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Building halted at two City in the Hills tracts
| Monday, Aug 18 2008 1:37 PM
Last Updated: Tuesday, Aug 19 2008 9:15 AM
Construction at two neighborhoods in northeast Bakersfield’s City in the Hills development has been halted by one of the builders there, K. Hovnanian Homes, a company official said.
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Bob Jones and his wife moved to City in the Hills in December. Along with some other families in their K. Hovnanian Homes neighborhood, they're upset by the homebuilder's Aug. 12 letter saying new construction will stop there, leaving barren patches like this next to existing homes.
A patch of finished homes is surrounded by totally undeveloped spreads of land within the City in the Hills development off Highway 178 in northeast Bakersfield in this March 2008 photo.
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Rosemary Arbor and Lantana’s Edge are on hold, said Joseph Manisco, vice president and chief legal officer at the company’s Southern California regional office in Ontario.
Manisco said the tracts weren’t profitable.
The New Jersey-based homebuilder, whose parent company is Hovnanian Enterprises Inc., is continuing work on another City in the Hills tract, its K. Hovnanian’s Four Seasons at Bakersfield. The neighborhood is restricted to residents 55 and over.
Four Seasons is “doing quite well,” Manisco said.
At least some homeowners in Lantana’s Edge are upset.
Three families who live on Pilar Way, where construction peters out at Tandil Way to leave bare earth stretching to Highway 178, shared frustrations Monday afternoon.
“This is what we look at ... a barren landscape on a daily basis,” said Bob Jones, motioning toward the dry dirt.
Jones and his wife, Donna Wyatt, moved from New York in December after buying their house online.
“We were psyched,” he said, about parks, bike paths and other promised features.
Now, he and other residents don’t know what will happen to those niceties.
Katie Rogers said dust from the empty lots blows in her family’s house “all the time.”
Corina Hilton, meanwhile, said on top of everything else, her home took more than a year to get built — she bought it almost two years ago, paying much more than units now go for — and has had numerous problems since she moved in at the end of last year.
“I got screwed,” Hilton said.
All of the neighbors, however, stressed a tight bond between the tract’s residents.
“The people are excellent,” Rogers said.
Hovnanian’s Manisco said he was not aware of stoppage at any of the homebuilder’s other communities in the Southern California region.
The company’s other Kern sites, in Arvin and Rosamond, are still going ahead, Manisco said, as far as he’s aware.
“I’m really surprised this is news,” Manisco said of the halted City in the Hills neighborhoods.
Residents of the tract were sent letters dated Aug. 12 telling them new construction was being “indefinitely” suspended.
The tract’s model homes will be sold and the sales office closed, the letter says.
County tract maps show the first phase of Rosemary Arbor and Lantana’s Edge totals 166 lots on 34 acres. As of March, 114 permits had been pulled, city building officials said.
A second phase immediately west and south shows plans for 254 lots on 65 acres. No permits have yet been pulled for the second phase, city records indicate.
The neighborhoods are located on the eastern edge of City in the Hills, just west of Masterson Street on the south side of Panorama Drive. Improvements to Masterson Street haven’t been finished, the neighbors noted, which has sometimes hampered emergency vehicle access.
The homebuilder’s Web site says Lantana’s Edge is sold out. It lists homes available in Rosemary Arbor.
The square-mile City in the Hills development on the north side of Highway 178 spearheaded growth in northeast Bakersfield when plans first came forward in the late 1990s.
But realization of the development has been slow going, leaving plans for parks, a lake and other amenities literally in the dust.
Some 11,500 residents are expected at full buildout.
Last month, City in the Hills’ master developer defaulted on a $49.5 million construction loan, county records show. The troubled loan was borrowed against the Juliana’s Garden neighborhood, located southwest of the the halted K. Hovnanian projects.
The Los Angeles-based master developer, which goes by the name Mountain View Bravo LLC for the City in the Hills project but has numerous other names, also defaulted last week on an Arvin project that K. Hovnanian is involved in.