Wilder Dairy Ranch looking in the late 19th century much how it looks today. (Ross Eric Gibson collection) It isn’t easy being a green endangered Ohlone tiger beetle, found exclusively in Santa Cruz County. (Courtesy US Fish & Wildlife Service, public domain) Mardi Wormhaudt ran for supervisor in 1994 on her opposition to logging and development on Gray Whale Ranch.
(Ross Eric Gibson collection) A flyer in favor of the Santa Cruz Greenbelt around the city, here showing Arana Gulch. (Ross Eric Gibson collection) An image shows plans for enlarging Santa Cruz to Scotts Valley and Capitola and building industrial zones chiefly along the North Coast. (Ross Eric Gibson collection) Wilder Dairy Ranch looking in the late 19th century much how it looks today.
(Ross Eric Gibson collection) After World War II, returning GIs found a housing shortage and developers began buying up cheap farmland to create remote housing-only suburbs, linked by freeways to new shopping centers, schools and churches. Santa Cruz County had plenty of vacant housing stock from summer homes to tourist rentals, adding modest new housing developments that serve existing infrastructure. Santa Clara County Planning Director Karl Belser (in office 1950-1967) witnessed the destruction of his beloved “Valley of Heart’s Delight.
” In 1950, the San Jose City Council announced it intended to become the “Los Angeles of the North.” This launched a stampede of land speculators buying up cheap farmland to be multiplied in price as urban subdivisions. Farmers who worried they were being priced out of family farms, gained protections through a 1954 Santa Clara County zoning amendment for agriculture-only districts.
San Jose’s pro-development City Council countered by annexing property, county roads and school districts into the city by any means possible. In the spring of 1955, the farmers got the state Legislature to pass an act preventing annexation of farmland on adjoining county roads without the property owner’s consent. This would have worked, but San Jose took advantage of the 90 days before the act became law, to expand its borders to 200 miles enclosing less than 20 square miles.
The frenzy of acquisitions frightened communities neighboring San Jose, who, for the sake of “home-rule,” incorporated into seven new cities. (Belser, in The New Book of California Tomorrow, 1984). After the 1955 Christmas flood engulfed downtown Santa Cruz, the town went into full recovery mode, planning for a modern future.
If the plans proved correct, downtown Santa Cruz was to be largely demolished to insert freeways, massive parking lots, bland boxy skyscrapers and shopping centers. Downtown merchants began removing the Humanist architectural details from their buildings to achieve the artless freeway vernacular look. Some even spoke of replacing the outdated “rinky-dinky Boardwalk” with high-rise apartments, privatizing that stretch of the beach front.
The coast between Santa Cruz and Davenport was planned to be a row of factories along the rail corridor, and suburban tract homes along the coast. Santa Cruz planned to annex farmland in Scotts Valley, Live Oak, Wilder Ranch and Cowell Ranch (now UC Santa Cruz). There was support to bring a university to Santa Cruz to fill our off-season rentals, but eliminating the quaint town everyone loved — even if just official speculation — was not widely approved.
Remaking Santa Cruz with freeway-centric planning seemed inevitable to most, but a small group decided to mount the impossible task of challenging deep-pockets developers, hoping to protect nature, farmland and historic buildings. Chuck and Esther Abbott were the first to make an impact by convincing merchants it was cheaper to restore downtown landmarks than make them look like every other town in America. They inspired the creation of the Pacific Garden Mall, which opened in 1969 combining landmarks and nature.
In the late 1960s, Big Creek Lumber founder Bud McCrary, a member of the Santa Cruz County Planning Commission, hoped to stop development on the North Coast, with an emergency ordinance forbidding subdivisions under a certain number of acres. The Board of Supervisors passed his ordinance, stopping much North Coast development. (Friends of the North Coast).
The beautiful Monterey cypress forest on Lighthouse Field was largely cut down in 1962, for a proposed convention hotel. Yet the parklike design was by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, using Wright’s architectural philosophy to build in harmony with the landscape. However, in 1968, the Wright design was replaced with a more conventional look and massive parking lot, which eventually was replaced with a freeway vernacular style proposal up to 11-stories tall, designating West Cliff Drive a freeway.
The City Council approved the project in 1973, but it was rejected by the Coastal Commission in 1974. With local encouragement, the state bought the property, to become Lighthouse Field State Beach. (Frank Perry, Lighthouse Point, 2002) The postwar housing boom caused farmland to rise in value.
For example, Wilder Ranch paid $5,000 in property tax in 1945, but by 1968 it was $28,000, on land yielding an income of $50,000. The income remained the same in 1970, but the taxes were $80,000. (Rick Hildreth, Cruzan, March-April 1989).
Celia Scott was a land use planner in 1969, (later mayor in 1997-1998), and her husband Peter Scott was a UCSC physics professor. They wrote about the Wilder Ranch development in “Landscapes — MAH History Journal No. 9, 2018.
” Canadian developers bought the 2,300-acre Wilder Ranch for $4.5 million on July 7, 1969. Two months later, Wm.
Lyon Development Co. bought the 1,500-acre Scaroni Ranch north of Wilder Ranch for $1.6 million, annexed the property to the city of Santa Cruz through a corridor along the Wilder oceanfront.
His proposed “De La Cruz Beach” development, gained opposition from Save the Coast, the Sierra Club, Ecology Action, the Coastal Coalition and the Rural Bonny Doon Association. In 1972 the Canadian developers conceived a plan to combine Wilder Ranch with the Scaroni Ranch, and the 103-acre Rossi Ranch, to propose a 3,866-acre subdivision for 10,000 homes and 33,000 people. Called a “San Jose bedroom community,” it would have doubled the population of Santa Cruz and turned Mission Street into commuter gridlock.
(1972 Wilder Ranch development brochure). In 1973, the developer requested The Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) annex the property to Santa Cruz city. But an opposition group was formed as “Operation Wilder,” the council majority opposed annexation and LAFCO voted against annexation 4-1.
The Scaroni Ranch developer learned his 1969 annexation petition had expired in 1973, having not been completed. In May 1973, the State Department of Parks & Recreation offered to purchase the Wilder and Scaroni ranches, succeeding in June 1974. (Landscapes, Celia & Peter Scott).
Sprawl tended to eliminate a city’s character, as one town blended into another. This was the problem in England during the 19th century Industrial Revolution, when the outskirts of London started losing its ring of countryside to polluting factories and dingy worker slums. In 1875, Octavia Hill coined the phrase “greenbelt” as a protected ring of nature around cities, composed of forest, farm and parkland defining the urban-rural interface.
In 1979, Paul Lee (who helped found the Homeless Garden Project) joined other conservationists offering the Measure O greenbelt initiative. It was approved, to zone a greenbelt of open space around Santa Cruz that included Moore Creek preserve, Neary Lagoon, Pogonip, DeLaveaga Park and Arana Gulch. As Sentinel reporter Jessica York wrote, “The initiative also requested developers reserve at least 15% of each new project’s housing as affordable to low and moderate-income residents, plus it established about a 1.
4% annual cap on new city housing development.” (Sentinel, March 5, 2019). This affordable housing policy “evolved into the city’s first ‘inclusionary’ housing ordinance in 1980, and has been updated some eight or more times.
” (Ibid.) In 1987, the iridescent green Ohlone tiger beetle was discovered at Gray Whale Ranch as “a new species of cicindela.” The ranch was a 2,300-acre stretch of meadows and woodland between UCSC and Wilder Ranch, once owned by the Henry Cowell family.
Gray Whale was one of just four population centers of the Ohlone Tiger Beetle. The ranch was purchased in April 1988 for $5 million by Idaho investor Ron Yanke. (Celia & Peter Scott).
Yanke caused a controversy when he proposed logging the property. In 1991 he also proposed building 135 “estate homesites” on 291 acres and log 546 acres to support an undetermined charity. Gary Patton said, “This proposal flies in the face of the county’s interest in protecting the North Coast.
” (Lee Quarnstrom, Mercury News, March 26, 1991). When Ray Gwyn Smith discovered a number of Gray Whale redwoods tagged for logging, it prompted formation of “Save Gray Whale Parklands.” The Ohlone Tiger Beetle was named and described in a 1993 study.
(Coleopterists Bulletin). It was estimated in any given year to have between 2,000 and 10,000 adult beetles, making it very endangered. In 1994, Yanke withdrew his development proposal and said he was waiting to see who’d win a Board of Supervisors election.
The candidates were former Mayor Mardi Wormhoudt, who ran on her opposition to Gray Whale development. Yanke’s preference was former Chamber President Annette Hopkins, who had stated no position. (Paul Rogers, San Jose Mercury News, July 14, 1994).
Wormhoudt won, and two years later in 1996, the property was sold and became part of Wilder Ranch State Park. (Celia & Peter Scott). In 1995, a Nevada development company hoped to make Coast Dairies a subdivision for 139 luxury homes.
After purchasing Gray Whale Ranch in 1998, Save the Redwoods League saw Coast Dairies as a strategic link between existing parks and open space along the North Coast. (Peter Steinhart, Land & People, Fall 1998). The Packard Foundation provided up to 50% of the funds, with money also from the California Coastal Conservancy, the Nature Conservancy and Santa Cruz Land Trust donations, while state Sen.
Bruce McPherson joined state Assemblyman Fred Keeley in securing $6 million from the state. The acquisition of the 5,800-acre Coast Dairies protected most of the North Coast under the designation Cotoni-Coast Dairies National Monument. It is a “globally recognized biodiversity hotspot that is exceptional, even within the context of the adjacent, ecologically rich Santa Cruz Mountains.
” (Sempervirens Fund, 2024) Yet preserving open space didn’t mean there weren’t places for new housing. East Santa Cruz and Live Oak were farmland into the 1960s, known as the state’s Queen City of Poultry, the Bulb Capital of the Pacific and the Mushroom Capital of the World. Incrementally housing replaced these superlative farms, until urban regulations prevented keeping farm animals, like roosters, if they disturbed the peace.
In 1998, Mardi Wormhoudt said, “People live here because they are deeply committed to the natural resources. The battle for preserving open space and agricultural lands has probably been the political focus in Santa Cruz County (since about 1970). This is a community that really became convinced that we could control our own destiny.
” (Peter Steinhart, Land & People, Fall 1998). It’s a mistake to assume agriculture, conservation, preservation and the village aesthetic are not representative of this community. Or that the history of local activism can be stopped by overruling local authority.
Respecting local values could bring a more successful partnership in the pursuit of subsidized housing and affordable housing..
