Loreto BCS

We found a interesting article at the New York Times Online we think is worth the be publish here. Credits for the report go to: New York Times Online and Jim Atkinson.

Sun kissed many Americans are heading for Loreto Bay, a resort community that’s planning a total of 6,000 residences in the desert of Baja California.

THE 8,000 acres of the Loreto Bay Resort on Baja California snuggle on flat, hard desert between the charismatically craggy Giganta range and the spookily glassy Sea of Cortez. The most basic elements of nature — sun and water, rock and sand, the vertical and the horizontal — collide with that particular grace that only nature can produce.

From a footbridge that gently arcs over a deep green estuary leading from the bay into the development, there’s a good view of the resort taking shape on this once-isolated spot: a 150-room hotel with a beachside cafe and gardens; 240 two-story adobe houses with cupolas; some homes painted bright blue or yellow, others muted pink and beige or green; another 300 houses and condos in varying stages of construction.

But this is only a beginning. If the vision of the Mexican government and an American developer is realized, a decade from now Loreto Bay will include 6,000 homes, from small condos to 3,800-square-foot custom houses, most of them probably to be owned by American retirees or part-time residents. They will be formed into six groups called villages, themselves made up of clusters of five and six homes, each with its own small communal green space.

In the best tradition of the new urbanism, residents will travel about their villages on foot, by bicycle or in electric-powered golf carts, moving over flagstone streets purposely made too narrow for automobiles. They will have three golf courses, beach and tennis clubs and a marina at their disposal, with whale watching and other eco-tourism just a boat ride away. And everything will be built to the highest standards of environmental sustainability. The master plan includes not only solar-heated hot water, but a seawater desalination plant and a 500-acre wind farm.

The goals are so monumentally ambitious that it’s impossible not to ask whether it can even work. But some buyers are not waiting for a consensus. They’re grabbing Loreto Bay homes now.

“I came down for a weekend visit in 2005 after hearing about it,” Brian Durnian, 45, himself a real estate broker in Napa Valley in California, said one day this winter as he sat in the living room of his 2,200-square-foot, neo-Spanish Colonial second home at Loreto Bay. “There was nothing here except for the model homes. But I saw the mountains and the ocean. I like to kayak, golf, hike.” And Los Cabos, the hyper-popular resort area at the tip of Baja that he had been frequenting, had become overwhelming. One look at the house he could have here, Mr. Durnian said, and “I was down for it.” His brother wanted to buy one, too, and he suggested, “Let’s buy a bigger one together.”

So, with his brother, Mr. Durnian bought a large lot; had a three-bedroom, two-bathroom adobe with roof terrace and cupola built on it for roughly $400,000; and hasn’t looked back.

He likes the style of Loreto Bay homes, which range from $1.5 million custom houses to entry-level one-bedroom casitas at around $350,000 — all uniformly airy and bright, with rooftop terraces facing the ocean or the mountains (in some cases, both), finished out with tile flooring, granite countertops in the kitchens and marbleized bathrooms. And he likes the neighbors, who are often free spirits with an easygoing sense of community. “There’s always a party at someone’s place,” he said.

Mr. Durnian has joined about a million Americans who now own property in Mexico, whether for investment or, more commonly, for personal use. There was a time when it was iffy business: public safety and health were questionable; titles to land sometimes unreliable. Now, with Mexico’s leaders placing a premium on attracting foreign buyers, regulation is better and there are reliable agents, title searches and insurance. Financing is available through American lending giants like GE Capital and Citigroup — whose property arm, is, in fact, the majority owner of the Loreto Bay Resort.

Owning property in Mexico still has its quirks — especially in coastal and border areas — though Loreto has somewhat smoothed the requirement that foreigners buy through a bank trust that technically holds title. It has established an overarching trust relationship with a bank, allowing buyers to deal directly with the developer.

Loreto has a long and twisty history. It was identified by the Mexican tourism agency in the 1970s as a target for development — along with Los Cabos, Ixtapa, Cancún and Huatulco. All were to get special attention as tourist venues. In Loreto’s case, the results were incomplete. The government put about $200 million into roads, water, sewers, electricity and a small airport, then promptly seemed to forget about the area as Los Cabos (including Cabo San Lucas) and Cancún began to blossom.

For years after that, Loreto remained almost orphaned, known mostly to dedicated eco-tourists (the waters off its coast are a marine preserve) and to a few travelers who came for its beach and the charming village of Loreto nearby. Then in 2000, a Canadian new urbanist developer, David Butterfield, was invited to take a look at Loreto. He immediately saw the potential: with the infrastructure already in place, the large, sustainable community of as many as 15,000 transient residents that the Mexican government desired could definitely be created.

Mexican tourism officials wanted to do something original at Loreto, according to Karina Carretero, a spokeswoman for Loreto Bay Resort — something different from the high-rises of Cancún and more in keeping with the area’s fragile ecology. As the founder of the Trust for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to building environmentally friendly, sustainable communities, Mr. Butterfield had already displayed the ability to build green, notably at Shoal Point, a residential and retail development on the harbor in Victoria, British Columbia, and at Civano, a development of housing, commercial space, offices and schools in Tucson.

Mr. Butterfield and a partner, the Phoenix developer Jim Grogan, had a master plan drawn up by Duany Plater-Zyberk, the architectural firm that designed Seaside, Fla. After quickly selling a couple of hundred lots and seeing some villas to completion, Mr. Butterfield and Mr. Grogan eventually bowed out, ceding control to an early investor, Citigroup Property Investors, which has the capital needed for such a large project. Although major elements like the wind farm and desalination plant have so far not materialized, Citigroup insists that the environmental commitment remains.