No growth, shut the door – our visit to Mendocino County.
Our next stop on our retirement search was to the opposite
coast. We had seen some information in
one of our retirement guide books indicating that Mendocino County was a good
place for retirees, with decent home prices.
The information was wrong, but we had to find that out for ourselves.
We decided to try three locations in Mendocino County. The first was a town called Ukiah, the county
seat, but still a pretty small town. All
of Mendocino County, a very large area, contains fewer than 100,000
people. About 10% or 15% of them live in
or near Ukiah. It was a mill town and an
agricultural and manufacturing town. Most of that is gone. There are vineyards in the valley (Russian
River) and some other agriculture survives, and still some mill work but not
much.
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| Ukiah |
Jody had contacted (through Zillow) a realtor in Ukiah. He called back almost immediately. His name is Clint Hanks, no relation to Tom,
but is really nice, really honest, and very knowledgeable about the area. He volunteered to show us around, and set us
up on an automatic distribution about homes in areas we might be interested in that were somewhere
close to what we were looking for (as if we knew).
We flew to Sacramento on a Tuesday, on a completely full
Boeing 737, and picked up a very warm rental car and headed north on I-5. It
intersects California 20, which heads over towards Ukiah. The ride was pretty interesting, but got
difficult as we reached Clear Lake, a huge natural fresh water lake surrounded
by lots of vacation type places. Slow
going there. Our hotel in Ukiah was a dump. What can I say, we are seniors and
look for bargains. Our first night we
ate at a local restaurant that was a few steps from the hotel. The steps were warm – Ukiah can get really
hot.
The next day (a Wednesday) we were meeting Clint
mid-morning, but spent some time driving around the west side of town looking
at some of the places he was going to take us to. We did not attempt to go in, just looked around
to get our bearings. We’re used to
seeing newer houses – our neighborhood in Richardson was built in the late 70’s
or early 80’s, and most of the communities we’ve looked at have been new
construction. When Clint picked us up,
we learned why that isn’t what we would see in Ukiah, or in all of Mendocino
County.
The problem is that people who live there would prefer that
everything remain more or less the way it is.
Growth is not welcome. An example
would be Lake Mendocino. This lake was
built, by the Army Corps of Engineers, in the 50’s, as a flood control project,
and the Army offered the whole thing to Mendocino County for $.01. They declined, saying they had no plans for
any growth that would require that much water.
The lake water rights were purchased by Sonoma County, and Sonoma uses
that water to this day. This no-growth
philosophy means that when you look at homes in Mendocino County, you will be
looking at a lot of old homes, some of them built before indoor plumbing. more
than a hundred years ago The layouts are
all over the place – we saw one home where the master bedroom and bath were in
a finished attic, and all the rooms on the ground floor were beautiful but
tiny, and the garage had long since been converted to living space. We saw lots of gun safes, lots of propane
tanks, and lots of homes that were on septic systems. We even saw a couple of homes in Ukiah that
did not have air conditioning.
On our first day with Clint, we saw ten houses in
Ukiah. There were a couple that we could
have considered. Prices are insane. Clint says the first hundred thousand of the
price of any house in California is for the weather. Well, Ukiah is hot. Not as hot as where we live now (Dallas-Ft
Worth) but close. (By the way, Clint’s
phone rings with the theme from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. He said it was totally appropriate for real
estate.) Most of the homes we saw were
on the west side of town, and many of them were homes built for mill workers 60
or 70 years ago, or more. Most were well
maintained and had been expanded, but each was very particular and had its own
history. Some of them were in need of TLC.
All were expensive - north of $450,000.
The next day we left our dump of a motel and drove up to
Willitts, another mill town without a mill any more, stopping for a cup of
coffee on the way. Willitts has a population of only 4,000 or so, down from
6,000 a few years ago. No jobs. The drive from Willitts over to our second
destination, the coastal town of Fort Bragg, was only thirty miles or so but
took us ninety minutes. The road is very, very winding, with a lot of climbs
and descents, and huge trees blotting out the sun. California has 37 million people, but I would
guess five trees for every person. The
drive was difficult and exhausting. I guess the locals get used to it. Clint said it is easier after dark, because
the light is consistent and you aren’t dealing with bright sun and near-dark
shade every other second. Makes sense.
When we finally got out of the woods, we headed north along
California highway 1. Fort Bragg is not
exactly scenic. It has a quaint downtown, but a lot of chain motels and fast
food places. We were much too early to
check in to our next hotel, but we at least made sure to find it, and then, totally
by accident, stumbled on the most interesting park in the town. It is
officially part of MacKerricher State Park but it is called Glass Beach. The ‘glass’ is resulting from the old
practice of using the ocean as a city dump.
Old bottles and such are worn down by the sea into interesting
pieces. They no longer dump their trash
in the sea. There is a nice walk along
the shore, and the day we were there the wind was howling and it was cold, but
clear. We had fabulous views of the
Pacific waves crashing on the rocks, and we had no idea that we would not see
much of the sun again, at least along the coast. Fog is prominent on the coast
in the summer, and this was our day of no fog – we could see the fog bank, but
it remained a couple of miles offshore.
We took lots of photos, and found a place to eat lunch in the downtown
area. We found our hotel and it was a
lot nicer than our Ukiah hotel, but we had an amusing little hiccup. The room
was kind of stuffy, so I tried to put on the air conditioning, and when I did I
got heat. The room had no air
conditioning, but it had windows that open, and the outside temperature rarely
reached 60.
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| Glass Beach Park |
Later, we took a ride up the coast to a winery and bought a
couple of bottles. Pacific Star Winery
is worth a visit.
The next day Clint came over to show us around. He also works in Fort Bragg. We saw ten more houses, with even greater
variety in the age and quality. There
are a couple of subdivisions with more recent construction, and we saw some
houses in there. Prices are really
high. Clint noted that Fort Bragg was a
soft market and we probably could get some of these houses to come down
significantly. Apparently, back in the
Sixties, a lot of Summer of Love flower children moved up the coast from San
Francisco looking for cheap places to live, and a lot of them settled in Fort
Bragg. Now as they age, they need to be
closer to medical care. Fort Bragg has a small hospital, but for anything
significant you have to go to Santa Rosa, and for serious emergency situations
they fly you by helicopter to San Francisco.
There’s only three routes out of there going south. One is the winding road through the forest
over to Willits, and then down US 101.
Another is down the coast past Mendocino and across on CA 128 (winding
and narrow) to US 101. The third is down
CA 1 all the way, which would take upwards of six hours. If you want to travel somewhere
international, you might try Sacramento and connect in DFW or LAX, or you might
drive to San Francisco. But you might
need a hotel near the airport the night before you leave, or the night you come
back, or both.
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| Downtown Fort Bragg |
The next day we
headed to our third destination, the town of Mendocino. This was really a mistake. There isn’t much
there at all. What we should have done
is to plan our trip with Santa Rosa as the third destination, not
Mendocino. There was really no point in
our going to Mendocino, but we enjoyed it anyway. It is a quaint, picturesque,
touristy town, with lots of great food and interesting shops. I don’t know if anyone really lives there,
and the official population is around 700.
We looked at a few properties that we identified on Zillow as being
close to what we wanted, but they all turned out to be three stories.
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| Mendocino garden |
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| Mendocino headlands park |
Our next stop
was Sacramento, just to be close to the airport and not to have to drive 200
miles of switchback roads with a deadline.
We elected to drive down to Santa Rosa for a drive-by, since some of our
friends have talked about it a lot. We encountered seriously bad traffic
problems at several points along the way.
We located one or two properties, but really didn’t know what we were
looking for or at so it was a waste. We
split a really good flatbread pizza at BJ’s Brewery. The drive to Sacramento
was a miserable experience, heavy traffic and several crash stop near misses.
We were so sick of driving, we ate at the hotel. It was awful but we didn’t care.
Our trip home
was on another totally full Boeing 737. The
flight was delayed on account of weather in Dallas, causing the inbound
aircraft to be late. Rain in Dallas in
August is unusual, but it’s better than 107, which was the temperature one of
the days we missed by being in Mendocino County. We got home after the evening rush hour was over, so it all worked out.
So, the bottom
line is that we did not find our retirement place in Mendocino County, but it
sure was fun visiting someplace cold in the middle of August.
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