Builders Bail Out Of Bakersfield

In Kern County, California, The Bakersfield Californian reports:

• Two major builders have abandoned housing projects near northeast Bakersfield’s City in the Hills development. A third is halting construction at an Arvin site it recently said was going forward. [...] In the northeast, Centex Homes and KB Home have stopped construction at a pair of contiguous tracts immediately west of City in the Hills.

***

• Unfinished tract walls, utility hookups and tiers of graded lots stretched into the distance south and west of the unpainted [Centex] model units. [...] A county tract map recorded last September indicates the 48-acre site is slated for at least 99 homes.

***

• Immediately east of the Centex site, KB Home’s partially constructed Olympia neighborhood is home to an abandoned construction trailer. [...] Neat green lawns abut empty brown lots. In all, 174 houses are planned for 40 acres, tract maps show. Property records indicate the empty lots are owned by GMAC Model Home Finance LLC, a Minneapolis-based financial company.

***

• In Arvin, meanwhile, K. Hovnanian Homes has apparently stopped new construction at its Azul and Brisa neighborhoods. [...] About 128 of the tract’s planned 325 homes have been built.

***

• Another national builder with a [Bakersfield] presence, Atlanta-headquartered Beazer Homes, formally pulled out of Fresno in June, as well as recently leaving Colorado.
  Kern County property records indicate the company owns more than 225 lots here in at least three tracts, though the company’s Web site shows only one active neighborhood in Bakersfield. A spokeswoman at Beazer’s regional office in Valencia did not return a message left Thursday afternoon asking about the company’s plans for its Bakersfield holdings.

For more, see Three more major builders halt housing projects.

For a sample of Kern County stories on building projects going under, see:

• Three major defaults posted in northeast Bakersfield (A trio of large developments in northeast Bakersfield have defaulted — two of them from the master developer of the City in the Hills project, county records show, continuing a string of such troubles in Kern. More than $26 million was past due on the three loans),
• Another day, another default in Wasco (A 10th housing development has defaulted in Wasco, the city of 24,300 — including a state prison population of nearly 6,000 — that touts itself as the “rose capital of the nation”),
• McAllister Ranch slated for the auction block (The unfinished McAllister Ranch development is headed to the auction block Aug. 22, something that could make Lehman Commercial Paper Inc. landlord of three square miles of dust, curbs and an unkempt Greg Norman-designed golf course in southwest Bakersfield. The developer of the 6,000-home community defaulted on a $235 million loan from New Jersey-based Lehman in April.). unfinished development