Filmmaker George Lucas is pushing forward with plans to build low-income housing at Marin County's picturesque Grady Ranch, a vow of his that was widely dismissed as an insincere attempt by the billionaire to thumb his nose at complaining neighbors.

The Marin Community Foundation announced Tuesday that it is working with Lucasfilm to "explore options" for building affordable housing in the location where the movie mogul wanted to build a film studio until residents in an adjacent subdivision protested.

"We don't know yet what might be able to be developed there, but the notion of being able to explore his property and see if some beautifully designed family or senior housing can be developed there is too wonderful to pass up," said Thomas Peters, president and CEO of the foundation. "One of the incredible offers that Mr. Lucas made is that he would make available the extensive technical studies that have been done on that land, including water, topography, creek access and other engineering data that would give us a head start and help us determine whether senior or affordable housing can be built there."

Lucas, whose "Star Wars" films ushered in the digital arts age, withdrew his plans last month to build a large mission-style movie-making studio on Grady Ranch, blaming the Lucas Valley Estates Homeowners Association for being Nimbys and torpedoing it.

Several Lucas Valley Estates homeowners had, in fact, said that they considered the historic Lucas-owned farmland their back yards. They claimed the proposed 263,701-square-foot digital technology production complex was too large, would displace too much dirt, would change the course of a creek going through the area, create too much traffic and hadn't been studied enough.

In the letter withdrawing the plan, Lucas said he no longer believed he could maintain a constructive relationship with the neighbors and castigated Marin for being "a bedroom community" that is better suited for subdivisions instead of business. The letter said he would build the studio in another more welcoming community and "find a developer (for Grady Ranch) who will be interested in low-income housing since it is scarce in Marin."

Neighbors and local conservationists have insisted low-income housing could never be built in such a remote, rural, environmentally sensitive location, but Peters believes a good project can work. Housing prices in Marin are among the highest in the Bay Area.