Change
'Cause he's oh, so good, and he's oh, so fine
And he's oh, so healthy, in his body and his mind
He's a well-respected man about town
Doing the best thing so conservatively!
-- The Kinks
I took a year and a half off after Masco Corp "released" me in 2010. I had been wearing several hats for a couple of years because of the slow disintegration of Masco Contractor Services and my customer base. I was one of 33 employees in our division to survive the cuts in 2007 through 2009. In 2010 there were only a dozen of us left. I was exhausted. I had resigned my country club membership because I had little or no free time and my commissions were gone, so my income had dropped.
I was now sixty years old and suddenly without a job. I wanted to just relax and review my options and play golf again. I started painting and blogging. I bought a few framed canvasses and monkeyed around with a variety of mediums, trying to find something "different". It was fun, since I hadn't picked up a paint brush in over 40 years!
But, once again, it was done entirely for my own entertainment. Nobody really cared about my art work. They would say they thought it was "wonderful" but even Cathy didn't want to hang any of it anywhere in our house. One friend swooned over a painting I did of golfer Phil Mickelson. I eventually gave the original to him as a birthday present. Later we visited their house to watch a football game and I noticed the painting was nowhere to be found. I am willing to bet it is in the garage.
In November 2012 a flier came in the mail. It warned the community that things were going to change. The Escondido Country Club golf course had been sold and a meeting was scheduled to update the club members and the neighbors.
On the appointed day I drove over to the clubhouse and encountered hundreds of people standing outside the main entrance doors. I recognized a few friends and asked what was going on?
Only club members were being allowed inside, and word was that the new owner was announcing the closure of the club. That in the future the property would be turned into a housing tract!
People were really upset and some shoving and hollering was happening as people tried to push inside. Suddenly I spotted a TV news truck pulling into the parking lot. I walked over and just as the passenger side door opened I asked the reporter if he knew what was happening. He said no but maybe I could clue him in.
I told him what I had heard and noted that the new owners' plan to convert the golf course into a housing tract would never happen. The locals would fight tooth and nail to stop that because they had supported the club for fifty years. Some had paid premium prices for their homes to have golf course frontages.
Soon the meeting broke up and some very angry club members came out screaming "He can't do this!" They said the owner was giving members five months to pack up and get out. On April 1st, 2013 the club would close forever!
That night my interview with the reporter was all over TV. People were calling and thanking me for speaking up for the community. Even though I was no longer a club member, I was still a member of the country club community, so I took it personally.
I had been fiddling around with blogging and building websites. I fantasized about creating cash flow being a middle man selling golf specialty products online. Now I thought it was time to start a blog following the progress of what appeared to me to be a civil injustice.
For the first time I started to write about issues close to home. I had previously written columns for Golf Southern California Magazine under the tag "The Driving Forces In Golf'' where I interviewed prominent leaders of golf product manufacturers in San Diego. I did ad copy for the Times-Advocate, and some for Kitchen Barn. But the idea that some unknown property flipper from Beverly Hills could sneak in and hijack the 110 acre parcel of relatively flat land in North County San Diego, and turn it into a mega fortune, without the advice and consent of the other 1600 homeowners, just rubbed me the wrong way!
I wasn't the only one. A well financed opposition organization formed and the war was on! It didn't take long to rile up hundreds of neighbors to stop the property flipper from wrecking our community.
I decided this would be ripe for a website to inform the community and give them a perspective they wouldn't get from the mainstream news media. I knew enough about the power of the builder community, to spend massive amounts of money on lobbying local officials, and on media public relation campaigns, to know the local homeowners would have an uphill battle.
I started the WarOnEscondido.com blog and began a constant series of commentaries on how the whole thing came about, what was happening in court, and the community effort to thwart the flippers dreams. I blogged about:
For the first time my online work was attracting attention! I gained nearly 2000 followers and was asked to speak before the opposition group (the Escondido Country Club Homeowners Organization-ECCHO) meetings, which were attracting hundreds of anxious neighbors.
It took ECCHO two years and a few injunctions to get a proposition placed on the local November ballot: Yes, on building hundreds of new homes on the golf course, or No, it must remain Open Space.
The vote went 2 to 1 against the homes. But the developer sued, claiming it was an "illegal taking" to prevent him from developing his property. Four years after the proposition passed, an appellate court overruled it, declaring the Beverly Hills Flipper had the right to proceed with his hijacking.
The battle was waged for six years, but as of this writing (2023) the builder is just completing a 390 unit housing project which has radically altered the nature of our resort-style retirement community. By the time it is totally completed and all of the supporting infrastructure, walking trails, clubhouse, swimming pool and community park are turned over to the various homeowners associations, it will have been nearly twelve years of disruption and instability in our once quiet and carefree neighborhood.
The Rub? Like the climate, the environment, and the air we breathe, everything changes. Period. Never take anything for granted, never expect that you can bank on the future. The future is in an instant, the past. So it is effectively an illusion.
Change isn't always organic, gradual or evolutionary. The hijacker analogy has become synonymous with all kinds of heinous anti-social activities and undesirable change. Like taking over my neighborhood golf course, corrupting an election, dismantling border security, wreaking havoc in our schools with revisionist history, newly invented genders, and undermining the stability of our financial system. The credibility of our formerly beloved medical system has been compromised, as has the trustworthiness of our military and their business partners. The one thing that should be protecting us from these dangerous trends is the Fourth Estate, and that has also been hijacked by international business interests and political activists.
With a zillion megabytes of information available to anyone in a matter of seconds, it is hard to imagine how we could be any less confident that we know who is in charge of…defining things. Have we forgotten or just watched definitions be hijacked? What is a woman? What is gender? What is a baby? What is a family? What are pronouns? The list is…endless.
Maybe that explains why suicide rates are skyrocketing in children, amongst veterans, and why people are giving up on marriage and building families. Why narcissism is an epidemic, and crime is getting more and more socially acceptable. Why belief in God is in free fall.
They say if you believe in nothing, you'll believe in anything. And that hasn't changed.
***
And he's oh, so healthy, in his body and his mind
He's a well-respected man about town
Doing the best thing so conservatively!
-- The Kinks
I took a year and a half off after Masco Corp "released" me in 2010. I had been wearing several hats for a couple of years because of the slow disintegration of Masco Contractor Services and my customer base. I was one of 33 employees in our division to survive the cuts in 2007 through 2009. In 2010 there were only a dozen of us left. I was exhausted. I had resigned my country club membership because I had little or no free time and my commissions were gone, so my income had dropped.
I was now sixty years old and suddenly without a job. I wanted to just relax and review my options and play golf again. I started painting and blogging. I bought a few framed canvasses and monkeyed around with a variety of mediums, trying to find something "different". It was fun, since I hadn't picked up a paint brush in over 40 years!
But, once again, it was done entirely for my own entertainment. Nobody really cared about my art work. They would say they thought it was "wonderful" but even Cathy didn't want to hang any of it anywhere in our house. One friend swooned over a painting I did of golfer Phil Mickelson. I eventually gave the original to him as a birthday present. Later we visited their house to watch a football game and I noticed the painting was nowhere to be found. I am willing to bet it is in the garage.
In November 2012 a flier came in the mail. It warned the community that things were going to change. The Escondido Country Club golf course had been sold and a meeting was scheduled to update the club members and the neighbors.
On the appointed day I drove over to the clubhouse and encountered hundreds of people standing outside the main entrance doors. I recognized a few friends and asked what was going on?
Only club members were being allowed inside, and word was that the new owner was announcing the closure of the club. That in the future the property would be turned into a housing tract!
People were really upset and some shoving and hollering was happening as people tried to push inside. Suddenly I spotted a TV news truck pulling into the parking lot. I walked over and just as the passenger side door opened I asked the reporter if he knew what was happening. He said no but maybe I could clue him in.
I told him what I had heard and noted that the new owners' plan to convert the golf course into a housing tract would never happen. The locals would fight tooth and nail to stop that because they had supported the club for fifty years. Some had paid premium prices for their homes to have golf course frontages.
Soon the meeting broke up and some very angry club members came out screaming "He can't do this!" They said the owner was giving members five months to pack up and get out. On April 1st, 2013 the club would close forever!
That night my interview with the reporter was all over TV. People were calling and thanking me for speaking up for the community. Even though I was no longer a club member, I was still a member of the country club community, so I took it personally.
I had been fiddling around with blogging and building websites. I fantasized about creating cash flow being a middle man selling golf specialty products online. Now I thought it was time to start a blog following the progress of what appeared to me to be a civil injustice.
For the first time I started to write about issues close to home. I had previously written columns for Golf Southern California Magazine under the tag "The Driving Forces In Golf'' where I interviewed prominent leaders of golf product manufacturers in San Diego. I did ad copy for the Times-Advocate, and some for Kitchen Barn. But the idea that some unknown property flipper from Beverly Hills could sneak in and hijack the 110 acre parcel of relatively flat land in North County San Diego, and turn it into a mega fortune, without the advice and consent of the other 1600 homeowners, just rubbed me the wrong way!
I wasn't the only one. A well financed opposition organization formed and the war was on! It didn't take long to rile up hundreds of neighbors to stop the property flipper from wrecking our community.
I decided this would be ripe for a website to inform the community and give them a perspective they wouldn't get from the mainstream news media. I knew enough about the power of the builder community, to spend massive amounts of money on lobbying local officials, and on media public relation campaigns, to know the local homeowners would have an uphill battle.
I started the WarOnEscondido.com blog and began a constant series of commentaries on how the whole thing came about, what was happening in court, and the community effort to thwart the flippers dreams. I blogged about:
- How American Golf, a large golf property management and property holding company that had owned the club for 14 years, had made a business decision in light of the 2008 Great Recession, to divest dozens of properties and to focus only on high-end private golf clubs.
- How they found a La Jolla based investment firm to buy them out.
- How that firm had stretched itself too thin, and having no experience managing golf properties, decided it too should bail out on Escondido Country Club and two other properties they had acquired.
- How the owner of that firm, a young and rambunctious developer, had tipped off a friend in Beverly Hills to the opportunity to buy a note out of foreclosure at a ridiculously cheap price.
- How several members at the ECC had desperately offered the underwater owner a variety of other pathways to saving the golf club, to financially support a plan to pay off debt, retire the note, and rebuild the membership. All to no avail.
- How the Beverly Hills flipper snatched the note for $4.3M and approached the Escondido City Mayor with a plan to convert the course to housing. And that he had said, "I will not stand in your way" while telling the voters the opposite.
For the first time my online work was attracting attention! I gained nearly 2000 followers and was asked to speak before the opposition group (the Escondido Country Club Homeowners Organization-ECCHO) meetings, which were attracting hundreds of anxious neighbors.
It took ECCHO two years and a few injunctions to get a proposition placed on the local November ballot: Yes, on building hundreds of new homes on the golf course, or No, it must remain Open Space.
The vote went 2 to 1 against the homes. But the developer sued, claiming it was an "illegal taking" to prevent him from developing his property. Four years after the proposition passed, an appellate court overruled it, declaring the Beverly Hills Flipper had the right to proceed with his hijacking.
The battle was waged for six years, but as of this writing (2023) the builder is just completing a 390 unit housing project which has radically altered the nature of our resort-style retirement community. By the time it is totally completed and all of the supporting infrastructure, walking trails, clubhouse, swimming pool and community park are turned over to the various homeowners associations, it will have been nearly twelve years of disruption and instability in our once quiet and carefree neighborhood.
The Rub? Like the climate, the environment, and the air we breathe, everything changes. Period. Never take anything for granted, never expect that you can bank on the future. The future is in an instant, the past. So it is effectively an illusion.
Change isn't always organic, gradual or evolutionary. The hijacker analogy has become synonymous with all kinds of heinous anti-social activities and undesirable change. Like taking over my neighborhood golf course, corrupting an election, dismantling border security, wreaking havoc in our schools with revisionist history, newly invented genders, and undermining the stability of our financial system. The credibility of our formerly beloved medical system has been compromised, as has the trustworthiness of our military and their business partners. The one thing that should be protecting us from these dangerous trends is the Fourth Estate, and that has also been hijacked by international business interests and political activists.
With a zillion megabytes of information available to anyone in a matter of seconds, it is hard to imagine how we could be any less confident that we know who is in charge of…defining things. Have we forgotten or just watched definitions be hijacked? What is a woman? What is gender? What is a baby? What is a family? What are pronouns? The list is…endless.
Maybe that explains why suicide rates are skyrocketing in children, amongst veterans, and why people are giving up on marriage and building families. Why narcissism is an epidemic, and crime is getting more and more socially acceptable. Why belief in God is in free fall.
They say if you believe in nothing, you'll believe in anything. And that hasn't changed.
***