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Builders to buy parkway property
By JAMES THORNER, Times Staff Writer Two development companies have claimed opposite sides of the Suncoast Parkway north of State Road 52, where they plan to launch competing projects with homes numbering in the hundreds. Both Westfield Homes and Shady Hills L.L.C. intend to buy chunks of the so-called Mablebridge property, 723 acres between Shady Hills and Hays roads split by parkway construction in the 1990s. Developer David Maltby of Shady Hills L.L.C. and his business partner Frank Ripa are days from applying to rezone 165 acres on the eastern part of Mablebridge. His Spanish Oaks development calls for 295 single-family homes, some townhomes, most priced about average for new homes in Pasco County. Maltby is scheduled to buy the land Sept. 17 from Swiss businessman Renato Crameri, head of Mablebridge Corp. Groundbreaking is slated for 2003. "This is not high end. We'll have mixed prices from about $100,000 to $200,000," Maltby said Tuesday. On the west side of the toll road, Westfield Homes, during a July meeting with Pasco planners, discussed developing 311 lots for "first-time home buyers" on 166 acres. Westfield's Barry Karpay couldn't be reached for comment Tuesday. But the company builds homes in two central Pasco developments: Wilderness Lake Preserve east of U.S. 41 in Land O'Lakes and Seven Oaks west of Bruce B. Downs Boulevard in Wesley Chapel. Land at the Suncoast Parkway-SR 52 intersection is well situated. Development is pushing east along SR 52 from the Hudson-New Port Richey area and north along the parkway from Hillsborough County and southern Pasco. Maltby said less expensive land at SR 52 means he can offer his homes at a lower price than developers farther south. "I can be 20 percent lower than SR 54," he said. The Mablebridge land has a long history. It was once part of the 53,000-acre Pottberg holdings that stretched from Pasco and Hernando to Lake and Levy counties. Otto Pottberg, who died in 1976, began buying the land, much of it for $1 an acre, in the 1930s. He hoped he would find oil; but even when his oildreams dried up, he accumulated acreage for its future development value. Pottberg's nephew, Alric, sold the land in the 1980s to Mablebridge Corp.'s Swiss owners, who pitched a 2,090-home development in 1985. That plan fizzled and owners rezoned the property in 1990 to hold a golf-course community of 1,210 single-family homes and apartments. Then came the Suncoast Parkway, construction of which consumed 74 acres of the Mablebridge site, severing the land in two. In April, James and Dorothy Mitchell bought 168 acres of the Mablebridge land west of the parkway abutting SR 52. The couple apparently have no immediate plans to develop the land.
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From today's Pasco Times Editorial Letters Letters |
