Pebble Beach is an expensive place to live. The gated-community also has resorts and golf courses. Many of the 1700 people who work for the Pebble Beach Company commute. But now, some of them won’t have to.
The Pebble Beach Company marked the opening of Morse Place Townhomes with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Monday. The affordable housing complex is located past Pebble Beach’s Morse Gate, near the edge of Pacific Grove. It has 24 townhomes, some two-bedrooms, others three. They’re all designed for Pebble Beach Company employees and their families.
Kelsey Shoup just moved in. She works at two Pebble Beach golf courses and is also a student at California State University Monterey Bay.
“What a great opportunity to actually be able to move in and enjoy this area that I work in, but now I can call home,” says Shoup.
Shoup says her new two-bedroom townhome will cost $960 a month in rent. She says that’s roughly half as much as her previous place in Monterey.
Morse Place has been in the works for about seven years. Pebble Beach Company CEO Bill Perocchi says in 2012, the State of California required Pebble Beach Company to have an affordable housing project to balance their market rate housing. While the company could have paid Monterey County to build it, they decided to build it themselves.
Perocchi says it wasn’t easy to complete the project.
“I mean developing, even when it's affordable housing, in Monterey County is not easy. And so you have to go through all the required approvals through the California Coastal Commission,” Perocchi says.
Neighbors also had concerns, like the removal of hundreds of trees on the 13.2-acre site.
“Over the years we've preserved over 650 acres and as part of this project, we preserved 10 acres and we only used 3 acres to build on. So we also saved a lot of trees,” says Perocchi.
Morse Place Townhomes cost about $9 million to build.