Miralon, a 309-acre planned community in Palm Springs, scheduled to open later this year, wants to give potential buyers a vision of what makes the desert community such a draw. Located just east of Indian Canyon Drive, right after the I-10 pours into the Coachella Valley from LA, the development will be framed by views of the San Jacinto Mountains. New homes offering contemporary riffs on midcentury modern design, with glass walls and open floor plans, will line the streets.
And unlike nearby developments, it’ll also see thousands of olive trees, some fully grown, covering 75 acres of groves—capable of generating 15,000 gallons of olive oil annually.
Overseen by Freehold Communities, a national real estate developer, Miralon represents one of the country’s biggest bets on agriculture-oriented real estate. Called both “agri-hoods” and “farm-to-fork communities,” these types of projects, of which there are more than 150 in the U.S., have blossomed. Residents in these exclusive neighborhoods can tend community gardens, fill up baskets of fruits in orchards, and, in Kukui’ula in Hawaii, even harvest guava, papaya, and pineapple.
Selling a more experiential and exclusive lifestyle—“whether it’s tranquil, artsy, eclectic or organic, more or less everything is right where you want it,” says Miralon’s website—these developments hit squarely at the intersection of sustainability and the foodie movement, while still grounded in the love of open space—the thing that brings people to places like Palm Springs in the first place.
That Miralon is also turning an abandoned golf course in the desert into a more responsible, albeit still manmade, landscape—olive groves in place of fairways, routes for golf carts repurposed as more than 7 miles of walking paths, and tee boxes turned into dog runs and community gardens—shows how the developers are trying to tune their sales pitch to a different set of values.
Along with installing solar panels on every rooftop, Miralon’s olive groves and landscaping will use about 24 to 28 percent less water than an 18-hole course, according to its landscape architects. Making the desert bloom this way is both a sales pitch and a step towards sustainability.
“We were surrounded by championship golf courses,” says Brad Shuckhart, California division president for Freehold. “We wanted to find a better use for the protected open space that could be enjoyed by not just golfers, but standard buyers. It offers a sense of romanticism, akin to wine.”
Of course, maybe the most sustainable use of land may actually be dense high-rises, which support resource conservation, public transit, and more efficient land use. But that may be a bit too radical, not to mention expensive, for Palm Springs.
“It’s paradoxical, of course, since true sustainability is density,” says Paul Habibi, a real estate entrepreneur and UCLA professor. “It may be a positive compromise, allowing sprawl to have positive attributes.”
Miralon actually had its start as a failed golf course development named Avalon that, like it’s partial owner, Lehman Brothers, was stopped short by the recession.
Located a short ride from downtown Palm Springs, the new community, co-developed with SunCal, was envisioned as a new potential gateway to the city. By 2008, lots were just partially finished and much of the underlying infrastructure, including the entire 18-hole course, was completed. The abandoned property, effectively subsidized by previous investors, retained a good deal of its value.
Then in 2015, real estate prices were on the rise in Palm Springs, by then a world-renowned resort destination—it had been on a two-year winning streak throughout the larger Coachella Valley— and Shuckhart and his team wanted to capitalize on the moment, and the city’s rich design heritage.
All the 1,150 homes and condos in Miralon will be built in a modernist style; the builders who work with Freehold will need to meet their own internal design guidelines, in development by Robert Hidey Architects. The rules include material and height restrictions, approved colors, a master plant palette, and a “monotony code” to avoid identical homes appearing next to each other.
Three main home variations—inspired by the work of architects William Francis Cody, Donald Wexler, and Ricardo Legorreta—offer proposed dimensions and details including steel posts and beams, cantilevered, flat roofs, and flat walls with smooth-finish stucco. Finished blueprints will also have to adhere to city guidelines, an effort to maintain a consistent midcentury aesthetic that fits in with the Palm Springs’s existing architecture.
Reviving the golf course, though, no longer made sense: The promise of having a home near protected open space—18 holes not required—was one of the main draws of such a development. In fact, one Urban Land Institute study found that under 40 percent of people living in golf communities were members of their own clubs.
To help rethink the open space concept, Freehold hired C2 Collaborative, the landscape architecture firm that designed Avalon the first time around. Numerous ideas were tossed out as agricultural alternatives for a standard golf course, according to firm principal Jack Haden.
Grapes attracted animals and pests. Citrus also caused pest problems, and would be damaged by the area’s high winds (another reason it wasn’t the best place for a golf course). Date palms required too much labor to harvest.
Olive trees offered a unique solution: less water-intensive, easy for a professional to harvest, they add shade, and they also attract bees and birds, benefitting the surrounding ecosystem. They’re pretty much pest-free, though quails have been known to eat olives allowed to rot and ferment, and actually get drunk.
Along with a community center, community garden plots, 1.5 acres of citrus trees, and 43 acres of desert-themed landscape, the olive trees will remake the footprint of the original golf course into something much more communal and accessible, all requiring fewer resources.
“The desert is a unique place, in a sense,” Haden says. “Amazing how plants can grow with just a little bit of water.”
Swapping golf for growing is in line with the game’s diminishing popularity. But it also shows how developers are rethinking the way open space is used as an amenity for planned communities.
When Miralon opens, homes will range from the high $300,000s to the mid-$700,000s for the largest houses, according to Shuckhart. It’s not the only such neighborhood popping up in the area. In nearby Indio, a 1,300-home development known as Virada, initially wrapped around a 27-hole golf course, will instead be organized around a public park and include a neighborhood solar plant.
“We have a lot of land uses that are generally low density and don’t take advantage of infill,” says Habibi. “Golf courses are a great example of that pattern. Agrihoods resurface that low-density, less-sustainable model, and instead create something with a triple-bottom line return: developers do well, and the new neighborhoods have both social and sustainable impact.”
Other, similar neighborhoods are open or under development across the United States. The Cannery, 547 homes built around a working, 7.4-acre farm, is raising crops in Davis, near Sacramento, California. Serenbe, a “Sonoma for the new South” outside Atlanta, is now expanding.
People care about their food and authenticity, and the trend is here to stay, says Habibi. The Global Wellness Institute found the so-called “wellness real estate industry” to be a $134 billion global industry in 2017, with 740 projects built or in-development in 34 countries.
Miralon may just be the next iteration of Southern California’s great, inevitable development rush into the desert: a development that, despite its location and density, tries to offer a connection with nature instead of simply bulldozing over it.
While residents won’t be part of the harvest—that’ll be handled by professionals at the Temecula Olive Oil company—they’ll pay for occasional maintenance and pruning. It’s not a lot. But it’s cooler than having the neighborhood kid cut your lawn.