How One Developer's Vision is Redefining Coastal Living on California's Central Coast
There is a particular kind of courage required to look at one of America’s largest abandoned military bases, with thousands of acres of decommissioned barracks, cracked tarmac, and coastal scrubland, and envision it as a beachcommunity waiting to be born.
Don Hofer has that kind of courage. As Vice President of Community Development for Shea Homes’ Northern California Division, he has spent decades navigating the complex business of building communities that people actually want to live in. But nothing in his portfolio, not the 10,000-plus homes he has overseen since 1998, not the mixed-use master-planned communities that have become something of a Northern California signature for Shea, has been quite as ambitious as The Dunes on Monterey Bay.
Built on the grounds of the former Fort Ord, a U.S. Army base that once housed hundreds of thousands of soldiers before its closure in 1994, The Dunes is a first-of-its-kind coastal community in Marina, California. It is, in the truest sense of the phrase, a beach town built from the ground up. And the story of how it came to be, and what it says about where residential development is heading, is one worth telling.
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