On Saturday, October 10, from 2 to 5 p.m., there will be a pumpkin station, a bounce house, a caricature artist, and free pizza on the grounds of the Tustin Hills Racquet & Pickleball Club at 11782 Simon Ranch Road. Kids will get their faces painted a few dozen yards from tennis courts whose fate is currently tied up in two active lawsuits.
That's not a coincidence worth glossing over. It's the actual state of things in North Tustin right now: a community club hosting its fall festival in the middle of the longest-running land use fight the area has seen in decades, because the people who run both the festival and the fight are largely the same people, and neither one is waiting on the other.
The Only Court of Its Kind in the Hills
The Tustin Hills Racquet Club has anchored that stretch of Simon Ranch Road for 68 years, since 1958. It sits on 5.88 acres and currently carries eight tennis courts, roughly a dozen pickleball courts, a swimming pool, two small spas, and two single-story buildings used for banquets and community meetings. For North Tustin, an unincorporated community with no city hall of its own, the club has doubled as the closest thing to a public square: tennis leagues, swim lessons, Pilates classes, and the kind of low-key Saturday gathering that doesn't show up on any events calendar but happens anyway because everyone already knows where to park.
That's the part that makes the current situation land differently than a typical zoning story. This isn't a shuttered strip mall or a vacant lot. It's a facility people are actively using this week, while a legal fight over whether they'll keep using it drags into its sixth year.
What Actually Changed
The club was purchased just before the pandemic by Ranch Hills Partners, a Newport Beach-based investor group reported to have paid $6.3 million for the site, according to the Orange County Business Journal. The plan was to replace the club with 37 residential units, split between 34 attached single-family townhomes and three detached homes, spread across 17 buildings. That works out to roughly 6.29 units per acre.
For context, the surrounding tract, 118 single-family homes built under a half-acre minimum lot size, runs at about two homes per acre. The proposed project would sit at more than three times that density, on the same footprint that currently holds tennis courts and a pool.
The Orange County Planning Commission approved the project. North Tustin residents, organized through the Foothill Communities Association, appealed to the Board of Supervisors. In September 2023, Board Chairman Don Wagner moved to reject the planning commission's approval and send the project back for revision. The motion died for lack of a second, and the approval stood.
Two Lawsuits, One Fifty-Year-Old Promise
Losing at the Board of Supervisors didn't end it. The Foothill Communities Association moved the fight into court, and by the spring of 2025 there were two active lawsuits.
The one drawing the most attention rests on a covenant, roughly 50 years old, that runs between the club and its neighbors. The claim is straightforward: the covenant holds that the site will always be used for recreation, and if it's ever redeveloped for housing, any new units have to match the density of the surrounding neighborhood, single-family homes on lots around 20,000 square feet, not attached townhomes at three times that density. By spring 2025, that suit had picked up two affordable housing advocacy organizations as co-plaintiffs, a detail that complicates any easy read of who's on which side of California's housing fights.
There's a statewide angle too. The Foothill Communities Association points to a 2024 ruling from the California Court of Appeal's Second District, Snowball West Investments L.P. v. City of Los Angeles, which addressed how the state's Housing Accountability Act interacts with local zoning. The appellate court held that the Act doesn't override local control outright. It applies only when a proposed project already complies with local zoning and development policy. FCA argues the same reasoning should apply to the Ranch Hills project, since the density increase is the entire point of dispute. Whether a judge agrees is still an open question. No ruling has been issued.
As of the association's most recent public update this July, the group describes the fight as having escalated to a legal battle on two fronts with consequences reaching beyond North Tustin. That's their characterization, not a court's, but it's a useful marker of where things stand heading into fall: not resolved, not withdrawn, still moving.
What This Actually Costs, Beyond the Legal Fees
Litigation isn't free, and the Foothill Communities Association has been candid with members about that. Back in the spring of 2025, the group estimated it would take another $200,000 to see the covenant lawsuit through to a conclusion. That's not a number tied to court fees alone. It covers the kind of unglamorous work that actually moves a land use fight: specialized counsel, printed materials, media outreach, the machinery of sustained opposition.
Whatever that number looks like today, the fact that a homeowners' association needed to raise six figures to defend a tennis club tells you something the median sale price in North Tustin never will. This isn't a fight anyone expected to still be having in year six.
Saturday Afternoon, Same Courts
Which brings the story back to October 10.
The North Tustin Fall Festival is organized through the club, open to the community, and stocked with the kind of programming that has nothing to do with zoning: a DJ, outdoor games, a trunk-or-treat setup, the standard fall lineup. If you didn't know the backstory, you'd have no reason to think about it while you're in line for a slice of pizza.
That's worth sitting with for a second. The same grounds that anchor a covenant lawsuit and a Housing Accountability Act argument are, this weekend, hosting face painting. Nobody involved seems to think those two facts are in tension. The residents who show up for pumpkin decorating are largely the same residents who've spent six years and a six-figure legal fund trying to keep those courts as courts. Using the club and fighting for the club aren't separate activities in North Tustin. They're the same instinct, playing out on two different timelines.
If you're new to the area, or you've lived here long enough to have stopped paying attention to the signs posted around the club entrance, that's the thing worth knowing before Saturday. The fall festival isn't a distraction from the bigger story. It's the clearest evidence of what the bigger story is actually about: a community that treats a shared recreational space as something worth showing up for, in every sense of that phrase, whether the calendar says festival or filing deadline.
One address note if you're planning to go: the club's mailing address lists Santa Ana, not North Tustin, which trips people up every year. North Tustin is unincorporated, so a lot of addresses in the hills carry Santa Ana or Tustin postal designations that have nothing to do with which community you're actually in. If you're using GPS, search Simon Ranch Road directly rather than the city name.
North Tustin's identity has always run a little deeper than its zip code confusion suggests, and this is a fairly direct illustration of why. The people who live here have shown, repeatedly, that they'll organize, fund, and litigate to keep something as unglamorous as a tennis club functioning the way it always has. That's not a data point that shows up on a listing sheet, but it's the kind of thing that shapes what living here actually feels like.
If you're curious what that kind of neighborhood commitment does to property values over time, or you just want to know what a home near Simon Ranch Road is worth this fall, The O'Dell Group has spent decades tracking North Tustin block by block, lawsuit or no lawsuit. Reach out anytime you want a straight answer.
