Seniors suffer in troubled California subdivision
Associated Press
By Jacob Adelman
...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...
...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, located some 75 miles southeast of Los Angeles...