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Posted on 02/01/2026 6:00:03 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
The Peninsula Open Space Trust has purchased 2,284 acres of Sargent Ranch near the southern border of Santa Clara County along Highway 101, marking the largest land deal in the 49-year-old nonprofit’s history. The $23 million acquisition is the latest of three properties the trust has secured in its overarching goal to permanently conserve the entire 6,500-acre ranch that was once slated for commercial development as a quarry. It’s also one of the largest pieces of undeveloped private property in the South Bay.
“POST and our partners are on our way to achieving a long-sought milestone,” president Gordon Clark wrote in a Thursday statement on the trust’s website, revealing the nonprofit has acquired 6,114 acres of the sweeping property to date. “The remaining 480 acres are under contract and we expect to conserve them in late 2026.”
The Mercury News, one of the first outlets to report on the acquisition, noted the total amount of land is six times the size of Golden Gate Park.
With its rolling hills and native grasslands dotted by oak trees and steep ravines, Sargent Ranch “hosts a scenic natural beauty that is distinctly Californian,” the trust wrote. Not only does it provide corridors for species ranging from mountain lions and badgers to bald eagles and hawks, allowing them to move more easily between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range through the Upper Pajaro Valley, but it also protects local watersheds. The streams within the property are also home to California red-legged frogs, California tiger salamanders, northwest pond turtles and steelhead trout.
Peninsula Open Space Trust
In the early 1800s, the land was claimed by Mission San Juan Bautista; by 1835, it was named Rancho Juristac under a Mexican land grant. After the Gold Rush, James P. Sargent purchased the property...
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
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A great place to have homeless camps.
Nah, it’s too far out of San Jose.
Good spot for Hussein’s flak tower and massage parlor.
and this is why housing is so expensive. They wont let people build more and instead lock more land away from developement
Santa Clara county is the richest in the nation.
Median home prices are $1.9 million.
And you won’t see solar or windmills there either.
There are no homeless camps in Santa Clara county.
This nature trust purchased the land.
Nobody is preventing a developer from buying it and building.
Now that fertility is under 2.1 and illegal immigration is currently halted, we are not going to need more houses.
But what we do have are thousands of RV's (many in disrepair) on city streets in which tech workers live.
I can’t speak for CA but in these parts (CT) if a nature trust buys land it is stone dead for future development.
No developer would be allowed to buy it in this state.
With its rolling hills and native grasslands dotted by oak trees and steep ravines, Sargent Ranch “hosts a scenic natural beauty that is distinctly Californian,” the trust wrote. Not only does it provide corridors for species ranging from mountain lions and badgers to bald eagles and hawks, allowing them to move more easily between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range through the Upper Pajaro Valley, but it also protects local watersheds. The streams within the property are also home to California red-legged frogs, California tiger salamanders, northwest pond turtles and steelhead trout.
Good for them some things aren’t for sale.
The trust likely is not paying market rates on property taxes. They can hold it and never sell.
The great real estate racket continues.
Environmentally, the ranch is preferable to unused “open space.”
How long before the biomass buildup and the catastrophic wildfire?
As a full time developer for 50 years, i KNOW how Liberals “buy” land. Basically they “steal” it via regulation. Austin liberals stole a lot of land via “impervious” cover laws. Tracts the Libs really wanted to steal got slapped high impervious cover requirements which meant/means an owner could only build ANYTHING on 20% of the ground. Another trick was go out and find a bug that nobody ever heard of. I could go on and on. By the time the Liberals got through regulating, many tracts are worthless and then they buy them from the owner for pennies.
Pinging Nick.
It depends upon the distribution of proximate seed. My estimates for that successional process in our area (about 15-20 miles from there) are here. Our place can go from bare sand to closed canopy forest in 30 years.
I did have MidPen's cheese biologist (Cindy Roessler, now retired) visit the Wildergarten, twice. When she saw what I had done to bring back an aboriginal patch of blue dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum), she fell to her knees in disbelief. Later in the walk, she asked me, "What do you do to keep Coyote Bush (Baccharis pilularis)under control?" She'd seen a few shrubs here and there, but there weren't many and they surely weren't taking over. I responded without hesitation, "I cull the females." Looking at her shoes she repeated, "...cull the females," knowing that the powers that be at MidPen would never allow such a sexist policy. (snort!) That's how backward that agency really is.
But they do keep the developers and the banks happy building Sustained Development.
Thanks.
Have you ever been here?
I know of at least two in Los Gatos. There is a large one between the Episcopalian church and 17.
There are several near Pollard Road, between Campbell, especially the overpasses. Parents at Rolling Hills Middle School were always complaining.
Now Evan Low is a state assemblyman, but when he was the mayor of Campbell, and still billed himself as a progressive, he ordered the Campbell police to "expel" all the homeless people in Campbell into Los Gatos, and LG didn't make an issue of it.
Police have told me that almost every underpass in the county has to be constantly cleaned out because of all the crap from homeless people.
There are huge camps around downtown. There is a huge homeless camp, with thousands of people near the Guadalupe River. They have their own society down there. Occasionally they will try to clear one out, but it doesn't last long.
And that doesn't include all the people living in their cars. You can go to parking lots full of people living in their cars - sometimes families.
Just a year ag it came out Santa Clara County has the most homeless in the Bay Area: A report indicates that Santa Clara County has the largest homeless population in the Bay Area
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