Conclusion of informal history

of the first fifty years of the Mount Shasta Vista development

 

"We can chart our future clearly and wisely only

when we know the path which has led to the present."

 -- Adlai E. Stevenson

 

Lost cause?

It came as no surprise that the Vista entrance sign's snarly energy was reflected in its monthly board meetings. Open to all parcel owners and family members, while proceedings were dull as dishwater sometimes, other times they were a caution. Gnarly shouting matches were not uncommon. Once a fistfight broke out on the floor.

 

It was as if the place was growing some deadly cancer that, left unchecked, would fatally metastasize. The tsunami waves of bickering among the malcontent dwellers was so overwhelming, it would've made rich fodder for the likes of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson: “Fear and Loathing in the Vista.”

 

The first residents must've felt something like earliest prospectors during the California Gold Rush. While briefly having diggings to themselves, intoxicated with their good fortune, things quickly turned to pandemonium once the flood of fellow seekers of the prized yellow stone descended en masse. Similarly, earliest Vistans luxuriated in having the domain all to themselves. They established their own lifestyle and had blind faith in the system, such as it was, to keep a semblance of fair-minded law and order.  But, like the first miners, they'd soon get run over. 

 

They'd  become like so many mad King Lears, shouting imperious commands to the winds.

 

As more newcomers moved in, some opting to ignore code requirements, the firstcomers briefly still had the ball in their court, through established relations with county code enforcers and a lock on board membership. They ran with that ball, clinging onto it for dear life. They'd dismiss as idiots anyone at meetings who took exception to their hardball tactics; such people obviously didn't understand the dire gravity of the situation. Beyond desperate, their bottom line was that, come hell or high water, they had no choice; they had to do their damnedest to keep health and building codes rigorously enforced to prevent the fabric of their fledgling retirement community from unraveling.

 

Desolated and shocked beyond endurance, overbearing board members clad themselves in armor, mace and sword at the ready, prepared to engage in full-on, take-no-prisoners battles over enforcement. For a while at meetings, they tried to outright avoid public discussion on any potentially inflammatory matter by steamrolling their agenda through, mumbling “public comments?” out the side of their mouths before taking a fast vote. "Motion?...second?...all in favor...motion carried." They'd banked on newbies’ unfamiliarity with formal meeting procedure. Shouts of protest once concerned newbie residents realized their sneaky maneuver were countered by simpering yells from board supporters: “Robert's Rules! Robert's Rules!”

 

Despite all, the well-heeled firstcomers’ dream of building a conventional backwoods retirement Shangri-la was turning into a nightmare. The Vista was coming apart at the seams before their very eyes.

 

As more and more settled in the junipers and sagebrush -- many of such modest means and with such free-spirited natures that the notion of building to code wasn't ever considered -- the country's code-enforcement officers' responsiveness reached a tipping point. Beyond that, they were unable and/or unwilling to enforce the codes and ordinances (the very ones that people living in town, nowhere to hide, perforce toed the line on). This despite being duly appraised and constantly updated of the dire situation by the seething mad legal residency haranguing them with each new found infraction and demanding swift response. The prospect of taking an early retirement must've started looking good to some.

 

So it happened that eventually authorities all but abandoned code enforcement efforts inside the misbegotten realm. One got the impression they liked to pretend it simply didn't exist. (Not unlike the place's scofflaw dwellers towards their residential ordinances). That is, beyond the county's property tax collectors' and property assessors' unfailing attention to each and every parcel and what improvements if any, were made, so they could squeeze a few more shekels out of its annual property taxes.

 

Before the tipping point was reached, it seemed the only responses made, other than for actual emergencies, were to the most persistent calls from fuming parties who knew the law and had perhaps threatened legal action if they didn't respond. They'd become such pains, it became easier to drag themselves out and tell the culprits, "Hey, you can't be doing this, you'd better stop or else; we mean it" and hope the admonishment would stick.  Sometimes a sheriff deputy would accompany them to back things up. Some scofflaws would then indeed clear out, their fantasy of easy cheap country living gone bust. But others, more hardened, kept right on living the way they were on their parcels. They felt that inertia and property rights, plus county enforcement resources being overwhelmed, would ultimately win the war, and increasingly they proved themselves right.

 

White bread outpost?

Though some might've experienced mixed feelings towards firstcomers' intolerance over substandard construction and sanitation and baldly aggressive reactions, one couldn't help but sympathize with their plight. What a heartbreaking situation it must've been, seeing the place they'd had such high hopes for to enjoy their golden years irretrievably slip away. (Perhaps not too unlike a predestined romance, shorting out for one party being asleep at the wheel at the critical moment.) The Vista could’ve, should've, would've been such a nicely settled, enviable, law-abiding backwoods community...

 

...if still only a white bread one.

 

For while in later years at least absentee ownership appeared to become racially diverse judging by the file list of owner names, actual residents in 2014 -- numbering yet only perhaps 300 or 350 -- were overwhelmingly white. While there were a few Hispanics, there were few to no Black, Asian, or Native Americans. Growing up in the polyglot melting pot of San Francisco, the writer didn’t find anything too amiss about this -- other than wincing whenever a neighbor dropped the ‘n’ word in casual conversation (or later, the 'c' word). I’d learned to pretty much adapt to any ethnic mix -- or lack thereof -- in a place, given an even playing field and no one bearing expedient intents and then using the race card to obscure the situation.

 

The scene perhaps reflected rural Siskiyou county as a whole, so predominantly white that it might've appeared to be -- not without some truth --  a narrow minded, passively racist backwater to any people of color arriving from large melting-pot cities with their relatively mutual racial tolerance, inclusivity and everyday intercultural mingling.*

___________________

 

*One might say it wasn't prejudice alone that would later, starting in 2015, make the Vista's overwhelmingly white population so generally unwelcoming to minority members. There's a natural inclination of any like-minded ethnic group to stick together in easy familiarity over time, and so be slow to adapt to any sudden major change in the ethnic make-up. There would be a steep learning curve at play -- one fraught with potential for mutual suspicion and misunderstanding. That said, a willingness to be law abiding could go a long ways towards helping the process along.

_____________________

 

A more diverse Vista residency from the start might've made the place a more culturally rich and thriving development, such as it was. But it was all moot; Wonderbread it was for a full half century.

 

Fine line

Anyone respecting the rule of law held that a development needed its residents to work together on some level and follow the county's and state's rules to keep things generally safe and pleasant -- the acid test being one’s children -- for those committing to hang their hats there. Otherwise, weeds of civic indifference and scofflaw attitudes could spring up, filling a social vacuum and choking the place's livability.

 

However, it could make simple country living all but impossible if ordinances were TOO strict, too expensive, too onerous for the majority to ever conform to. As the poet Kahlil Gibran wrote, noting this eternal dance in The Prophet: “You delight in laying down laws / Yet you delight more in breaking them.”

 

It appeared there was a fine line between having enough rules and regulations to keep some semblance of fair-minded order and having too many and courting sure rebellion. In any event, again, developer Collins would never have gotten the Vista development greenlit if he hadn't set up the CC&Rs to reflect every buyer legally agreeing to observe county, state and federal rules, laws and ordinances on signing the title paperwork.

 

But the rush of having one’s own land in such a relatively remote region could so easily obscure the reality of there being any county or state regulations TO conform to. There wasn't anyone around to say 'boo' -- especially after the county abandoned residential code-enforcement in a drastic budget-slashing measure for several critical years in the 2010's.

 

“I say we got Trouble...with a capital ‘T’...”

Writer's own tale

In October 1978 I snapped up a nice, gently sloping lot with inspiring mountain view, for $1,750., with an easy $250. down. I'd get by for eleven years with kerosene lamps and candles before at last going solar in 1989, when solar panels still cost ten times more than now, not even adjusting for inflation. (A one-by-four foot, 50 watt panel was over $400.)

 

It was an early fall, so I set up a quick camp. While days were still pleasant, overnight temperatures already plunged to a bone-chilling 13 degrees F.  During my first morning after overnighting, an older man driving by -- not part of the official board posse, but nonetheless wound up -- spotted me heating coffee water and defrosting myself over a tiny rock-lined campfire in a clearing some 30 feet from the road. He slammed his brakes, climbed out, and stood there, pointedly looking at the fire.

 

“You got a permit for that?” he demanded. Thus spoken were my first words of welcome from the would-be community before I could even get in my first sip of morning coffee. They weren't reassuring.

 

Fast forward six weeks and I'd apparently waited too long to apply for my building permit -- and, crucially, first join the POWW water-truck club in lieu of drilling a well to be able to qualify for a permit. As a result, I was destined to get the full "Unwelcome Wagon" treatment from sundry busybodies in the development that, I began to more fully appreciate, was more than just a little squirrelly around the edges.

 

While having intended to conform all along, if reluctantly, being a fairly timid, Walter Mitty type, law-abiding citizen (but also having a contrary, intellectually radical streak), I'd been gearing up slowly and carefully. Over winter, I planned to research tiny home design, study construction methods and building codes, then draw up tentative designs to submit in spring. I was staying in a half-mile distant, 12-by-16 foot cabin kindhearted neighbors, leaving as the pleasant season wound down, had taken pity on my situation and offered to let me, a total stranger, winter in.

 

This so I wouldn’t freeze to death camping in my tent, as I'd first resolved, wanting to stay on my brand-new land and future homeland no matter what. Cold alone could be endured with my extreme-weather bedding and a jury-rigged wood stove in the tent (not recommended). But unbeknownst to me, the region was notorious for windstorms of such magnitude they beggared description. Coming out of nowhere, they'd roar across the land like a runaway freight. Seventy to eighty mph wind speeds were not uncommon, and in the late 1980s we were hit with a storm with 100 mph gusts.

 

December weather assaults kept blowing my tent down no matter how tightly I tried securing the guy ropes. When it collapsed yet again in the middle of a howling blizzard one night, I finally surrendered. Grateful I had such an option, the next morning my black cat and I moved into the vacated cabin. Thereafter I made the quarter-mile hike each day to work on my place, clearing brush, roughing in a roadway and building an earth-sheltered storage shed that would become my legal onsite construction shelter once finally securing a building permit.

 

Before I moved, though, I was to experience the full heat of unknown intolerant neighbors. It seemed that ever-vigilant Vista board members and their cohorts had established a pipeline with local realtors for every Vista parcel sale made. Distant neighbors soon learned some rambling upstart of obviously modest means had dared to sneak into their domain, assumably with no intention of ever paying the piper. My Strout realtor informed me later that while admitting he'd just sold a lot to a young long-hair, he'd refused to divulge or where or to whom.

 

I thought that sporting.

 

Now a determined posse was hot on the trail of the latest scofflaw, systematically combing the endless back roads in search. Weeks later they finally tracked my place down when I wasn’t home. They took one look at my thrown-together, mostly underground shed and a verboten outhouse and duly reported me to the county health department. They didn’t know -- or, I suspect, care--  that I had earnest intentions to start building to code come spring.

 

The scorched-earth policy allowed no such wiggle room. Equal opportunity hasslers, anyone and everyone non-compliant was duly thrown under the bus.

 

Busted

Summoned onto the carpet of then head county health department honcho, Dr. Bayuk,  I got the full bum's rush. I wan't even allowed to explain my intent to comply. Assuming the worst, he was loaded for bear and so duly read me the riot act. He and gave me 120 days to get compliant by installing a septic system -- even though I wouldn’t have a cabin to connect to it for years -- and build a temporary outhouse over it, or he'd see to it that I'd be thrown off my land. “And don’t think I won’t!”, he growled, shaking his head, jowls shaking like Nixon's. He no doubt thought I needed an extra dose of fear to get properly motivated.

 

The only reason he'd worked with me at all was because, at the last moment, another kindhearted neighbor had come forward. She had explained how they’d promised to let me join the by-then membership-capped water truck club when I was ready to build. So he'd grudgingly allowed me to become the final and twenty-sixth member.

 

Being thin-skinned, the stressful experience happening within months of my arrival loaded with keen expectations totally traumatized me. Before the last minute reprieve, I'd pretty much given up on the place. Devastated and demoralized, at age 29 I appeared to be gearing up to fade away into yet another homeless sunset. Instead, though fondest hopes and dreams by then felt hopelessly mangled, I dredged up some reserve willpower, paid the $125 water-truck membership fee and became determined to invest the required time, money and effort to get legal and squared away over time. I'd then at least be able to live on the land with a modicum of dignity and salvage some peace of mind.

 

I passed the perc test and dug and installed an approved septic system. As per agreement, I built an outhouse over the top of the buried, inspected tank and leach field. In part for the benefit of any busybody driving by to check out the latest almost-bust, maybe hoping to find some new reportable offense, I painted on the side facing the road in bold blue letters, “Welcome Halley's Comet in 1984.” That should baffle 'em, I thought. I then built another outhouse more to my liking, a low affair cleverly disguised as a doghouse, water bowl and leash in front. No one ever discovered the ruse.

 

Over a leisurely three and a half years I built a code-approved, 1½ story, solar-tempered little-big cabin, using only hand tools. I hired help for the open-beam roofing and electrical and scrounged recycled lumber whenever possible. It appeared I was indeed on the verge of becoming a tenuously respectable resident. Not that I was any longer interested in being accepted as such. It was like the classic Groucho Marx quip made over a restrictive country club's finally offering him a membership despite being Jewish: I didn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. It'd be decades before I'd warm to the board and learn to appreciate its potential, at least, to do good for the chronically floundering, perpetually at odds with itself, would-be community.

 

Working under the gun of county code enforcers -- who I felt were trading notes with ever-wary Vista board members and their minions -- was so depressing it drove me to drink. I'd learn firsthand how board members and their guard had a special gift for radicalizing the place's denizens in their hell-bent campaign to either return the place to some semblance of its former glory days or, in total frustration, at least try to demand a pound of flesh from anyone not compliant.  It felt as if the place was caught up in a negative reactionary spiral, trapped in a contention-drenched, never-ending time loop of contention.

 

On the wings of getting the new shelter signed off in early 1983, I was still a timid if rebellious 33 year-old. One by now thoroughly disenchanted with the Vista's imperious, would-be overlords.

 

Rainbow fever

I soon got into worse trouble. It seems I'd decided to celebrate the return of Halley’s Comet by hosting a rainbow family camp on my land.

 

In 1984, the annual national alternative-culture rainbow family gathering event was going be held in California for the first time ever since its start, some 12 years earlier. It was to be held somewhere in an area a two hour drive away in the Warner Mountains wilderness, in the remote northeast corner of the state. Come spring a flood of psyched early-comers, some returning for the first time in decades to their coming-of-age, countercultural roots, would begin pouring in from everywhere, including overseas. Many would have nowhere to go until the public-forest site was determined, months away yet.

 

Wanting to reconnect with my roots while evening the ledger for all the countless people who'd helped me when I was on the road  -- plus thinking to maybe liberate the incredibly stodgy development a tad -- I opened up my land and resources to all comers for the next five months. Like the Vistan firstcomers who built homes amidst an ostensible rec-land development indifferent to what troubles it might create, I was equally determined to let the chips fall where they may.

 

I solemnly tendered my invite by letter to the rainbow steering committee, then holding monthly steering committee meetings in far away Chico. Word spread fast, and though never recognized or supported as an official rainbow camp for being held on private land, for months hundreds of earlycomer wired spirits, often in colorful, glad-rag garb and sometimes outlandish rigs, traipsed in and out of the buttoned-down-and-proud Vista hinterlands. Rainbow elders set up three 28-foot yurts  -- formerly part of the Seattle area's controversial Love Family spiritual sect -- on the parcel's back acre. "There's your UFO, Stuart," one told me as the central yurt went up; earlier I'd mentioned how I'd always hoped a scout ship might land on the parcel.  I'd named the land Earth Base, after a Seattle fire station that transformed into a community center and was renamed Earth Station. Earth Base it was for years thereafter. In a way, the scene felt a little like the animated feature Yellow Submarine when the Beatles' triumphant music turned the dreary frozen black-and-white world into technicolor.

 

Predictably, my terminally convention-minded neighbors (again, most most living miles away), had a veritable conniption fit. While a few more liberal-minded retirees seemed tickled by it all, possibly rebels at heart who didn't see anything too threatening about the ongoing scene, most wanted none of it. No free-spirited long-hairs, with all their flagrant pot-smoking (then still very much illegal), shameless nudity, and unsettling tribal drumming long into the night, not in their one-time Shangri-la now going to rack and ruin, thank you. One family per parcel; that was one Vista rule etched in stone. (Claims of “Hey, we ARE one family” wouldn't cut much ice.)

 

Frothing at the mouth, they reported me to every enforcement agency they could think of: county sheriff; health, planning and building departments; fire marshal; probably the dog catcher... But, saving grace, earlier I’d coordinated a meeting between then county sheriff Charlie Byrd and rainbow elders, to be held on my land. Law enforcement was keen to learn what they might be in for with 33,000 rainbow celebrants (as it turned out), soon to flood their turf. The sheriff, reassured our ragtag group seemed a basically harmless if freaky bunch (apart from gleefully ignoring pot laws), causing only a temporary glitch in the terminally dull, conventional order of things, must've told my apoplectic neighbors to basically just chill a while, grit their teeth, that it'd soon be over. Jaws no doubt dropped.

 

The system was failing them yet again.

 

The writer liked to think the ensuing free-spirited scene helped break the ice of the Vista's long-oppressive atmosphere, even if at the risk of possibly encouraging anarchy to gain a permanent foothold. Rebellious offspring of various outraged residents had visited the scene and loved it;  the scene became part of Vista lore. 

 

It seemed that over time the place would swing from one extreme to the other: From firstcomers' honeymoon period, happy campers giddy over the endless possibilities of their pristine lands to ruthless, law-and-order minded "No this, no that, don't even think about it" intolerance", then back to "Whoopee, anything goes!" albeit of a more scofflaw variety. 

 

_________________________

 

Gone eleven months of the year

The firstcomers' control-freak stance was, again, in part born of feeling the strong need to post serious signs everywhere to try protecting the place and left belongings while living 700 miles away some 11 months of the year. Mischief-minded locals, resenting the sudden bogarting of their former stomping grounds, had been having a hell-for-leather field day during their long absences...which of course got visiting owners spitting-nails mad in return, their hoped for carefree vacation anticipated all year met with shocking reality check.

 

Clearly, the locales had other ideas. They'd mounted a rebellious, "You may think it's your land, but it's still ours and we'll never recognize this damn place" campaign. The endless miles of ungated, groomed backroads were ideal for dirt bikers to gouge deep donuts in. And various, more delinquent-minded youth couldn't resist engaging in more spirited hell raising, stealing and vandalizing at will.  Unruly youth -- absorbing the angry sentiments of their redneck parents and carrying on a proud tradition --  had geared up a protracted war with the foreign la-la-landers who'd dared to try appropriating their wilderness playground and grazing land. Law enforcement could only do so much trying to work with the mostly absent owners, there being maybe at most a single overseer watching over seven square miles of property off season and the actual land owner needing to report any incident to get an investigation.

 

By the time civic-minded lot owners started living on their parcels and joining the larger community, attending church services, some enrolling kids in the local schools and joining PTAs, it almost seemed too late to reverse such a long-established vicious circle. Alas, dislike and suspicion of the Vista and its lot owners appeared permanently ingrained in the DNA of many locals, their kids, their grandkids...  

 

“Permit? We ain’t got no permit...

I don’t need no stinkin’ permit!”

As related, through the ‘80s and ‘90s the county's health and building ordinances were by and large still strictly enforced. Unless one didn’t mind being deemed an outlaw and never earning recognition or acceptance as an “official” resident -- in time, it seemed more and more wouldn't mind at all -- landowners hoping to become respectable residents tried to comply. Or at least provide the illusion of complying: "See here?  I've started my well; I'm fifty feet down and waiting on my next paycheck to drill deeper, cut me some slack here, will ya? (Hope he's buying this.)"

 

After the Great Recession of 2008-2009 hit and devastated the economy, county supervisors had to make some real tough budget cuts. Among other actions they axed the position of the residential-code enforcer. It seemed to be having little effect anyhow -- leastwise in the Vista. The place was so far gone by then, calling it a lost cause almost seemed like an understatement.

 

Over the next half decade, residential-code enforcement essentially disappeared from the Vista. With no official telling you anything different, it was easier than ever for newcomers to foster the notion they could do whatever the heck they wanted on their parcels. The threatening signs that had been erected everywhere were by now seriously biodegrading, the words dire warnings fading into illegibility. They now lent the place the air of being some forlorn, all but abandoned, rural ghost settlement living out a zombie half-life in total obscurity.

 

No legal power to fine;

Can a place center without a center?

Other subdivisions that had formed in the region about the same time had wanted to assure having the best chance of establishing a respectable residency. Accordingly, they gave the property-owner boards legal power to levy fines for infractions of agreed-on rules. If not paid they could slap legal liens on a culprit's property that had to be paid before land could freely change hands. Examples: in Lake Shastina visible clotheslines, solid fencing and dirt bikes were all verboten; in Shasta Forest, one could get fined fifty dollars for changing oil on their own property, even if capturing every drop for recycling.

 

No such legal powers ever existed in the Vista.

 

This had always been the place's two-edged sword. While its relative lack of sometimes nit-picky, overreaching rules and regulations (or enforcement thereof) empowered residents to feel more like lords and ladies of the manor, as it were, such freedom could also attract those with clearly scofflaw intentions, wanting to exploit the land and thereby disturbing the place's treasured peace and quiet. Example: the place long ago had a monumental junkyard eyesore surreally surrounded by yet-pristine, wooded lots; it took the board ages to get the county to condemn it and the place cleaned up.

 

It basically came down to giving people the freedom to do what they wanted so long as their actions didn’t interfere with the rights of others to do what they wanted. Liberty vs. license. The flip side of liberty was, of course, the obligation to support the rules of law set up to safeguard the freedom rights of the greatest number. (That the rules sometimes seemed to distinctly favor the interests of the wealthier class at the expense of others forever getting the short end of the stick was no doubt what made people want to rebel.)

 

Few parcel holders -- especially absentee, but even some residents -- ever felt a need to build a community center. So the Vista never built one. Though its population had grown enough to merit it, there was never enough community interest to create such a practical facility: a place where residents and visiting members could meet, get to know each other, in a central, neutral, relaxed setting, form informal volunteer action groups, like litter patrol, start community gardens, hold swap meets... and hold the monthly board meetings, open to all owners and their families, right in the Vista rather than, as a kindness, next door in a fire station backroom.

 

But it was long held in this cramped, cold-fluorescent-lit backroom space, off Vista property. And the annual property owner meetings were held some ten miles away, in Lake Shastina, one having to walk through the golf club's bar lounge littered with buzzed tee junkies to reach the conference room. (In earliest years they were held hundreds of miles away, at places like, many members’ then favorite, the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, to make it easier for the dominant southern California ownership to attend.)

 

It seemed impossible for a quasi community to ever gain a sense of centeredness without such a center. Have to leave the place to attend the monthly meeting? Drive ten miles to attend its annual meeting? It struck more than a few as too weird and reflected the place's discombobulation as much as anything.

 

“Wouldn’t give you a dime...” vs. “Only $29,999!”

As said, due to the place’s sundry shortcomings the sale values of parcels stalled out for decades, barely keeping pace with inflation. Interest in the parcels took the meaning of 'soft market' to a new low. Until 2015, unimproved two-to-three acre lots went begging at $5,000. Lacking any easier water, septic systems or electricity, or any more can-do, fair-minded, empowered board and appropriate CC&Rs, the place shouted, "Beware! Failed subdivision!"

 

It just didn’t strike many as an inviting place to want to drop anchor. Only those enjoying roughing it for a while, or relishing the novelty of owning their own piece of California. Or those determined to live on the cheap, who wouldn't lose any sleep over being non-compliant, "Screw the System"  being their motto. Or those renting houses and mobiles from code-compliant owners who'd moved away, for affordability more than anything, and tried their best to tune out the gnarly politics. Or long-timers who'd known the place in kinder times and had sunk such deep roots they were braced to weather changes that made most others move away.

 

Long ago I met a former realtor who said of the properties with a heated disdain apparently then common in various property peddling circles, “I wouldn’t give you a dime for any of them!” He said it with such vehemence, like the realm was sitting on top of a radioactive waste dump or something, that it made one wonder if maybe he and his colleagues had skirted ugly, protracted lawsuits for misrepresenting the properties, or endured some other such unpleasantness that made it not worth the paltry commission fees closing such low-end parcels generated.

 

Eventually, though, two out-of-region realtor groups thought differently. Specializing in scouting rural developments deemed undervalued, in the late 2000s they snapped up hundreds of the bedeviled hinterland's parcels for cheap, properties that had long laid fallow (at least relieving many long-stuck or more recently-stuck parcel owners). Then they mounted slick sales campaigns to try to remedy the under-exploited situation, hoping to make a mint.

 

The first outfit was called National Recreational Properties, Inc.. It hired former "CHiPs" TV star Erik Estrada to serve as their uber aggressive pitchman. Out of Irvine (possibly the same town as Vista founder Collins), it apparently had a penchant for going after failed, “left-for-dead” subdivisions, their sharp talons squeezing out any easy quick profit before swooping off to the next rural roadkill. In ad promos "the Ponch" shamelessly enthused how the place was so great he even owned a parcel himself. (He was of course given it as part of the deal, just so he could truthfully say that.)

 

The outfit reportedly offered to fly prospective buyers in to enjoy a champagne brunch along with the big pitch and a grand tour of the prime properties that offered such rich solitude and dazzling mountain views. When they held a grand open house, balloons festooning highway entrances, rumor had it no one even showed up. (They were more successful with their Alturas, California area development, California Pines, which boasted over 15,000 one-acre parcels, each demanding the installation of a pricey, engineer-designed septic system, which of course hindered its development.)

 

A few years later, around 2012, another group,  Billyland.com, likewise grabbed a mess of raw Vista parcels, possibly taking some lots off the former's hands. They, in turn, seemed to be aiming at land-hungry Internet surfers. They'd hawk parcels online, eBay auction style, the 'winner' being the one having made the highest down-payment bid when the timer ran out. “Only $29,999!” they gushed. (With low monthly payments and high interest rate, final costs could run well over $50,000.) Their campaign attracted many living on a shoestring, some soon to grow a few cannabis plants, no doubt in part to try to make land payments and so avoid losing what various legal residents, perhaps uncharitably, viewed as basically private campgrounds for the homeless. (As of late 2022, they were still trying to hawk a lot or two at $80,000, hopeful the right sucker was out there.)

 

By 2015, according to county records the Vista had a grand total of some 80 legally permitted residences. Out of 1,640 parcels, that was one in twenty, or five percent.  The rest -- some 1,556 lots, or 95%, --  either held unpermitted dwellings, were once informally lived on and since vacated, or, most commonly, still as relatively pristine as the day the place launched a half century before (minus various scars of tree poachers and careless off-roaders).

 

Hope sprang eternal for some of the current speculative landholders still thinking to make a bundle. They set a ridiculously inflated price with the realtor, thinking to snag some eager land-hungry buyer with more money than sense, oblivious to the depressed market and the development's long festering problems: "Secluded", "Perfect spot to build that dream home!", etc.  Once, during the early teens, a sale to a woman was about to finalize. She was taking one last look at the parcel before signing when a next door, scofflaw resident, determined to keep out 'the wrong kind of people', strode out to the road nearby, buck naked, and started prancing about. It worked; the deal fell through.

 

“Maybe if we ignore them they’ll go away.”

It was no secret the county supervisors rued the day they ever greenlit the woebegone development. One former Vista board president stalwart, Jeannette Hook, worked with county officials in her career. She said they viewed the Vista as "the red-headed stepchild no one knew what to do with."

 

Meanwhile, the place, having no fining power, was, short of extra-legal vigilante efforts, totally at the total mercy of county officials and enforcers to keep intact whatever shreds of respect for the rule of law yet remained.

 

But the huge, mostly rural county, on an overstretched budget and often understaffed, gave up trying to deal with the forsaken realm. Responsible enforcement and policy-making parties grew numb to the perpetual thorn in their side. They tried to forget its legal residency paid their salaries through annual county property taxes and, not unreasonably, expected them to earn their keep.

 

Despite -- or because of -- the number of non-compliant dwellers increasing, they still wouldn't respond, short of an actual emergency. They knew it was a disaster waiting to happen. County officials kept kicking the can down the road on automatic pilot, determined to avoid dealing with the fool's errand of a place whenever humanly possible...

 

...until the day of reckoning came. 

 

In the spring of 2015, a sudden flood of growers, anticipating the eminent tidal wave of legalized recreational cannabis use in California, poured in out of nowhere, snapping up parcels like the bargain-basement steals they were.

 

It appeared to catch everyone flatfooted, asleep at the switch, out to lunch, name your metaphor... "No one could've possibly predicted such a thing would happen"  said one official to media, head firmly stuck in the sand. 

 

Studious ignoring of the development's long-term plight -- born of a rural county too poor, provincial-minded and/or lackadaisical to keep up with changing times or enforce its own ordinances and regulations, should people for any reason opt to ignore them -- had been careening on a collision course with reality for ages...

 

...until avoiding dealing with it finally proved itself to be something of an unwarranted luxury.

 

 

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Afterword

Fifth century B.C. Chinese philosophy Lao Tse said that the cause of anything is everything and the cause of everything is anything.  It'd be unfair and over-simplistic to try to pin the blame for what happened in the realm on any one cause or party.

 

There was an extraordinarily daunting combination of cascading factors at play over time, countless ingredients in the place's sure recipe for disaster.

 

A brief recap on the major contributing factors:

 

Seller to the land developer didn't get first permission from the rest of the long-time owning Martin family, establishing a contentious and shaky foundation from the very start

 

Surrounding locals resented the place ever being allowed to develop, possibly including some county supervisor members who'd vote against its formation (ostensibly for lack of water) 

 

The ambitious efforts of first settlers, each providing their own well, electrical hookup, etc., weren't followed by most future dwellers, despite this being crucial to ever becoming a recognized, standard community which residents could take some pride in

 

Add:

A sea of indifferent absentee owners, often mere speculators, countless soon nursing serious buyer remorse yet unable to unload the clunker parcels and so loathe to sink another cent in the place

 

The firebrand property owners board, along with other heavily invested, first-comer residents, reacting to the rash of scofflaw residents determined to live on lots without conforming to code, declaring open war on them and throwing them all under the bus, thereby creating an incredibly contentious social climate for decades

 

Expedient-minded realtors, not caring what one intended to do with their lot

 

Uninvolved association managers and sometimes board presidents, indifferent to or ineffective in helping more civic-minded residents make the place more livable and even participating in the eventual realty boom sparked in large part by legalized cannabis

 

Stir in:

County officials in time all but abandoning enforcement of the building code and state health regulations for a half decade

 

More and more free-minded residents deeming the home building-code standards too complicated and expensive for simple country living and so worthy of being ignored

 

 

Mix together and bake 50 years. Result? One giant question mark of a place that the public still shakes its head over and dismisses as a hopeless mess defying all comprehension.

 

Was it any wonder the Vista became such a basket case? All along it seemed as if it was perhaps vying for a 'Most Dysfunctional Rural Development' award in some bizarro alternate universe.

 

Countless influences -- some possibly not even touched on here -- led the Vista to become the way it is now: a former shared recreational land forever trying to be something more, despite the cards being stacked against it from the start...

 

...and, people being people, and the Vista being the Vista, is still trying to...any way it can.

 

 

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