Sept. 25, Oct. 9 issues: Letters to the editor/Opinion

Sept. 25 issue:

Silvergate: Out of scale, out of place

The sheer number of story poles now looming over the proposed Silvergate retirement community site—at the corner of Calzada del Bosque and Via de la Valle—is shocking. They do not simply suggest a structure; they overwhelm. What we see today is not an outline of a project, but a warning. If approved, Silvergate will forever alter the historic character of Rancho Santa Fe.For nearly a century, generations of residents have fought to safeguard the Ranch’s identity: a community defined by open landscapes, rural charm, and architecture that blends with the natural land. The Silvergate proposal —immense in bulk, scale, and visual intrusion—is completely out of step with those values. Its presence threatens to unravel what has been carefully preserved for 100 years.

Rancho Santa Fe was never meant to accommodate significant institutional developments. As respected historian Vonn Marie May recently noted, the Ranch is “a living chronicle of the community’s unique history—a place designed to blend architecture and land, where open views and understated elegance prevail, not overwhelming mass on prominent corners.” That vision is enshrined in the Covenant—not as a guideline, but as a safeguard for future generations.

Approving a project of this magnitude sets a dangerous precedent. If this can be allowed here, what comes next? Bit by bit, we risk trading away the very qualities that make Rancho Santa Fe one of Southern California’s rare and treasured landscapes.As May warned, “once a historic landscape is lost, it is gone forever.” Let us not be the generation that allows a century of preservation to slip away.Holly Manion,Lifetime Covenant resident,Lifetime member, RSF Historical Society

Silvergate threatens the soul of Rancho Santa Fe

The Rancho Santa Fe Art Jury has always held this town close to their hearts, safeguarding its traditions, beauty, and rural character. I want to acknowledge that care and thank you for the dedication shown in protecting our way of life. Today, I come to you with a heavy heart and deep concern about the proposed Silvergate project.

Silvergate cloaks itself in the language of care, trying to sell us a “warm fuzzy.” But behind that veil is a corporate enterprise seeking profit at the expense of our beautiful, quiet, and peaceful community. The first day that heavy equipment touches this land, the quiet soul of Rancho Santa Fe will be silenced. The serenity of dark skies, the rhythm of equestrian trails, the whisper of open fields—all of it threatened by an oversized complex better suited to a larger city equipped to absorb such a facility. If the story poles unsettle us now, imagine the hulking walls and glaring lights that will follow. What was once a tranquil haven will be transformed into a concrete care plex—an intrusive, urban scar in a rural village.

Our traffic situation is already unbearable—daily gridlock on Paseo Delicias, Via de la Valle, Del Dios, Calzada del Bosque, and Via de Santa Fe. Introducing a large, commercial-scale 24-hour institutional facility with staff rotations, vendor deliveries, 24-hour medical response vehicles, and visitors will make this crisis permanent. One ingress and one egress, funneled through Calzada del Bosque, means even longer backups. Wildfire evacuation under these conditions would be impossible to manage and dangerously chaotic.

Rancho Santa Fe does not turn its back on its seniors—we cherish them. We greet one another at the post office, share conversations over coffee in the Village, and stroll together along the golf course. Silvergate is not about honoring that bond; it is about forcing an institutional behemoth into a place where it does not belong. A 24-hour operation may blend into a city corridor, but Rancho Santa Fe is not that place. Leaders, I implore you: listen to the voices of your people. Hear the cries of a community that values peace, character, and safety above corporate ambition. We do not want Silvergate.

For these reasons, I urge you to deny the Silvergate Conditional Use Permit. At the very least, demand a full Environmental Impact Report that confronts the reality of wildfire evacuation, cumulative traffic impacts, dark sky destruction, noise intrusion, and the strain on our water, land and resources. Anything less is negligence.Rancho Santa Fe’s legacy is not measured in concrete but in its open skies, quiet roads, and neighborly bonds. If Silvergate rises, those will fall—and with them, the soul of this community.Michele Leonard,Rancho Santa Fe

Oct. 9 issue:

Is the opposition to Silvergate about charm or property values?

When we moved to Rancho Santa Fe in 1998, I thought we moved to the Williamsburg of ranch houses. The ranch houses have been replaced by a hodgepodge of styles. The rural charm and romance of Rancho Santa Fe is belied by its history.

Rancho Santa Fe was abandoned by the Santa Fe RR because the eucalyptus trees they planted for railroad ties needed to be old growth. Eucalyptus are weed trees. They are not native. They require lots of water and become firebombs in a high- fire, low- water region.The romantic idea of a community of “gentlemen’s estates” included a brothel and a golf course for the gentlemen. The 1929 Covenant was a template of housing discrimination to keep out the hoi poloi and people of color known as sundown towns. While two offending paragraphs were removed from the Covenant after the Fair Housing Act in the 1960s one has to wonder if density, noise and traffic are the modern-day attempt at exclusion to ensure property values stay high.

If size is the issue, maybe Silvergate could downsize the project and include mixed use affordable housing for the elderly, as well as housing for the people who do the work to maintain our charming lifestyle – teachers, fire, police and gardeners.

Opposition to Silvergate may not be about the racial discrimination embedded in the original Covenant, but it certainly has the whiff of economic discrimination, and it’s not charming.

Mary BillsRancho Santa Fe

Silvergate subterfuge

The Silvergate concept is on the path of a grand subterfuge, a suckering in of the bulk of the local electorate and naïve leaders, the Rancho Santa Fe Association, his target audience. Since they have not yet submitted a set of General Plan Amendment permit and related Rezone and Major Use Permit applications to the County of San Diego, it clearly is their hope and hypothesis that if they first get the naïve endorsement by the private, volunteer led RSF Association of this massive high density monstrosity they can then waltz in to the County Board of Supervisors, the real power authority, and get a greased money pass through the gauntlet of County, State CEQA, Federal EPA, Corps of Engineers, et al, permits.

Silvergate is not likely surprised that the current political demographics of the County Board of Supervisors, more D’s than R’s, is a far cry from past decades of control by “concrete Bill Horn”, who never saw a high density development he would vote against. Horn, in his 24- year reign, methodically gutted the county of a whole range of land use policy tools to the joy and financial largesse of developers and the detriment of communities trying to preserve rural character, like Valley Center, Fallbrook, Bonsall, Pala-Pauma.

“Mr. Silvergate” knows this, and that his only path to success for this giant urban orphan in our rural paradise is to first get the imprimatur of a land use law ignorant private volunteer body, the Rancho Santa Fe Association, then go to the county, the real power authority for this type of project.

He certainly knows that the private RSF Association, the bulk of appointed Art Jurors, and honorary elected seat holders of the RSF Association board, are not trained or educated in state, local and federal land use environmental regulations, including the myriad EIR studies needed, including hydrology, geology, liquefaction, emergency evacuation management, water course alteration law, floodway/floodplain law, traffic, infrastructure, dark skies, community character, proof of market economics, site alternatives, etc.

He surely believes this humbuggery is his best path to success in later winning approvals by the county and all the required state and federal laws, because he will have the powerful Ranch Covenant imprimatur and political and financial contribution power to sway the real authorities, the publicly elected County Board of Supervisors. Rest assured, the developer’s past statements that he requires no General Plan Amendment, Rezone, and Major Use Permit are utter baloney. He might not need such permits for private antediluvian Covenant contract compliance, 100-year-old deed language scribed with quill when nothing existed here but pristine land with a grove of imported seedling trees. However, he darn well needs permits from the county, our only municipal government authority with police powers of public health, welfare and safety.

Albert B. Frowiss,

Native Californian, 4th generation San Diegan, 51-year resident of Rancho Santa Fe, former chair of two local HOA’s, and activist leader of 25 task forces and committees engaged in land use and river valley preservation in San Dieguito

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