Parkland Is Home to Planned Community

Imagine peninsular bighorn sheep strolling up to your backyard fence as you pull into the four-car garage. Or dipping into a custom swimming pool and then freshening up in marble bathrooms overlooking thousands of acres of protected wilderness.

Such is life at Mirada, a slice of Beverly Hills in a wildlife refuge. The designer desert development is inside the gates of the rugged Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument near Palm Springs.

That’s right, inside the monument.

“This is the equivalent of living on the floor of Yosemite,” said project director Chuck Strother, sitting behind the wheel of the company’s giant four-wheel drive as construction crews around him carve out more multimillion-dollar plots.

Mirada, developed by MCO Properties of Arizona, is an island of densely packed mini-mansions in the wildlife sanctuary. It is the only master-planned community in the country built entirely within the borders of federal parkland.

To the dismay of environmentalists, it is unlikely to be the last.

“I think you’re going to see this more often as the pressures of suburbanization surround these lands,” said David Barna, spokesman for the National Parks Service. “We’re scrambling to buy up as much of this property as we can.”

More than 4.3 million acres of privately held inholdings are inside national parks and monuments, 200,000 acres of which federal officials estimate are threatened by development at any given time.

Preservationists grudgingly accept the Mirada development, but only because its approval predates the monument’s creation in October 2000. MCO also agreed to provide more than 1,400 acres and millions of dollars to help save the endangered sheep.

Park watchdogs warn that with the precedent set, other high-end homebuilders will want to elbow their way inside preserves. Real estate companies increasingly view parks, monuments and protected forests from the California desert to Civil War battlefields in Tennessee as prime places to plant modern subdivisions.

They need not wait for preserves to be created around land they own, as happened at Mirada. Instead, they can snatch up privately owned parcels surrounded by public land. “People assume the land inside these parks is protected,” said Robin Pritchard, spokesperson for the National Park Trust in Washington. “These areas are private and they can be subdivided.”

When the federal government creates parks and monuments, it isn’t always able to acquire all the privately owned land within the new park’s boundaries. In some cases, private owners aren’t ready to sell; in others, the funds aren’t there.

The government tries to buy these parcels, called inholdings, as they come on the market. But that’s becoming increasingly difficult because landowners often find that they can make more money selling to a developer.

The trophy homes at Mirada in Rancho Mirage offer a glimpse at what some inholdings could look like.

“It’s paradise,” said Doug Robinson, a security company president who owns a 4,500-square-foot ranch-style home in Mirada with a view from every room. Bighorn sheep gathered at the fountain on his property daily until they were fenced out last year. “We’ve had 16 of them here at once,” he said.

The neighboring Lodge at Mirada Hotel offers room service to the private homes, so Robinson and his wife can enjoy a catered breakfast poolside while watching wildlife. “It doesn’t get any better,” he said.

Project director Strother points out the 4-mile fence that keeps the sheep out of the development. On the other side are steep, rocky mountains that are the animals’ home. The lots average three-quarters of an acre and sell for as much as $2.1 million. Forty-six homes and the hotel are already there. Another 63 plots for single-family houses are being released into the market, and 128 townhomes and two-story “hotel villas” are planned.

“For the guy who wants to be close to Mother Earth, this is the perfect backdrop,” Strother said, pulling the truck onto a parcel with a 360-degree view of the desert landscape, the snowcapped mountains, and the Palm Springs Airport hundreds of feet below. The airport view is a prime selling point for residents who like to build their lounges so they can watch the planes come and go.

“See this house,” Strother said, pointing at a space age-looking number down the road. “They had 22 interior designers work on it.” Another homeowner is building a 23-foot retaining wall, which will also hold in the swimming pool. Water from the pool will cascade over the top, creating a waterfall.

Biologists tending to the bighorn sheep say they regret that the development encroached on the animals’ habitat and don’t want to see such construction again, but they are pleased at the attention MCO is paying to its environmental obligations.

The 1,400-plus acres of open space MCO donated amounts to 10 acres for every acre it developed. The company also set up the Mirada Habitat Foundation, which is providing $1.5 million to fund conservation mandates from the federal government. Every homeowner at Mirada becomes a trustee of the foundation and must contribute monthly dues toward preservation efforts.

Rep. Mary Bono (R-Palm Springs) is on an advisory board to the foundation and will be at Mirada on Thursday when the organization’s plans are unveiled. .

The foundation is a selling point at Mirada. “It makes buyers feel fuzzy that they are contributing to the habitat,” said marketing director Chris Gilfillen.

Environmentalists appreciate the help, but they are hoping Mirada is the last subdivision of its kind.

That may be wishful thinking.

Inholding controversies are not new. Preservationists have long battled landowners seeking to log, mine, graze cattle or extract oil and gas. There are occasional fights over proposals to build a lodge or country home.

George Nickas, executive director of Wilderness Watch, a Montana-based nonprofit group that keeps track of inholdings, says sprawl is rapidly approaching many of the borders of the parks, making the inholdings attractive to builders who want to subdivide. “They are like ticking time bombs,” he said.

About 505,000 acres checkered in large parcels among the lava fields, sand dunes and mesas in and around Mojave National Preserve were threatened with residential development when landowner Catellus Corp. began courting real estate companies to purchase the land in the mid-1990s. To buy it themselves, private donors and the federal government came up with $56.1 million and a generous tax break for the company.

Still, more than 1,000 privately owned parcels remain inside the preserve, according to Jay Watson, regional director of the Wilderness Society, a national preservation group. That includes 16 40-acre parcels where residential units have been proposed by a Las Vegas developer, and a 640-acre site near the volcanic rock formations of Hole in the Wall, where plans for a golf course have been submitted.

“The longer those parcels sit there, the more likely people are going to come forward with proposals to build condos on them,” Watson said.

But the subdivision threat to parkland is most imminent in the East.

Hundreds of residents and war buffs around Valley Forge National Historic Park outside Philadelphia revolted in January after learning of a plan by Toll Bros. to put 62 single-family houses inside the park where George Washington spent a grueling winter with his troops. The company wants to turn 80 acres of the park into a development called Valley Forge Overlook.

The park service is trying to buy the parcel, valued at $10 million.

Civil War sites are also under siege, with real estate companies looking at privately held family farms scattered inside such parks as Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park on the Tennessee-Georgia border.

“We just acquired a 30-acre parcel last year that developers would have loved to get,” said Bobby Davenport of the Trust for Public Land.

There are 42 privately held parcels within protected areas in and around Gettysburg, Pa., most of them family farms that developers are eager to acquire.

Development pressure in the area is tremendous, and park officials fear that prices for the properties could skyrocket on hitting the market.

Land management officials in California say the situation is less pressing here because inholdings tend to be remote. But remote parcels haven’t always thwarted building. In Colorado, one developer flew in construction materials by helicopter in 1992, calling the federal government’s bluff. He ultimately negotiated a deal to trade the land, worth an estimated $240,000, for a public property near the ski resort of Telluride, which he then sold for millions.