Corinne S Kennedy

Palm Springs Desert Sun

Along the 14th fairway of Palm Springs' Tahquitz Creek Golf Course stands a long row of tamarisk trees, a 50-foot-tall wall of dense foliage seen nowhere else on the course. This species of tree, which guzzles water and leaves large deposits of salt, is so invasive that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has categorized it as a pest.

But residents living for decades on the other side of this thicket, in the Lawrence Crossley neighborhood, see the tamarisks as something far worse than a horticultural nuisance. They see the trees as an enduring symbol of racism and inequality – and they want them removed by the city of Palm Springs, which owns the golf course.

The tamarisks were originally planted in the early 1960s, as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum around the country, to block off the historically black neighborhood from the affluent white patrons of the golf course on the other side.

While properties around the city have accrued value, adding to the wealth of their owners and their families, the residents in the shadow of these trees – which obstruct their view of the San Jacinto Mountain Range and the golf course – say they have not seen the same increase in property values. Data shows they could be right.

California real estate has been particularly lucrative in recent years. On average, state homeowners have gained $26,000 in equity from 2016 to 2017.

UPDATE:Palm Springs will remove the trees blocking historically black area from golf course

In the Coachella Valley, home prices have risen for the past 16 months, with the median sale price for a Palm Springs home at $389,750 in August. The average assessed price of a home in the Lawrence Crossley neighborhood,now more racially and ethnically diverse than when it was incorporated, was $162,490.

Those figures aren’t apples to apples. The assessed value of a home is often lower than the sales price. And some of the homes in the Crossley tract have had the same owners for decades, meaning they’re locked into lower property tax rates and have not been recently assessed. Some of the homes in the neighborhood also have fallen into disrepair.

But the figures provide a starting point for understanding the discrepancies between the Lawrence Crossley neighborhood and other Palm Springs neighborhoods. They also underscore the residents' frustration.

Trae Daniel, a real estate agent who moved into the neighborhood 14 years ago, said homes in the Crossley tract sell for about $140,000 less than comparable properties in other areas of town.

Daniel has been organizing his neighbors to present a more united front to the city. He and other Lawrence Crossley residents have four demands: Remove the trees; build a 6-foot privacy wall for any homeowner who wants one; install any necessary netting to prevent golf balls from going into backyards; and plant new trees similar to those seen along other parts of the course.

Like any other golf course, the Tahquitz Creek course was landscaped after it was built, and trees were planted along the greens for aesthetic value and to keep errant golf balls from damaging nearby residences. Most of the trees were palms, acacias or trees commonly seen in the desert, which tend to have thin, narrow trunks, wide, leafy canopies and are well suited to the desert climate, unlike the tamarisks.

While Daniel has been adamant that the trees be removed, he acknowledges the trees have also provided benefits. Daniel said he and others were able to buy homes they might not be able to afford if they were in another part of the city.

He also added that he, as a white resident, would see a great increase in his property value if the trees were removed. But he said the bid to remove the trees was really about economic justice for the African American families who had lived in the neighborhood for decades.

His neighbors said they appreciate his taking the lead. One even called him the neighborhood guardian angel.

“It’s really about the barriers. It’s about the segregation and discrimination that has prevented black people in Palm Springs from accumulating wealth,” Daniel said.

He made clear that he wasn’t accusing any city staff or officials of racism, but that he believed racially-motivated actions taken decades ago led to the current situation.

“Trump wants to build a wall, in Palm Springs they planted a wall,” Daniel said.

While other cities may not have planted walls of trees, the process of systematically denying African Americans access to credit and the ability to gain equity in their homes or property–either through codified government policy or off-the-books practice–was widespread throughout the United States for decades. The result was economic disenfranchisement and the entrenchment of segregated housing, long after racist housing policies were made illegal.

Palm Springs City Manager David Ready said removing the trees was an option, but the city needed to have more conversations with residents before deciding on a course of action. Removing them would be a “major policy change,” and would require city council approval. He said estimates the city had received for tree removal ran about $169,000.

Ready said City Council member Ginny Foat had asked for a discussion about the trees to be placed on a future city council agenda.

A Florida Atlantic University study released earlier this year showed, on average, having property adjacent to a golf course increases property value between eight and 12 percent.

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A landmark 2013 study from the Institute for Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University concluded disparities in homeownership and rates of return on homeownership were one of the largest contributors to the nation’s racial wealth gap.

According to the study authors, if rates of return on home ownership were equalized, meaning black Americans “saw the same financial gains as whites as a result of being homeowners,” the wealth gap would shrink 16 percent.

The story of the Crossley tract cannot be divorced from the wider history of Palm Springs and its dealings–or failings–with its own African American community.

Many of the neighborhood’s original inhabitants moved there when they were forced out of Section 14, which was the scene of hundreds of evictions in the 1950s and 1960s which left African American and Latino residents with no home and no place to go. Up to that point, discriminatory housing practices kept many of those residents from living in other areas of Palm Springs.

As the city expanded and the land increased in value, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and the city agreed to clear the land for development, leading to a decade of demolitions and destruction.

The area now includes some of the most valuable real estate in the city, a lucrative one mile stretch of the Agua Caliente reservation in downtown Palm Springs which hosts a casino, hotels and the convention center.

Read more: 'It was beautiful for the white people:' 1960s still cast a shadow of distrust over Palm Springs

One of those people forcibly evicted was Ivory Murrell.

“When I left the reservation in 1962, they were three doors away from tearing my house down,” he said. “And I had nine kids.”

Residents like Murrel are why the neighborhood was developed. In 1956, Lawrence Crossley, Palm Springs’ first African American resident, bought twenty-acres just outside city limits and created a subdivision for people who worked in Palm Springs resorts and spas or as domestic servants for wealthy families but were barred from living in the city by archaic racial restrictions.

It was 1958 and Palm Springs was booming. Celebrities owned some of the most lucrative properties around town and could be seen wining, dining and relaxing at the city's spas and resorts. As Palm Springs property became more valuable, more golf courses went in and pricey homes and condo developments went up.

One of those residential golf communities was the Palm Springs Golf Club, now known as the Tahquitz Creek Golf Resort. Westview Development Company spearheaded the project, but when it ran into financial difficulties in 1959, the company sold the golf course to the city to be developed into a public course.

Frank Bogert was the mayor of Palm Springs in February 1959, when the city council authorized the purchase of the golf course. He was also executive vice president of Westview Development Corporation, according to a 2015 citywide historic survey, commissioned by the city council.

The city assumed control of the course, and all its foliage, in July 1959 and housing and condo developments went up around it. According to the same city study, the homes and condos built up around the golf course used it as a selling point, telling potential residents the homes offered “golf course living...with a golf course as your backyard.”

Charles Metcalf grew up in the neighborhood. His parents moved there after they were forced out of Section 14. He said the tract was “one big family community” with lots of kids. It was suburbia at its finest. Neighbors looked out for one another and left their doors unlocked.

But he said it always felt isolated.

“We knew that we were in the city of Palm Springs, but not a part of or connected to the city of Palm Springs,” Metcalf said. “Palm Springs was just a city that we lived in.”

He now lives in Minnesota, but still thinks of Palm Springs as home. He manages the three properties his parents own in the neighborhood and comes back to visit multiple times a year.

Previously: How the Coachella Valley became a golfer's paradise

Metcalf said his parents had worked hard and invested their money in property in the city, and they should be able to reap the benefit of making and managing those investments over the years. He said he feels his parents have been denied that, due to the trees.

“When you’re coming down 34th and you pass those tamarisk trees, it’s like you’re in another world,” he said. “And it shouldn’t be so. And if you look at it, everything else around is open to that golf course. And I’m pretty sure we’re paying taxes for that golf course.”

Even before the trees were planted, the golf course attracted resident scrutiny. Just five days after the council indicated its intent to acquire the course for public use, part-time Palm Springs resident Ben Shearer said the city was buying a “white elephant” and threatened to contact the district attorney’s office and request a grand jury investigation.

Bogert defended the council’s actions.

“Anyone can investigate to their heart’s content–we have done nothing wrong,” he said at the time.

The council made a lease-purchase agreement on the course, paying $62,500 a year for the lease. Maintenance costs were estimated by the city to be between $75,000 and $100,000 annually.

Shearer said he doubted the city could run the golf course for a third of what it cost to operate a public course at the time and that it could attract 150 golfers a day, the city’s target number to break even on the operational costs.

Almost 60 years later, the city is facing some of the same questions. Though the city has raised course fees from $3.50 to between $10 and $89, depending on the time of day and the time of year, those fees don't raise enough revenue to cover all the expenses associated with the property. The city spends between $750,000 and $1 million annually to keep the course open.

Metcalf said he believed residents who had lived in the neighborhood for years, who had raised families and paid taxes to keep the golf course open, should be able to enjoy the benefits of living on a golf course.

“It’s like the city of Palm Springs did everything they could do to not acknowledge this community,” Metcalf said.

He paraphrased Ronald Reagan’s famous request to Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to take down the Berlin Wall.

“Palm Springs leaders, people who are in a position to make this decision, tear out these trees,” he said.

Former mayor William Kleindienst, who was on the city council from 1994-2003, said he did not remember any discussion of the trees or any complaints from residents during his time behind the dais. Ron Oden, the city’s first African American mayor who assumed office after Kleindienst, did not respond to questions about whether the issue was raised during his time on council.

In his 17 years as city manager, Ready said he never heard from Lawrence Crossley neighborhood residents about the issue until a few months ago. Since then, he’s received requests to remove the trees and requests to keep them and have the city maintain them better.

At a minimum, Ready said, the city will improve its maintenance of the trees. Residents said that isn't enough.

“I truly believe they were planted to segregate the black neighborhood from the ritzy community over there and that shouldn’t stand anymore,” resident Cathie Fox said.

Ready said he couldn’t speak to whether or not the trees were planted with racial motivation, but that “if people feel that way, that feeling is real.” He said he wanted Lawrence Crossley residents to know that the city is listening to them.

Cathie Fox said she feels like the city acts as if the neighborhood isn’t even there. When she meets new people, they often tell her they don’t know where the neighborhood is.

She and her husband Charlie moved into the neighborhood in 2014 to be closer to Cathie’s son–who lives just up the street in the same neighborhood–and to live somewhere warmer.

Related: Lawrence Crossley Road's fight continues'

The couple said they love Palm Springs and their home. Cathie’s son’s friends have been so kind and helpful to them she’s taken to calling them her “desert sons.” But then there’s the trees.

“We want them gone,” Charlie Fox said. “They’re a mess and they make a mess.”

At an informal neighborhood meeting in July, about 30 Lawrence Crossley residents discussed the tree issue and how best to move forward. Asked what the trees meant to them, many residents said “segregation” or “discrimination.”

Christopher Williams, who grew up in the neighborhood and now owns a home just up the street from his mom, said to him, the trees mean separation.

In his backyard on a sweltering summer afternoon, Williams raked up piles of needles and branches that had fallen off the trees and into his yard. Branches as long as six feet have fallen onto his property before, damaging his fence and his tool shed. He said he has mostly given up trying to clean the mess.

“I don’t want to live like this,” he said, putting down the rake and gesturing around his yard.

Williams doesn’t use his backyard much anymore, between the debris covering about a third of his lawn and not being able to see anything but the trees, he said he doesn’t enjoy it.

“I’m a homeowner. I’ve done what I need to do to own a home here,” he said. “Why do I not get the benefits of the view?”

Previously: 2016 in desert real estate: Price records broken, golf courses cancelled

Williams has fond memories of growing up in the neighborhood and playing on the golf course with other kids, including from the other developments around the course. Then one day in the 1970s, a chain link fence went up between the trees and the backyards of Crossley tract residents, preventing him and others from going through the trees to get to the green.

He said he could still hear other kids playing on the golf course, but couldn’t see them and didn’t get to go play as much after that. As he spoke, the sound of children playing and laughing on the other side of the trees and fence could be heard in his yard.

“I guess not much has changed,” he said.

Then he picked up his rake and continued his cleaning.

Corinne Kennedy covers the west valley for The Desert Sun. She can be reached at Corinne.Kennedy@DesertSun.com and on Twitter @CorinneSKennedy.

Tamarisk trees by the numbers:

Height: up to 50 feet

Width: 25 to 50 feet

Growth rate: 36 inches per year

Water consumption: 200 gallons a day

Life span: 50 to 150 years

Removal costs: $169,00