UPDATE: The comment period for the Canyon Springs Draft Environmental Impact Report (Draft EIR) has been extended. Written comments will be accepted through March 6, 2013.
Leigh Golden turns his GMC Jimmy up icy Lance Drive and then rolls to a stop, idling his motor alongside a vast expanse of snow punctuated by a handful of custom homes. Row upon row of signs peddling vacant land for sale at Elkhorn Ridge, a 66-lot subdivision approved 20 years ago by Nevada County, cluster on a hillside a few hundred yards from one of the largest and most controversial development proposals Truckee has seen since the real estate market collapsed.
“There has only been one house built here in the last year and a half,” Golden says of Elkhorn Ridge, which sits just south of the eastern end of Glenshire Drive.
Truckee’s deep supply of homesites, but an obvious lack of strong demand for them, has Golden and other Glenshire residents adding an economic question to their laundry list of environmental concerns over the Canyon Springs development proposal at the eastern edge of Truckee. Specifically, they want to know: What will the addition of 185 lots do to a Glenshire housing market struggling to recover from a five-year real estate nosedive?
“The economic question is a big deal here, and regrettably it is not addressed in [the draft environmental impact report],” said Golden, the president of SOS Glenshire, a nonprofit formed to save open space around Glenshire.
Glenshire has long held the reputation as Truckee’s blue-collar family neighborhood. It’s a place where construction trucks share driveway space with snowmobiles and children’s snow sleds — a mark of Glenshire’s identity as a family-friendly, full-timers’ mountain town outpost. But the housing market collapse hit Glenshire hard. As contractors lost work and home prices declined, the neighborhood experienced a wave of foreclosures, and many Glenshire homes are now selling for half of what they fetched in 2006 at the peak of the real estate boom.
In Truckee, like elsewhere, the precise number of empty lots for sale is a moving target. But a Tahoe Multiple Listing Service search for Truckee residential lots turned up 158 results, and a search of the entire North Tahoe region’s lot inventory maxes out at over 250.
As the inventory of developable land has increased, prices have dropped. Gray’s Crossing lots, which once sold at well over $150,000, now go for as low as $29,000. The lowest priced lots in Glenshire start at the same number. The glut of residential lots in the market should not be a surprise. Nearly every Truckee subdivision approved in recent memory — Donner Crest, Sierra Bluffs, Elkhorn Ridge, Grays Crossing, Pine Forest, Winter Creek, Old Greenwood — still has a significant amount of vacant land. Much of the inventory has to do with simple economics — in the wake of the housing market’s deep price plunge during the recession, it is significantly cheaper to buy an existing home than to buy a piece of land and bankroll the construction of a new home.
This real estate dynamic has some Canyon Springs opponents fearing the worst: a project approval, widespread grading and road construction, and then little sales activity.
“We want to make sure it is the right project because if another project goes through and it is not successful, we will be left with another ghost development,” said Alexis Ollar, executive director of Mountain Area Preservation, a Truckee-based environmental group that is hiring experts to comment on Canyon Springs.
Chip Huck, a part owner of the Canyons Springs project, said that the real estate market is showing strong signs of recovery, and many of the lots on the Truckee market are not in direct competition with Canyon Springs.
“Signs of recovery within both the housing and lot markets indicate that demand and prices will increase for new homes and the lots they are built upon,” said Huck. “The marketplace recovery will allow for Canyon Springs to be priced competitively in the future, and provide new inventory as existing sells out.”
But Golden and an alliance of Glenshire homeowners, Mountain Area Preservation members, and other conservationists hope that the combination of economic and ecological concerns will result in the property being preserved as open space.
“I am guardedly optimistic that we are going to succeed at [conserving the Canyon Springs property],” said Golden. “And I think the economy is going to help.”
The Canyon Springs property off of Martis Peak Road between Truckee and Hirschdale has been proposed for development for decades, most seriously in 2002, when a higher density proposal called Tahoe Boca was met with vocal protest from hundreds of people at public meetings. Despite the unprecedented market boom back then, the project never made it through the approval process, and the majority of the property was reclaimed by the bank.
The prime environmental concerns, then as now, are the project’s impact on a beleaguered herd of mule deer that winter in the mountains around Verdi and then pass through to fawn in Dry Lake and near Northstar ski resort. The Loyalton-Truckee herd has a total of 3,200 deer, less than half of which (the so-called Verdi sub-unit) migrate through Glenshire.
Their perilous migration route includes crossing Interstate 80 and swimming the Truckee River. Many are killed on roadways and forced to survive on shrinking habitat as development squeezes them into a narrowing corridor between Reno/Verdi urbanization and Truckee/Tahoe real estate development.
Studies show that deer regularly pass through Canyon Springs, but have not concluded whether the land is a primary migration corridor for the herd.
The other major issue addressed in the draft environmental impact report is traffic. The development is projected to add approximately 2,578 new, one-way vehicle trips to the area during a typical weekday. That amount of traffic has residents worried about the safety of the intersection of Martis Peak Road and Glenshire Drive, as well as the already problematic intersection of Donner Pass Road and Glenshire Drive.
Huck, meanwhile, highlights the project’s protection of 175 acres of the property as open space and the four bridges that would span the wetlands on the property.
Even with all the environmental issues raised in the draft environmental impact report, MAP’s Ollar said the environmental document leaves a lot to be desired.
“We feel that this draft environmental impact report is very flawed. There are lots of holes and gaps in analysis,” she said.
Golden has been involved in raising awareness about the project for nearly 12 years. But despite more than a decade of public meetings about development at the location, he says that many of his neighbors still know little about the project.
“The real shocking thing about this project is the amount of people who have no idea this is coming,” said Golden.
The Town of Truckee is receiving comments on Canyon Springs’ draft environmental impact report through March 1. Learn how to comment on the document by going to townoftruckee.com and clicking on “Current Projects.”
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