Villa de Paz

Staff Writer, DL Mullan

Community Interest

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Villa de Paz is a place unlike any other. I have lived in Iowa and California. I have traveled across the United States. I have seen New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. I have traveled and explored the crevices of Arizona as well. Nothing compares to the little golf community of Villa de Paz.

Village of Peace... quiet, understated, demur, but not obsolete. Ducks, Canadian geese, quail, doves, pigeons, osprey, hawks, owls, vultures, seagulls and cranes grace the sky, trees, and ponds. It's where turtles cross the streets and children play on their bicycles.

In the mornings, students walk to school with their backpacks on. In the evenings, people return home from work. On the weekends, families barbeque.

Retired couples relax and spend their golden years in style. Young couples raise their children without fear of overcrowded streets, sprayed poisons, or drag racing. It's a place where everyone fits just right in a mold all its own.

If you are in need of help, all you have to do is ask. One of your neighbors are bound to lend a hand. Sometimes two do.

Villa de Paz cannot be replicated because it has taken decades to form with care, ethics, values, and strength. The golf course is the center that keeps the shape, feel, and culture of this small community alive and well. Without the golf course, the community would not be the same and the allure that brings people here would not survive as it once was.

Sometimes change is good, but when that change comes at the cost of your community, your neighbors, and your values, then change is best left to other places. Here in Villa de Paz, it's like coming home even if it's your first visit. There's something about this golf course community that attracts people from differing walks of life. 

Without the golf course, Villa de Paz would lose what makes it special. Unique. We have peace, quiet, wildlife, and a little extra space away from the crowded lights of the other meccas that allow us to stargaze every night. 

Why would anyone want to come in and destroy such beauty? 

Money? Greed? For overflowing accounts someone already has? Or is envious to obtain? Seems trifle and silly to me. Sometimes it takes a community to stand together and just say: "NO!"

When you have perfection, why would you want anything else?

Residents Picket Golf Course for Redress

Staff Writer, DL Mullan

Community Interest

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On November 12, 2013, residents of the golf community, Villa de Paz, picketed the neighborhood's golf course's club house. Not for better pay or cheaper tee prices, but to keep the golf course apart of their community as a golf course. 

Confused yet?

A Canadian developer is hell bent on turning the residents beloved golf course community into a cash cow of HOA fees with new housing and possible condominiums by destroying their golf course in order to do it.

Does that explain the uproar?

The residents, who are eager to keep their community as it is, decided that picketing was a good option to bring attention to their cause. Attention they got. The efforts of the neighborhood to combat the false promises and deceptive practices of the developer's public relations team has become a force to be reckoned with. 

In a short time, the residents have banded together to win the Maryvale Village Planning Committee's vote against the development 12 to 1. With 150 speaking on behalf of keeping their golf course intact.

Now the residents have to face the Phoenix City Planning Hearing Office on November 20th, 2013 at 10am. Calvin Goode Building , 251 West Washington Street, 85003. 10th Floor, East Conference Room. 

As the developer continues to push residents and place his needs over the community's interests, Villa de Paz residents keep building a stronger case to maintain their living standards. The push back has become fever pitched. 

The golf course can be sold as a golf course, but development money has outweighed the sanctity of the community's culture and way of life. Sanctity of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness reigns supreme. Villa de Paz residents only want what every American wants: to live in peace. 

Hopefully the City of Phoenix Planning Office and Planning Commission will realize that burdening a small community with overflow traffic, extra students at the local elementary school, more crime, destruction of a green zone and its ecosystem full of wild life, and increasing light pollution, not to mention the clamoring before dawn and health concerns associated with construction in a desert environment so close to private homes, is not a viable outcome, then will the developer understand that money is really no object because some communities cannot be bought.

There is no amount of money in the world that Villa de Paz residents would sell out their community, neighbors, or culture for.

Don't you wish every community was like this one?