writings       links       about me

Been a while since I rapped at you folks.  I have been busy demolishing my house (more on that in the next update).  In the process, I found something which lead to a lot of research and eventually to this piece.  

I live in Village Park, known to most long-time residents of Encinitas as one of the former ghetto areas of the city.  The other notable ghetto area of Encinitas was the neighborhood down near San Dieguito High School.  That area still is somewhat ghetto - not so much anymore for Village Park.  It's hard to maintain a genuine 'hood when a two-bedroom condo is selling for 310 thousand dollars, and rent on that same condo would run around 1400 dollars a month.  

Back when I first moved into this place in 1981, Village Park really was a ghetto.  I remember being awakened one night to cops yelling right outside my window, a police helicopter hovering overhead, as some felon got cuffed and taken into custody while trying to hide in the little alcove next to the window.  Ahhh, violent felons kept at bay by a few inches of wood and drywall.  Those were the days.

Twenty years before that day, back in the 1960s, the spot that was to become Village Park was the dump for Encinitas.  

The dump was eventually moved sometime in the late 1960s to a location over near Hummingbird Lane (right off El Camino Real), bordering on quite a bit of old Willowspring drive and the community that used to be known as High Country Villas; this development was touted and sold as "the Village Park adults-only development" and was built by the same developer.  The adults-only policy of High Country Villas was rendered moot by California's implementation of age-discrimination laws that outlawed such developments, opening them to all.  However, most of the original owners never sold - it's still largely full of old people.  Not a lot of kids up there.  

At any rate, I don't know what's buried in the landfill over there, but it has been closed for the last thirty-something years, fenced off and never built on - and that speaks volumes in an area where developable land is selling for well over a million dollars an acre.

A company known as Avco Community Developers, Inc., bought the old (Village Park) Encinitas landfill, graded it, and built a development.  Avco was, and is, the largest builder of planned communities in the United States.

How do I know Avco was the builder?

It all started when I began demolishing my bathroom.

Stuck to the bottom of my old sink top was a work order, dated February 23, 1972.  Typewritten - ahhh, high-tech of the day.  The customer listed was "Avco Apartments".  The work was a modification of the original sinktop, cutting it down to fit into a bathroom with dimensions of only 5x10 feet.  

I first thought that Village Park/Avco had perhaps purchased and installed used countertops, for two reasons.  First, if you saw the quality of fixtures originally installed in a Village Park condo (i.e. low-budget, welfare-caliber crap), you might well believe someone had gotten them from an old building, or, perhaps, from the old landfill.  Secondly, the work tag said "refinnish (sic)/rework".  But one detail kept bothering me.  The work order was for "lot 105".  Not only was lot 105 specified on the work order, but as subsequent demolition revealed, it was written on the back of the side and back splashguard of the bathroom sink.

I own lot 105.  These were original fixtures built for my condo from the day it was built.

I had a name to hunt down!  I found out a lot of interesting things.  I still have some unanswered questions as well.

From that point on, Google became my best friend.  It took a while.  And once I got the full name of the company (Avco Community Developers, Inc.) it took even longer.

Avco Community Developers has been sued, and they've done their share of suing, and that's what made the Google search so difficult.  A suit they were involved with before the California Supreme Court (Avco Community Developers, Inc. v. South Coast Regional Commission) set a huge precedent in how property and development rights are dealt with in the state of California, and polluted the Google search results with multiple returns, most of which were various citations of that case.  Thankfully, there was some wheat mixed in with all the chaff.

I'm no lawyer, but the gist of the verdict seems to imply this - as a developer, you are granted no rights from any zoning or development decision that takes place before, during, and after you purchase the property all the way until you are granted a building permit or similar document.  If you buy land zoned for multi-unit development, sit on it for ten years, and the week before you go to get your building permit a duly empowered authority decides that land is to be used for agricultural use - too damn bad.  In the Avco case, Avco was going to build a seaside development.  They owned the land and were permitted to build, but then the California Coastal Commission (which did not exist when Avco Originally bought the land for their project) banned the type of development they were seeking to build.  They sued.  They lost.

They have been involved in other lawsuits.  Absent from Google is the verdict from where Village Park sued them for negligence.  Avco had failed to do soil testing (and, even though this was not part of the verdict, had used grossly substandard materials) resulting in the water pipes that had been laid into the concrete slabs bursting and flooding the homes.  This has happened to every single condo on my street, and so far as I know, all 251 units in the development.  The money won did not cover the costs - as a result, in the mid-1980s, when the pipes burst in this condo, the repair/rebuild costs were borne by the Village Park homeowners association and, to some extent, by homeowner's insurance.

Hey, they're America's largest builder of planned communities.  They may not be America's best builder of planned communities. 

In their defense, the pipe thing was a stupid mistake.  They've built some really nice homes - and some rather large communities.  In Southern California alone, Avco planned and developed Rancho Bernardo, just a little bit to the south of me.  It's now a city in its own right.  They built Laguna Niguel in Orange County, which is also now a city in its own right.  Much like our miniature slice of heaven here in Village Park, Laguna Nigel is one-third open space.  

They built a lot of Southern California residential, commercial and industrial properties.  I'm still trying to determine the scope of their development activities.

Avco was involved with the fatally flawed Soul City project (a created-from-scratch town, to be built in North Carolina, to be administered by African-Americans) in the late 1970s, one of their few failures.  The University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina, my sister's alma mater, has some rather extensive documentation and resources regarding the Soul City project, available online here.

Avco Community Developers is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Textron, Inc.  Textron started as a yarn company in 1923, bought Avco (originally based in Connecticut) in 1985, and today seems to be one of those multinational global tax-dodge umbrella-type companies that does nothing but own other companies; as per their website:

Textron is an $11 billion global multi-industry company with market-leading brands and businesses serving the general aviation, aerospace and defense, industrial and commercial finance markets.

That's pretty vague.  Here's what they own, as per their SEC filing from 1998 (I used the 1998 report, as the definition of what constitutes a "significant subsidiary" has changed) and the state/nation in which the subsidiary is incorporated.  It's not in order, for which I apologize.  In bold is the company that built my condo.

Avco Corporation, Delaware
ARS Two Inc., Delaware
Avco Community Developers, Inc., California
Textron Pacific Limited, Australia
Avco Financial Services, Inc., Delaware
Bell Helicopter Services Inc., Delaware
Bell Helicopter Asia (Pte) Limited, Singapore
Bell Helicopter Textron Inc., Delaware
Cadillac Gage Textron Inc., Michigan
Cessna Aircraft Company, Kansas
Cone Drive Operations Inc., Delaware
Elco Textron Inc., Delaware
Fuel Systems Textron Inc., Delaware
Greenlee Textron Inc., Delaware
HR Textron Inc., Delaware
McCord Corporation, Michigan
Textron Automotive Interiors Inc., Delaware
Davidson Overseas Investment Inc., Delaware
Davidson Marley B.V., Netherlands
Textron Automotive Functional Components Inc.
McCord Winn Division, Massachusetts
Micromatic Operations Inc., Delaware
Micro-Precision Operations Inc., Delaware
The Paul Revere Corporation, Massachusetts
The Paul Revere Life Insurance Company, Massachusetts
The Paul Revere Protective Life Insurance Company, Delaware
The Paul Revere Variable Annuity Insurance Company, Massachusetts
The Paul Revere Equity Sales Company, Massachusetts
The Paul Revere Investment Management Company, Massachusetts
Textron Atlantic Inc., Delaware
Avdel plc, England
Bell Helicopter Supply Center B.V., Netherlands
Marly ORAG S.A., France
ORAG Italia S.R.L., Italy
ORAG Scandinavia A/S, Denmark
ORAG Textron A.G., Switzerland
Textron Atlantic Belgium S.A., Belgium
Textron Atlantic GmbH, Germany
ORAG Deutschland GmbH, Germany
Freidr. Boesner GmbH, Germany
Textron Limited United Kingdom
Textron Automotive Exteriors Inc., Delaware
Textron Financial Corporation, Delaware
Cessna Finance Corporation, Kansas
Textron FSC Inc., Barbados
Textron Properties Inc., Delaware
Textron Canada Limited, Canada
Textron Realty Corporation, Delaware
Textron Realty Operations (Wheatfield) Inc., Delaware
Textron S.A. de C.V., Mexico
Textron Automotive Company de Mexico, S.A. de C.V., Mexico
Turbine Engine Components Textron Inc., Delaware
Turbine Engine Components Textron (Danville and Thomasville Operations) Inc., Delaware
Turbine Engine Components Textron (Cleveland Operations) Inc., Delaware
Turbine Engine Components Textron (Danvers Operations) Inc., Massachusetts
Turbine Engine Components Textron (Newington Operations) Inc., Connecticut
Turbine Engine Components Textron (Santa Fe Springs Operations) Inc., California
Wolverine Metal Specialties, Inc., Michigan
AFS Corporation, Delaware
Avco DC Corporation, Delaware
Avco Enterprises, Inc., California
Avco Financial Services Canada Limited, Ontario
Avco Financial Services International, Inc., Nebraska
Avco Financial Services Ltd., Australian Capital Territory
Avco Financial Services Limited, New Zealand
Avco Group Limited, United Kingdom
Avco National Bank, California
Balboa Insurance Company, California
Balboa Life Insurance Company, California
Family Insurance Corporation, Wisconsin
Meritplan Insurance Company, California
Newport Insurance Company, Arizona

I left out the listing of the subsidiaries of Ransomes PLC, as I'm unsure as to the nature of the corporate relationship.

Textron are most notably the developers of the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft (Bell Helicopter).  

The Avco group of businesses fall under the "Textron Financial Corporation" arm of their business.

Textron has been in some trouble recently, for giving bribes to Saddam Hussein's government under the UN oil-for-food program, as well as bribes to land contracts in United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Egypt and India.  See here.  In another era, we used to call this treason.  Now we call it "enhancing shareholder value".

References:

A good summation of Avco Community Developers, Inc. v. South Coast Regional Commission is here, thanks to Boston College (Section A. The Majority Rule).

Textron's company history is here.

Textron's main website portal is here.

The University of Chapel Hill Soul City Project is here.

Relevant information regarding Rancho Bernardo can easily be found here.  If you don't like Wikipedia, the same information is available here, located under the "History" tab.

Relevant information regarding the City of Laguna Niguel is here.

The most recent SEC list of Textron's subsidiaries is here.  The definition of a "significant subsidiary" has changed, which is why I opted to go with the 1998 report, here.

Reuters story regarding the 3.5 million dollar SEC penalty for bribes and kickbacks in various countries here.  SEC press release here.

Site design and administration by Apocalypse Web Designs, NLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of kRAPcO Industries, NLC
Love it? Like it? Approve? Tell me! 
all content © 2011