High demand niche for new homes?
Ponderosa vice-president tabs $3 million range
It’s notable that the City Council and city staff finally have gotten around to updating the city’s burdensome and impractical policy for locating cellular phone towers.
The policy was passed years ago when what likely were unfounded health concerns had the ordinance passed that severely limited locations. The areas of the city with cell dead zones are well known. In our former church site in the Ironwood neighborhood, we had to install a repeater in our building to get service for the staff phones and other people had to wander outside in the parking lot to get a signal.
I would have thought the virus lockdown would have sparked a public outcry sooner, but that was six years ago.
The good news is the council instructed the staff to move forward with its recommendations and return with an ordinance to modify the policy so the dead spots can be eliminated.
Ponderosa Homes, which is headquartered in Pleasanton and has been building here since 1985, just received Planning Commission approval for a 28-home development on almost 200 acres off Dublin Canyon Road.
One notable comment from Ponderosa Sr. Vice President Jeff Schroeder concerned the price point. Paraphrasing, he said the market that is hot in Pleasanton is in the $3 million range. He’s been with Ponderosa since 1999, so he’s seen plenty of markets and the company has built hundreds of homes in Pleasanton—County Fair was its first major development and it also built Ironwood, both the market-rate housing and the Ironwood Village for senior residents 55 years and up. In recent years, projects have ranged from executive homes on the Rose Avenue extension to homes on the redevelopment of the former church site in Valley Trails.
He knows the market and his comments speak to the challenges of building in Pleasanton with the land costs and the city (it got easier if builders were doing multi-family on pre-approved sites thanks to the settlement of a long-running law suit and state mandates clearing potential local objectors (the redevelopment of the Harvest Valley church site on Hopyard Road and the old motel site on Santa Rita both fit that pattern.)
In this season of life, reading obituaries too often contains names that mean something. That’s particularly true for a guy who spent his adult life in the news business. Two had particular meanings this week: former Cal quarterback and two-time Super Bowl QB Craig Morton died at 83 in the Denver area and former 49er tight end Charle Young.
Morton quarterbacked both the Dallas Cowboys and the Broncos in the Super Bowl after a record-setting college career. I remember seeing him play in Memorial Stadium as a teen-ager.
Young, who died at 75, played for the Bill Walsh-coached 49er team that came from nowhere to win the Super Bowl. Young played for 13 seasons in the National Football League, including three with the 49ers. I remember his for one story that the 49er chaplain at the time, Pat Ritchie, told our men’s group. He recalled that Young, an ordained minister, said publicly the 49ers were going to win the Super Bowl and he was going to celebrate by giving God all the glory. Those were bold words given the team’s status at the time.
Sure enough, after San Francisco defeated Cincinnati 26-21 in the Super Dome, Young did exactly that on national television. Today, that’s become common, but it was different 40 years ago.
Correction: I had the title wrong on Mike Dunne, one of the three founders of Inertia, the Livermore-based company striving to design and build a pilot commercial fusion power plant. Dunne is a former associate lab director at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford.
