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What Happened in Late June?

On Tuesday, June 27, the Antioch City Council on a 4-1 vote approved the first phase of “The Ranch” project.

“The Ranch” is a 1,177-unit residential subdivision in south Antioch’s Sand Creek area that was approved in 2020. The Zeka Group wanted to get special treatment by using this approval to make it easier for them to build, but we helped stop them.

Why Is Zeka Important?

The Sand Creek area is known as “the prettiest three miles” in Antioch.

The part west of Deer Valley Road, looking directly west from Kaiser Hospital all the way to Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve, has been a big target for our advocacy efforts in Antioch.

The most important priority in the Sand Creek area is the westernmost square mile, known as Zeka.

It’s surrounded on three sides by land that’s already protected by East Bay Regional Park District, so it’s an obvious good decision to add it to these protected lands. It also has the most beautiful scenery and most important wildlife habitat in Antioch. 

It’s also full of potentially hazardous places like old coal tunnels and mine shafts, so it is more difficult to build there compared to other places.

The Zeka Group wants to build several hundred houses in this rugged land, right next to Empire Mine Road on its west side.

Not only would this destroy wildlife and negatively impact our regional parks, it would mean that Antioch residents would lose the great recreational trail that Empire Mine Road has become.

What Does Approval of “The Ranch” Have to Do with Zeka?

“The Ranch” will be built just east of Zeka, on the east side of Empire Mine Road.

Because Zeka is located right on the other side of the road, Zeka wanted “The Ranch” to have their roads and utility infrastructure link all the way to Zeka’s property, so it would be easier for them to eventually build. 

That would have been special treatment. The council was acting on a totally different project proposed by a different developer. There is no obligation for one developer to make it easier for another to build, especially in a place like Zeka.

We won a buffer of open space along the east side of Empire Mine Road back in 2020.

That’s what was agreed on and approved for “The Ranch” back then, and that’s what the Antioch City Council reaffirmed last month.  

How We Improved “The Ranch” Development

When “The Ranch” was first introduced in 2015, Save Mount Diablo mobilized residents and made it clear that the project was too big with a lot of negative impacts.

The strong desire of Antioch residents to protect open space, limit traffic, help wildlife, and curb Antioch’s expanding urban footprint allowed us to put so much pressure on decision makers and the company, that they greatly improved the project.

Things culminated in our 2020 landslide Yes on T campaign, in which 79 percent of Antioch residents made it clear that they wanted the power to decide what gets built in this area and how.

Though most of Measure T was overturned by the courts because of conflicts with new state-level housing laws (that weren’t in effect when we were drafting the measure and collecting signatures to put it on the ballot), we still achieved big wins.

One was making Antioch’s Urban Limit Line permanent and changeable only by a public vote.

The other was that “The Ranch” changed into a much smaller project that

• had fewer houses,
• moved development off the hills,
• buffered the important wildlife corridor of Sand Creek,
• added trails for the public to enjoy the additional open space we got into the project, and
• buffered Empire Mine Road from development.

That smaller project concept was approved in 2020, and the first phase of that project with specific-detailed maps and architectural designs was approved on June 27.

These big improvements to this big project are worth celebrating, but there’s still lots of work to do in this area.

How You Can Help

Please ask the Antioch City Council to transfer housing development units not already approved (such as Zeka’s, among others) outside of the Sand Creek area.

Ask the council for a density transfer into other areas of Antioch much more suitable for development, where housing could be more affordable, create less traffic, be close to mass transit, and improve the parts of the city that are already built.