History
According to the Forester that advised me on forestry issues, this property hasn't been cut or forested since the mid 1800's when Truckee was clear cut. It's magnificently large trees are as large as any in the North Tahoe area. He was amazed just how beautiful this property is. He would know as the Cal Fire Forester for the area.
Before I bought Parcel C all three Parcels were one lot owned by two partners as a single lot. They planned to develop it at some point. When the partner who designed and built the house at the top of the hill (parcel A) wanted to develop it, the other didn't and the property got split by court order. Since the property was in two county's, the portion in Placer County became a separate parcel C.. The partner with the house got parcel A and C. I bought parcel B from the son of the original partner. Parcel A and parcel B are in the City of Truckee and the county of Nevada. The partner that owned parcel A nd C sold parcel A with the house to the current owner with an option to buy parcel C. The current owner of parcel A did buy parcel C and then sold it to a friend who built a house on it (parcel C).
The fact that parcel A and parcel B were a single lot when the town of Truckee zoned it residential 2.0 is very important from a developers standpoint. The town of Truckee is very development or money oriented and wants parcels to be developed at their highest density. Truckee's intention was to permit 55 housing units to be built on parcel A and B. Now that that parcel was split only a total of 40 housing units can be built on parcel A and B. This is due to the fact the Truckee has hilltop and grade building restrictions. You can no longer build on a hilltop or on a grade more than 20%. Those additional 15 units would have had to have been built on parcel B. I was told, by someone in the know, that it would be worth submitting a development plan with those additional 15 units to the town of Truckee and request a variance.
When the original parcel was split via court order, an easement to extend Ponderosa Drive across parcel C and that included an easement for Utilities . There are now two access points; Dogwood Drive and Ponderosa Drive.
When I bought the property, it was purchased as a pension plan investment. I am the pension plan Trustee. As a Defined Benefit Pension Plan real estate investments are permitted. The original plan was to hold on to it and sell it later. When I saw the listing for this property I noticed that the zoning interpretation was wrong and that you could build four times the number of houses than was listed. After verifying the mistake with the city, I offered full price, cash. Somewhere along the line I started looking into development possibilities. When you are a retired self made multimillionaire businessman it's really hard to stay retired. Making money is fun and so easy! After some investigation and reading the Truckee building code it turned out that this property is a gold mine. The subdivision just north of it known as Winter Creek was successfully built, meeting all the current building code requirements, in addition, you can build a development in phases so you don't have to put in all the utilities and streets before building and selling housing units. When I toured Winter Creek I discovered that many of the houses where exactly the same so prefab construction could be used. The only glitch that I ran into was that my pension plan administrator informed me that as the Trustee of the pension plan, the IRS would not permit me to build a subdivision and engage in regular business. Being a tax exempt entity has it's benefits and restrictions. Oh well. I even invented a way to use manufactured housing that meets the snow load requirement. The patent search came back very positive.
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