Seniors suffer in troubled California subdivision

HEMET, Calif. -- John and Donna Pringle were newly widowed when they fell in love and decided to slip into retirement together at a sprawling community being built for the 55-and-up crowd a few miles from their homes in this sun-bleached Southern California town.

The Peppertree subdivision promised an expansive swimming pool where visiting grandchildren could splash and swim, a gym stocked with exercise equipment and hundreds of similarly aged neighbors.

But when Peppertree's builder abandoned the project months after the Pringles moved in, the pool disappeared behind a locked iron gate, the exercise machines were repossessed and the 13 existing residents were left alone to grow testy with each other in their cramped corner of the 85-acre development, looking out at empty, overgrown lots stacked with abandoned metal pipes and roof tiles.

Brown-plumed roadrunners dash over the arid dirt, sometimes with mice in their beaks, and tumbleweeds blow across the wasteland of the development onto residents' lawns.

In Peppertree's earth-tone stucco homes beside a cluster of boulder-studded hills, the recession and the collapse of the Southern California housing industry have crashed head-on into another fragile tenet of the American dream.

Feeling 'cheated'

"We really feel cheated out of our retirement," said Donna Pringle, 72, as she and her 81-year-old husband sat outside on their porch. Theirs is one of only seven occupied homes in the planned 470-unit subdivision. "We've worked all our lives toward this, and it's not what we were promised."

A few dozen additional homes are built but can't be occupied until Peppertree is connected to the regional sewage grid -- something developer William Lo left undone when he relinquished the subdivision in mid-2008 and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection.

"It just doesn't feel right," said another resident, John Reider, 65, a retired auto lot manager, as he walked along a buckling road pocked with sinkholes, the apparent result of a faulty drainage system. "It bums me out."

Delores Conway, director of the Casden Forecast at the University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate, said Peppertree's residents likely have years to wait before construction resumes, even after the sewers are fixed.

Once banks are more willing to offer construction loans again, she said, builders will first focus on areas closer to the region's employment centers than Hemet, some 75 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

In May 2008, residents received a letter from Lo explaining that PCG-Peppertree LP, a subsidiary of his development company Pacific Century Homes Inc., couldn't afford to complete or maintain the project and would let Central Pacific Bank take it over.

Lawyers for Lo and Central Pacific Bank did not return phone messages.

Residents said their shared adversity has not drawn them together. Tensions have run high since late summer, when a plan to use homeowners' dues to restore the swimming pool fell apart.

Reider said the trouble was getting city inspectors to sign off on the plan, but that others blamed him. He said his neighbors think he didn't want to spend dues on the pool because he's given up on Peppertree, and he concedes that when the sewer is repaired and the liens cleared he'll sell his home -- even at a loss -- and leave the subdivision.

The Pringles said they couldn't afford to sell at a loss and hope to see the neighborhood rise around them while they're still able to enjoy it.

"When you're younger, you can kind of sit back and think, 'In 10 years, I'm going to have this or I'm going to have that,"' Donna Pringle said. "We hope we have another 10 years left, but we don't know."