Home Place Ranch: The Empty-Nest Promise

Home Place Ranch was pitched to Monument as an age-targeted community for buyers 55 and older — quieter, lower-traffic, low-maintenance. That pitch helped win a contested approval. It was never written into the law, and it isn’t what got built.

First in a three-part examination of Home Place Ranch. Part 1: the promise versus what was built. Part 2: who controls the community. Part 3: drainage, stormwater and fire.

When Home Place Ranch came before the Town of Monument, its case rested on the kind of residents it said it would draw. The engineering firm HR Green‘s development narrative described roughly four of every five homes in the first phase — 175 age-targeted detached homes and 64 age-targeted cluster homes, alongside 60 estate lots — as “targeted to consumers who are 55+,” to be “marketed exclusively as an active lifestyle community specifically for residents within later stages of life.”

That premise did real work. Older buyers, the narrative argued, meant “fewer vehicle trips per day, and at times off of peak traffic times,” and households that “pay[] property taxes that support schools but [are] at the stage of life where typically will not have children in those schools.” The cluster homes would be “zero exterior maintenance.” The clubhouse was “designed to be accessed, owned, and maintained by the age-targeted HOA only.”

Today the 55-plus language is gone. Challenger Homes markets Home Place Ranch as a “luxury master-planned community” with amenities “families are sure to love,” lists the Lewis-Palmer District 38 schools that serve it, and pictures a “happy multi-generation family.” Vantage Homes advertises floor plans up to eight bedrooms and a “future playground.” This is a story about the difference between what was promised and what the Town actually required.

What the Town got in writing

Almost none of the promise.

Home Place Ranch’s first phase was approved on November 18, 2019, by Ordinance 28-2019. This newspaper read the ordinance in the Town’s own records. Its binding terms — the “Conditions of Approval” in Exhibit A — number five, and every one concerns emergency-access roads and the removable bollards that gate them. None mentions age, “55+,” “active adult,” or any occupancy restriction.

The five conditions were not the whole of the written approval. Ordinance 28-2019 approved the Preliminary/Final PD Site Plan itself, and the Board decided the application against twelve review and approval criteria in the Municipal Code then in force, at §17.40.190(E). The Town’s November 18 staff memorandum worked through each of them and recommended approval. None of the twelve concerns age, occupancy, marketing, or who may use an amenity center.

Nor is it in the covenants. The developer’s engineer used the term “age-targeted,” a marketing description, not “age-restricted,” the legal designation — and the distinction turns out to be the whole point. The recorded Declaration of Covenants for Home Place Ranch, recorded in January 2023 with Challenger Colorado, LLC and HPR Development, LLC as the declarants, contains no age or occupancy restriction of any kind: no “55,” no “housing for older persons,” no active-adult language, nothing. Between the ordinance’s silence and the covenants’ silence, the age-targeting was never a binding, enforceable requirement. Like the “fewer trips” rationale and the age-targeted clubhouse, it ran throughout the approval record — the developer’s narrative, both hearing packets, the applicant’s formal response to the Town’s review criteria, and the Town’s own staff report, which told the Board that “covenants or deed restrictions are not planned to be utilized.” What it never became was something the Town, a homeowner, or a court could enforce.

A clarification of responsibility is owed. The decisions that shaped Home Place Ranch were made by earlier boards: the Town annexed and zoned the land in 2006, approved the planned development in 2007, and approved the first phase in November 2019. None of today’s mayor and council served on the governing body when those decisions were made. The earliest to join, Mayor Mitch LaKind, came on as a trustee in April 2020 — after the November 2019 approval — and took the mayor’s seat in January 2023; the rest joined later still. The 2023 approval of the Filing 3 plat was a routine 7-0 vote on a development already entitled. The sitting council inherited the “ranch’s” shape; the decisions that set it belong to its predecessors — which is exactly why the lesson in it is worth drawing now.

Two distinctions belong here as well. The age-targeted premise applied principally to Phase 1; later phases were always described as larger-lot housing. And HR Green was the developer’s planning and engineering consultant, not the landowner or the homebuilder. Nothing in the record reviewed for this article indicates that any party acted unlawfully.

What got built, and how densely

What is being built and sold is a conventional, all-ages subdivision — and a notably dense one.

Home Place Ranch’s Filing 1, the built and nearly sold-out first phase, carries a median lot of about 5,060 square feet — roughly 0.12 acre — by this newspaper’s review of El Paso County Assessor parcel records. A representative 2024-built home at 16300 Monument Rock Court sits on 5,062 square feet. By comparison, the assessor records show a median lot of about 11,200 square feet (0.26 acre) across a sample in neighboring Promontory Pointe, and about 16,100 square feet (0.37 acre) in Sanctuary Pointe. The first-phase lots run about half the size of one neighbor’s and a third of the other’s.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a small lot. For the empty-nesters the project was pitched to — buyers who wanted a low-maintenance home and no yard to mow — a compact lot is a feature, not a flaw; that was the whole idea. The problem is the switch. The same tiny-yard homes are now marketed to families with children, who are left with little or no private yard and, for a place to play, the streets and sidewalks instead — the very streets that residents say now carry Sanctuary Pointe’s cut-through traffic at 50 to 60 miles per hour.

Two caveats belong here: Home Place Ranch’s later filings trend larger — Filing 2 near 6,500 square feet, Filing 6 above 10,000 — so the tightest lotting is in the first, most-complete phase; and three builders work the community — Challenger, Vantage, and Richmond American Homes. It is the first, age-targeted phase that was built smallest.

The 2019 proposal also reduced Phase 1 below what the sketch plan contemplated. The Town’s staff report put the sketch-plan figure at “almost 400 units in the area now defined as Phase 1”; the applicant proposed 300, a reduction it made voluntarily.

The traffic argument

If demographics were the argument, traffic was its centerpiece — and it never entered the math.

Both the 2019 master traffic study and the 2023 study that succeeded it counted the homes at the standard Institute of Transportation Engineers rate for detached single-family housing — about 9.4 daily trips per home — not a reduced “senior adult housing” rate. The studies modeled Home Place Ranch as ordinary single-family development, not the lower-trip senior community the narrative described. The expected demographic benefit was part of the sales rationale; it was never translated into a discounted trip-generation input.

Using the full detached-single-family rate rather than a reduced senior rate was the conservative choice; it sized the roads for more traffic, not less.

A second modeling point concerns Gleneagle Drive. When Home Place Ranch connected Gleneagle south to Baptist Road and, via a roundabout, to the Sanctuary Pointe street grid, it opened a shortcut with a logic of its own. For much of Sanctuary Pointe — especially its western half — dropping south down Gleneagle to Baptist Road is a faster way out than working east to that development’s own accesses, and residents say drivers have found it: the cut-through traffic now running down Gleneagle at significant volume, and the speeders along with it, comes largely from Sanctuary Pointe, funneling through Promontory Pointe to Baptist Road. That diversion was predictable from the street network alone. The studies’ stated background conditions did not include a Gleneagle connection: asked directly, the developer’s engineer wrote, “Total – No connection of Gleneagle in background conditions.” That does not prove the engineers ignored all diversion; it means the documented baseline never accounted for the through-traffic a connected Gleneagle would predictably pull off Sanctuary Pointe — precisely the movement a traffic study exists to anticipate. In 2023, as the Town approved Home Place Ranch’s Filing 3 plat, Council member Kenneth Kimple pressed for a new traffic study; the plat was approved 7-0 anyway. Post-connection counts on Gleneagle have not been made public. [This newspaper has requested them.] (The evacuation and safety implications of that traffic are examined in Part 3.)

The clubhouse that changed hands

The amenity center followed the same arc. Promised in 2019 as a facility “accessed, owned, and maintained by the age-targeted HOA only,” it was built instead as a metropolitan-district building; at a 2023 hearing, the developer’s representative explained that because it sits within the metro district it is “required to be open to the public,” with memberships for outsiders. The center has opened — Vantage advertises a gym and pickleball courts — even as Challenger’s own website still lists the amenity center as “Coming Soon.” (Who owns and runs that district is the subject of Part 2.)

The promise the first buyers bought

For the households that arrived first, the reversal is personal.

The development narrative did not just describe older buyers in the abstract; it sold them a way of life. The age-targeted homes, HR Green wrote, were meant for empty-nesters who “don’t wish to live on a street of children playing or teenagers driving” — a quiet, low-turnover enclave of “zero exterior maintenance” cluster homes, with a clubhouse the age-targeted residents were to own themselves. The earliest buyers moved in on the strength of that promise: serenity, low upkeep, and neighbors at the same stage of life.

Its central provisions have since come apart. The 55-plus language disappeared from the marketing; the recorded covenants restricted not a single home by age; the clubhouse became a public, metro-district building; and the same compact houses were sold to families with young children — the very children the pitch had assured buyers would not be there. On the tight lots and narrow streets they were told would stay quiet, those children now play along the sidewalks and in the road — the “street of children playing” the brochure said this would never be, and, residents say, one that now carries Sanctuary Pointe’s cut-through traffic. The buyers who believed the vision first are the ones now living with its opposite.

What comes next

The “ranch” — a label that sits oddly on 5,000-square-foot lots — is not finished, and by the developer’s own account, not close. The northern remainder, the roughly 270 acres fronting Higby Road still owned by Home Place LLC, sits taxed as farmland, unplatted, with no new application on file as of mid-2026. It is the same ground the developer told the Town in 2020 that “realities of available infrastructure will likely prevent … develop[ing] for 10 or 12 more years.” Yet under the 2007 planned-development approval, that land remains part of a planned development whose approved maximum is 912 homes — a figure reached in stages, from 1,019 in the earliest 2006 sketch, to 990 as revised during the community meetings, to the 912 the Board approved in April 2007. With roughly 300 approved in Phase 1, the balance runs to about 600 homes and a 10-acre site dedicated to Lewis-Palmer School District 38 for an elementary school. That dedication carries its own irony. Monument was sold a quiet, low-traffic, largely childless community — households that would “pay property taxes that support schools” without sending children to them; what is being built and sold instead is an all-ages subdivision marketed to families. And the elementary school those families might fill may never be needed. District 38’s district-run enrollment has fallen nearly 15 percent from its 2018-19 peak, its elementary buildings are absorbing the steepest losses, and its 2026-27 budget braces for a still-smaller district, cutting roughly 35 positions as the rolls keep shrinking. The 10 acres were set aside on the assumption the district would need another school; the district is now planning around the opposite. The gentler community Monument approved is entitled, on ground the developer says can’t be served for a decade, to hundreds more homes — and to a school its shrinking district may never build.

Added enrollment would also bring the district per-pupil revenue at a time when it is losing both.

The lesson

Strip away the particulars and Home Place Ranch is a story about the difference between a promise and a condition.

Monument was sold a softer, lower-impact version of this development — age-targeted, quieter, fewer cars, a private clubhouse, a landscaped edge — and it approved the project on the strength of that vision. But the vision lived in the narrative and the hearing, not in the ordinance. The five conditions the Town actually wrote down concern access roads and bollards. The age-targeting was never bound. The traffic benefit was never modeled. When a developer’s selling points are not converted into enforceable conditions, they are not commitments — they are marketing, and marketing changes with the market.

The forward-looking question for the current council and planning commission — none of whom were on the board when it was entitled — is a simple one: when the next applicant arrives promising a gentler project to win a hard vote, which of those promises will be written into binding conditions, and which will be left, like this one, to a brochure? The remaining 270 acres of Home Place Ranch will eventually test the answer.

Sources for this installment: the 2018/2019 Home Place Ranch preliminary development narrative (HR Green); Ordinance 28-2019 and its Exhibit A, and the 2006–2007 annexation and planned-development ordinances and Board minutes (Town of Monument records), recording the 912-unit entitlement and 10-acre school dedication — contemporaneously reported by Our Community News (2006 annexation, 2007 planned development, the August and October 2019 hearings, and the November 2019 approval); the recorded Declaration of Covenants (Reception 223000967, Jan. 2023), which contains no age restriction; El Paso County Assessor parcel records for lot sizes; the 2019 and 2023 traffic impact studies and HR Green’s 2024 comment-response letter; a Promontory Pointe resident’s September 2024 speeding testimony to the Triview Metropolitan District board, reported by Our Community News; the June 5, 2023 Town Council approval of the Filing 3 plat, at which Council member Kenneth Kimple pressed for a new traffic study (Our Community News); the developer’s 2020 replat request (reported by Our Community News); the community’s marketing (Challenger Homes, Vantage Homes, livehomeplaceranch.com); and the federal 55-plus rule (24 CFR Part 100, Subpart E). Method and the full cast of entities are described in the series sidebar.