Property decisions leave Bob Hope's imprint on California

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Jul 24, 1998 by Alex Roth Los Angeles Daily News

LOS ANGELES -- In the years after Bob Hope and Bing Crosby filmed their classic "Road" pictures, the inseparable friends hiked up to China Flat, a rugged bluff overlooking the suburban San Fernando Valley, Calabasas and west to Malibu.

"This is the Beverly Hills of tomorrow," Crosby boldly predicted to his golfing buddy that day.

Trusting Crosby's instincts and his own, Hope bought some of that land. And as his career grew, he continued to buy and buy and buy. Land near the ocean. Land in the Valley. Land that was empty and flat. Mountainous land with goats and California walnut trees. The way some people collect stamps or rare coins, Bob Hope collected property.

"He's always been very careful in spotting property," his daughter, Linda Hope, said in an interview. "He's always had a real good nose for it."

Long a place where Hollywood's famous have chosen to live, the Valley and outlying areas also are where many entertainment figures have chosen to invest, and among them Hope is one of the first, best- known -- and one of the biggest.

In the days when the Valley was farmland and chaparral, Hope gobbled up huge swaths, always with an eye for a profit. The 95-year- old comedian has since sold much of his holdings, except the Toluca Lake estate he has owned since 1939. Yet even today, Hope's fingerprints remain all over the Valley because of astute decisions he made decades ago.

A comprehensive list of what Hope has bought and sold over the past six decades is impossible to reconstruct, but his real estate dealings have included Jordan Ranch, a 3,050-home development being built in neighboring Ventura County; part of Universal Studios, a deal that made him a 600 percent profit; a sludge farm in nearby Las Virgenes; and a nature preserve in Thousand Oaks, in Ventura County.

For a short period, an entire community bore his name. There still is a street in Burbank named after him. And down the road he owns a small plot on which his wife has talked about building a new museum for the veteran entertainer and other famous comedians. With an assessed value of $1.8 million, it might be the most valuable Christmas tree lot in America.

In suburban Santa Clarita, Hope once owned property that's now the site of the Friendly Valley Recreational Association, a 1,247-home senior residential community.

His legacy also includes hundreds of acres of some of the most beautiful open space. The irony is that Hope's priority was business, not the environment. When Hope looked at empty land, he tended to see golf courses and expensive homes. But by the time he decided to liquidate much of his real estate portfolio, interest groups wouldn't permit development without significant concessions -- usually in the form of huge swaths of land.

"Right now the Las Virgenes Valley has a certain beauty and integrity," said Dave Brown, a former chairman of the Calabasas Planning Commission. "That probably wasn't Bob Hope's intention, but that was the effect."