Vision

Our vision for Yucaipa matches pretty much the vision from the current General Plan for Yucaipa, which was completed in 2016. We invite you to read the downloadable document of the General Plan from the City of Yucaipa’s website, as it is very informative, well written and illustrated, thoughtful, and based on input from various local government entities, businesses, elected committees, professionals, but also citizens like you.

What is a General Plan? - Here is the definition from the city’s website: “A General Plan is a key planning document that shapes the future of the community by providing the direction for growth and changes that will occur, and includes goals, policies and implementation actions that address important community needs ranging from land use and mobility, housing, to public safety”. A new General Plan is created every 20 years (for Yucaipa). Because it is so important and complex it took about four years to create the current General Plan. It is possible to change a General Plan, but this is an exception, and should only be done for extraordinary occasions. - A developer who wants to create smaller lots to boost profits s certainly not one of these reasons.

We believe that most of the citizens of Yucaipa share the values that we stand for but are usually silent. But like the old saying “Freedom is not Free” sometimes it is important to speak up and to show color. We think now is such a time.

Goals

As we said above, we love the Yucaipa and so do many others who started to call this city their home. This is why we want to preserve the many perks we get living here: Having nature at our doorsteps, enjoy the many parks and open spaces that we can use for recreation and de-stressing, be it by hiking, running, biking, or horseback riding. We want to preserve that up to this point the city has refrained more often than not from letting developers transform open spaces into run of the mill housing tracks. Without naming any particular city in the Inland Empire -we are sure you know a few- it is hard to miss those that have succumbed the siren call of developers who have converted entire neighborhoods into shopping malls, industrial tracks, and dense housing tracks with no character.

We are of course aware that we need to build more houses and apartments, commercial properties as the population increases and people need work, as well as the mandated build-up size from the state. However, this can be done in a smart way (smart development) or not (urban sprawl or uncontrolled, cancerous growth). This is where the General Plan comes in, it’s vision, anticipation of growth, incentives, and guidelines all for the benefit of citizen and not just for that of a few individuals or corporation. If you want to compare a city with a steam engine, then the general plan is like the governor, which opens the valves when the machine does not run well enough and closes them before it overheats.

In summary, our goal is to preserve the lifestyle that we all enjoy and preserve the natural beauty of the place we all call our home.