(DUBLIN, Calif.) - Discovery Builders, Inc. wants to add 19 single-family homes inside the existing Schaefer Ranch neighborhood, and Dublin residents get two chances this week to put questions to city planners about it. The city is holding community meetings tonight at 6 p.m. and Thursday at 7 p.m. Both run remotely over Zoom, and both cover the same material, so residents only need to attend one.
Eighteen of the homes would sit on a 6.87-acre site at the western terminus of Dublin Boulevard, in the portion of the project labeled Unit 3. The 19th would go on the western edge of Ridgeline Place, on a parcel identified as Unit 1, Lot 70. Plans call for three floor plans drawn in four architectural styles. The land is not newly entitled. The Unit 3 lots already fall under a Stage 2 Development Plan the City Council approved through Ordinance No. 06-16. What Discovery Builders is asking for now is narrower: a new Site Development Review Permit, a Lot Line Adjustment, and a Conditional Use Permit that would allow minor modifications to the architectural standards that ordinance established.
The distinction matters for anyone planning to speak up. Whether houses go up on the hillside was settled years ago. What is open is whether the buildings may depart from the design rules attached to that approval, and how the lot lines get redrawn to fit them. Schaefer Ranch sits on Dublin's far western edge, north of Interstate 580 and pressed against the Dublin Hills Regional Open Space Preserve. Discovery Homes is marketing the project as Schaefer Ranch Reserve and estimates it will open in February 2027.
Photo Credit: City of Dublin
Community meetings of this kind are not hearings. Nothing gets voted on. City staff deliver a short presentation on the proposal and walk through the development review process, then take questions from residents. What comes out of those exchanges feeds into the staff analysis that carries the application forward. Dublin has leaned on the format repeatedly this year. The city ran the same two-session structure on Aug. 26 and 27 for Eden Housing's proposed affordable development at the northwest corner of Central Parkway and Byrne Street, a 2.05-acre site inside Francis Ranch.
The city posted notice of the Schaefer Ranch meetings on Sept. 16. Residents who cannot make either session can reach Shane Fields, assistant planner, at 925-833-6610 or shane.fields@dublin.ca.gov. For neighbors already living in Schaefer Ranch, the practical stakes are the ones that tend to dominate these sessions: construction traffic funneling through a single hillside access route, grading on steep terrain above Dublin Boulevard, and whether four architectural styles spread across 19 lots reads as variety or as a break from what the surrounding streets already look like.
The 19 units are being sold as estate homes, in a city where U.S. News put the median home value at $1,283,390 when it ranked Dublin first among 161California communities this summer. The second session begins at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 24.
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