In recent months there has been a lot of speculation on what is going to become of the Las Campanas subdivision in Santa Fe.  Having suffered from financial problems and a recent furlough of services (i.e. the closure of the spa and golf courses), many are wondering what lies in the future of Las Campanas.

We get asked that question a lot at here at HomesinSantaFeNM.com. And our most honest answer is “We’re not sure”. However, we are also positive that Las Campanas will recover and will remain a highly desirable place to live in the Santa Fe area.  With unparalled views and amenities, Las Campanas offers what no other Santa Fe subdivision does. The community will not only survive, it will also continue to thrive and prosper.

The Santa Fe New Mexican published the following article in Today’s (December 27th, 2009) newspaper.  It’s an interesting read, and it outlines the challenges that Las Campanas has faced. 

ARTICLE

Life isn’t supposed to be so trying at Las Campanas.

For nearly 20 years, the gated enclave west of the city limits has represented the pinnacle of genteel country living in Santa Fe. Its two Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses, soaring clubhouse, 20,000 square-foot spa and baronial equestrian center, nicknamed “the horse Hyatt,” set it apart from every other affluent neighborhood in town.

But with the developer now in default, nearly one-fourth of the land still unsold and a looming bill for a multimillion-dollar water system, Las Campanas is in the midst of a troubled transition, its fate now in the hands of residents whose confidence has been shaken by recent events and who are being asked for the first time to shoulder the entire cost of the development’s signature services and amenities.

“We are in a challenging new era, no question about it,” said Bob Buddendorf, a retired Dallas business executive who chairs the committee of residents that is assuming control of The Club at Las Campanas, which includes the golf courses, the clubhouse, food services, the spa and the equestrian center.

Heavily subsidized by the developer, Las Campanas has been struggling to find its own footing and reclaim its reputation as having one of the best clubs in the Southwest, said Mark Silbert, who is working with Buddendorf. After developer Lyle Anderson lost control to Lloyd’s Banking Group in 2008, Silbert said, key personnel were let go, the quality of the food service slipped and building maintenance was deferred. The sale of the club to its members, originally scheduled for 2011, was advanced to stop “the attrition of members,” said Silbert, a retired Exxon oceanographic engineer who moved to Las Campanas from Houston three years ago.

Buddendorf and Silbert believe that sales of both land and homes will pick up as the recession eases, but other forces may be at work.

“Las Campanas introduced a new market segment to Santa Fe that was not being served. The question now is whether the depth of that segment has been plumbed,” said former Santa Fean Christopher Lienberger, a land-use consultant and scholar who chaired a commission involved with planning the Santa Fe Railyard and whose firm once counted Las Campanas among its clients.

Lienberger, who is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., believes that, nationally, the market for exurban development like Las Campanas has been saturated. For all of its amenities, Lienberger said, “Las Campanas represents a prettier form of sprawl. … The demand has shifted back toward a preference for close-in, walkable urban space.”

Lifestyle in jeopardy

Spread across 4,700 acres of high desert, with telescopic views of the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains, Las Campanas began selling lots in 1992. It quickly became the top selling luxury golf development in the country. However, by 2003, well before the current recession, lot sales at Las Campanas began to slow. Of 1,700 parcels, about 400 remain unsold.

A new era dawned at Las Campanas this fall with the announcement of a jolting 50 percent hike in monthly club dues. The increase was necessary, said Buddendorf, after the developer stopped paying about $2.5 million a year to maintain The Club at Las Campanas.

The loss of that annual subsidy led to a temporary shutdown of the club in September, the furloughing of 178 employees, and the sobering realization that if resident and nonresident members did not step in, the future of Las Campanas, or at least of its lifestyle, could be in jeopardy.

“The price premium Las Campanas has enjoyed is clearly tied to the reputation and viability of its amenities,” said Lienberger. “Whatever can be done to maintain them is a smart idea, whether it means raising fees or cutting costs.”

Club membership has fallen by about 15 percent with more than 100 memberships up for sale. An auction is planned for early next year, with the bidding tentatively set to start around $30,000 for golf memberships, which previously sold for $90,000. The bidding for social memberships, which exclude golf privileges, could start at $20,000, a 60 percent discount from their customary price.

Club members don’t have to own property at Las Campanas. Nor does the price of property necessarily include the cost of a membership, although it often does.

Image problem

The average sale price of a house has also fallen by 20 percent over the past year to just over $1 million. Prices did not fall as hard as they did in Tesuque, for example, but the rate of decline was steeper than in the city’s pricey northeast foothills.

Las Campanas is still doing its part to hold up the high end. One home on Mustang Mesa is going for just under $5 million. Another nearby estate, featuring a 12,000 square-foot house on 2 acres, is on the market for $8.2 million.

At the other end of the spectrum, you can find a 1,900-square-foot, three-bedroom house for $440,000, less than the amount owed on its existing mortgage, according to the real estate agent who represents it. Known as a “short sale,” the listing is a sign of the times. Buddendorf worries that it also may reflect a negative perception fostered by Las Campanas’ recent troubles. “We clearly need to alter that perception,” he said.

Las Campanas has struggled with an image problem almost from the outset. Fairly or unfairly, it has been branded as a wealthy wastrel, especially when it comes to water use. In 2002, in the midst of a drought, the city of Santa Fe filed a lawsuit to compel Las Campanas to abide by city water-use restrictions. Located outside the city, Las Campanas nonetheless took its water from one of the city’s main sources of supply, the Buckman well field, which was being drawn down at an unsustainable rate.

The fact that Las Campanas was using Buckman water to irrigate its golf courses during a drought was particularly irksome to city residents who were forced to cut back on household consumption.

Las Campanas agreed to abide by municipal water-use restrictions as part of a settlement of the lawsuit. But this past fall, the two sides were back at the negotiating table after Las Campanas scaled back its role in a partnership with the city and county to build a $200 million project to replace the Buckman supply with surface flow from the Rio Grande.

With the developer no longer able to participate in the project, Buddendorf and other residents were left to figure out how to pay the $4 million cost of a pipeline that will convey river water to their two golf courses. And as it scales back its investment in the Buckman Direct Diversion project, Las Campanas is again on the defensive as it seeks to assure rate payers elsewhere that they won’t be footing the bill for any of the development’s water.

“Are we paying for the sins of the developer?” mused Mark Silbert during a recent interview. “We didn’t get what the developer promised — a stand-alone water treatment plant that would have made us independent of the city and county. And we’re short $4 million.”

‘Epitome of divide’

Others say the years of wrangling over water masked a deeper resentment of Las Campanas and other gated enclaves that sprung up about the same time. Such developments were seen as an affront to a cherished image of Santa Fe as a place largely without class and ethnic distinctions, where wealth was camouflaged behind crumbling adobe walls.

“Las Campanas marked the beginning of the differentiation between rich and poor in this town,” said attorney Owen Lopez, the executive director of the nonprofit McCune Foundation, who has lived in Santa Fe since the 1960s.

“When we moved here, we lived on Otero Street across the arroyo from our landlady,” he recalled. “In those days, mansions were next door to hovels. The rich didn’t live behind walls with pass codes to get in.”

Yet Lopez himself was not immune to the appeal of Las Campanas. “I’m a big golfer. I have a lot of friends with places out there,” he said. “At one point, I told my wife we could get a deal on a house on the golf course. She said: ‘Are you nuts?’ That was the end of it.”

Lienberger has a similar take on Las Campanas. He compared Santa Fe’s demographic profile to a camel with two humps, one bulging with older, upper-middle-class Anglos and the other with a younger, poorer Hispanic populace. “Las Campanas became the epitome of that divide,” he said.

The last census illustrated his point. In 2000, the city’s median household age was 41, its median income $48,000. The citywide population was 49 percent Hispanic. At Las Campanas, where the population was split between two census tracts, the median age was about 55. The median household income was well over $100,000, and the population was 12 percent Hispanic.

The 2010 census may paint a different picture: As home prices come down at Las Campanas, there is likely to be more diversity among its residents.

“We have a growing segment of moms, dads and kids,” said Rosa Silbert, Mark’s wife, who heads a committee that is working on strategies to market Club memberships. “We’ve instituted junior programs in golf, tennis and equestrian. I’d say 20 percent of our memberships are young families. I think you’ll find that things are changing, that we’re more a reflection of the city.”

And yet it’s hard to shake the sense that Las Campanas is Santa Fe on steroids. It’s an impression reinforced by the mammoth vigas atop the great hall of the clubhouse, by the cavernous “horse Hilton” that provides 90 room-sized stalls for its tenants, at least one of which is valued at $100,000, and by the volume of water needed to sustain the golf courses — enough to supply more than 2,000 families.

Most of that water is effluent or gray water and not potable. But in the arid Southwest, even the demand for effluent is growing. As recycling technology improves, the potential for converting effluent into drinkable water is becoming a reality. In New Mexico, in the meantime, gray water nourishes farm fields and replenishes rivers and acequias. At Las Campanas, the golf course water serves the seasonal wants of a part-time community. “The golf courses are underutilized,” Buddendorf conceded.

In fact, many of the 700 homes are empty much of the time. Buddendorf and Silbert estimated that about half of Las Campanas residents live there year-round. During the winter months, the empty golf courses blend in with the surrounding landscape that lends Las Campanas its pastoral charm.

Charitable works

Many residents work hard to dispel the image of their community as a haven of carefree consumption in a poor state. Las Campanas every year opens its coffers to the disadvantaged and its gates to people with disabilities. Its Las Campadres program offers free riding, swimming and art lessons, and its community fund has contributed $18,000 to $20,000 annually to local nonprofits for the past few years.

“A number of our members serve on the boards of the opera, the Lensic and the Santa Fe Community Foundation,” Buddendorf said. “I think our efforts have made a difference in terms of how we are perceived by people in Santa Fe.”

But the good works have also relied on the deep pockets of the developer who donated $50,000 a year to the community fund. Those contributions won’t continue, said Buddendorf, unless The Club at Las Campanas raises the money on its own.

Whether residents will agree to raise their contributions along with their club dues is an open question, Buddendorf said.

“Las Campanas has played a significant role in this community, and I don’t think anybody wants to see it reduced. But the issue is now up to the members, and the key to the future is building membership.”

Frank Clifford | For The New Mexican

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