Most mornings, someone is out on the bluff-top grass between Hope Ranch and Goleta before the fog burns off, dog off leash until the trail narrows near the edge, coffee going cold in a truck parked on Vieja Drive because there is nowhere else legal to leave it. This is More Mesa: 265 privately owned acres of coastal sage scrub, oak woodland, and undeveloped shoreline that has functioned, for decades, as the free backyard trail system for Hope Ranch and much of the surrounding Goleta Valley.
Here is the part that surprised even people close to the effort to protect it. When the More Mesa Preservation Coalition ran a recreational-use survey in 2025, it found that more than half of respondents visit the mesa more than once a week. That is not a casual amenity. That is a habit, a route, a piece of daily life for thousands of people. And yet, as the coalition itself has said plainly on its own site, a lot of those same regulars still assume the land is already protected open space. It is not. It has been listed for sale, on and off, since 2019, and as of April 2026 it remained on the market at $65 million, according to KEYT's coverage of the preservation campaign.
That gap between how often people use the land and how little they know about its legal status is the actual story right now. Not a new restaurant, not a festival. A quiet mismatch between habit and awareness, playing out on a piece of ground that most of Hope Ranch treats as permanent.
The Land Under the Trail
More Mesa is not one owner. It is three, and the split matters more than most walkers realize.
| Owner | Acreage | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Khalid Saud Al Shobily LLC (Saudi-based real estate group) | 265 acres | Relisted at $65 million in April 2025; still on the market as of April 2026 |
| Pollard family | 6 acres, west end | Privately held |
| County of Santa Barbara | 54 acres, northwest | Publicly owned |
The Al Shobily group bought its 265 acres in 2012 for roughly $25 million. It has tried to sell that land multiple times since 2019, at prices ranging from $50 million to $106 million depending on the year and the appraisal being cited. The current $65 million ask has been in place, with brief interruptions, since it was relisted in April 2025. A deal nearly closed at $50 million in 2023 and fell apart. Another interested buyer walked away more recently. The land has never come close to development, but it has also never stopped being for sale.
For the trail you actually walk, the meaningful line runs through the eastern end of that 265-acre parcel. County zoning currently allows for up to 70 homes on roughly 40 of those acres, land that sits near the Puente Drive, Vieja Drive, and Mockingbird Lane access points most Hope Ranch residents use to get onto the mesa. A smaller allowance, about a dozen homes, applies to a few acres on the west end. None of that has been triggered. All of it remains possible.
From Awareness to Acquisition
For 25 years, the More Mesa Preservation Coalition operated mostly as an educator, tracking development proposals and reminding the community what was at stake. That began to shift in October 2025.
On October 11, 2025, the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County announced the first permanent conservation easement ever placed on any part of More Mesa, a 36-acre piece that connects the mesa to the neighboring Modoc Preserve. It was a genuine milestone and also a small one. Thirty-six acres is a fraction of the 265 still on the open market. The community marked it with a picnic on the mesa that same weekend, banjo and guitar music drifting over the grass while people spread out on blankets.
"This is such a gorgeous piece of property, it's a big challenge, but we as a community, working together, using all of our connections to the federal, state and local level, can do anything that we set our minds to."
That was Assemblymember Gregg Hart, speaking at the picnic. Five weeks later, on November 20, 2025, more than 125 supporters gathered at Rincon Brewery to mark the coalition's 25th anniversary and launch something larger than an easement: an actual campaign to raise the money to buy the remaining acreage outright. Rincon Brewery brewed a limited run called Save More Mesa Blonde Ale for the occasion, with proceeds going to the coalition, and the cans carried artwork by painter Kevin Gleason, whose original painting of the More Mesa bluffs was auctioned that night.
The calendar since then has stayed full. In February 2026, a talk on More Mesa's history drew a crowd to the Santa Barbara Historical Museum. A sold-out Doublewide Kings concert at the Lobero Theatre in April 2026 pulled in roughly 650 people, according to KEYT's coverage of the event, with a short documentary on the mesa shown before the band played. That same month, a trail-focused talk followed at the Faulkner Gallery, and in May 2026 the Oak Group, a long-running collective of local painters, opened an exhibit called Preserve and Cherish there, its first show benefiting More Mesa in twelve years.
None of that momentum changes who owns the land. It changes how many people know the fight is happening.
Why the Zoning Risk Isn't Theoretical
The reason MMPC vice chair Dan Gira, a retired county land-use planner, describes More Mesa as a natural target has less to do with the current owner's plans and more to do with the legal ground shifting underneath it. The land's protection from denser development rests substantially on the California Coastal Act of 1976 and on its designation as environmentally sensitive habitat. Both of those protections are creatures of state law, and state law has been moving toward looser housing mandates, not tighter ones. Gira has pointed specifically to recent changes weakening the California Environmental Quality Act as a preview of what could happen to the Coastal Act itself.
That matters for More Mesa in a very concrete way: it is the largest undeveloped, privately owned parcel left in the Goleta Valley, exactly the kind of site a future state housing allocation could single out if the county needs to find land fast. Nothing has been proposed. But the raw fact that 40 buildable acres already sit zoned for up to 70 homes, right where the main trailheads feed into Hope Ranch, is not a hypothetical. It is current zoning, sitting quietly, waiting on a buyer's decision.
What's Actually Happening This Fall
If you use the mesa regularly, here is what is worth knowing right now rather than in a year.
- MMPC, working with the Hope Ranch Trails Association among its partner organizations, has a community trail ride planned for More Mesa on September 27, open to the wider equestrian community.
- Access still runs through the same handful of informal points: the Mockingbird Lane trailhead, where there is no legal parking, and the Vieja Drive and Shoreline Drive approaches, where there is. There are no trash cans anywhere on the mesa, so anyone bringing a dog needs to pack out what the dog leaves behind.
- Dogs are welcome on leash. The bluff trail down to the beach involves a steep staircase, and the beach itself narrows to almost nothing at high tide.
None of that is new information to anyone who has walked the mesa a hundred times. What is worth sitting with is the other half of the picture: the land those trails cross is not public, has been for sale continuously since 2019, and the group trying to change that has spent the last ten months turning a quiet advocacy effort into an actual purchase campaign that depends on enough people knowing to show up.
That is the thing about More Mesa that does not show up on a map. The trail feels permanent because it has always been there for the people who use it. Whether it stays that way has very little to do with habit and everything to do with who understands, right now, that it is still someone else's land to sell.
If you are weighing a move in or around Goleta Valley or Hope Ranch and want a clearer read on how a specific street sits relative to open space, trail access, or the kind of neighborhood texture that does not show up in a listing sheet, Alemann & Associates knows this stretch of coastline block by block. Contact us.
