Wonky Wednesday: DMB’s Other Bay Area Development

DMB thought farmland and open space like this in San Benito County was the prime place to build 6,800 new houses. (Photo by Jared Stein)

As many of you know, we have been busy campaigning for the past several years to defeat Cargill’s proposal to build a new city of 30,000 on top of nearly two square miles of San Francisco Bay salt ponds in Redwood City that can and should be restored to natural wetlands instead.

While Cargill owns this key portion of the Bay, they have left much of the selling of their proposal to their development partners, DMB Associates. DMB, based in Arizona, has a history of building big luxury housing projects, frequently including golf courses and other high-end amenities. Many of these projects have been in environmentally sensitive areas, and their plans to pave over open space have frequently been opposed by environmental groups.

Cargill/DMB’s “Saltworks” development in Redwood City isn’t the first time that DMB has tried to push their Arizona development model on the Bay Area. Several years ago, DMB had a proposal for a major residential sprawl project in San Benito County – just south of Santa Clara County – which would have transformed nearly 6,000 acres of farmland and meadows into a new city of 20,000 people. At the time, it was believed to be the biggest proposed development in the region.

DMB’s proposed “El Rancho San Benito” was antithetical to the Bay Area’s efforts to protect our valuable open spaces and focus growth within the core of our cities. It was immediately met with sharp criticism from environmental groups and civic leaders who had worked for decades to limit sprawl in the southernmost portions of the Bay Area. Melissa Hippard, then director of the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club, told the Mercury News in 2009 that the project would be part of “this steady march of Silicon Valley, creating urban sprawl all the way down 101.”

After four years of protest from the Sierra Club, Committee for Green Foothills, the Nature Conservancy, Audubon Society and others, DMB shelved the project in 2009.

Yet rather than recognize that the Bay Area was done with sprawl, DMB moved 60 miles north to Redwood City – proposing an even bigger city on another type of open space – restorable San Francisco Bay salt ponds.

Do you think building on rural farmland and in the San Francisco Bay should count as “creating sustainable communities that thoughtfully and responsibly address the environment,” as DMB claims on their website? What do you think DMB’s ill-fated “El Rancho San Benito” says about their commitment to the environment? Let us know in the comment section below.

- Josh Sonnenfeld, Campaign Manager