Bing Crosby’s land at center of dispute in California’s fastest growing city

Hollywood stars rarely ask for their property to be annexed by small towns. But a land-use initiative coming before voters in California’s fastest-growing city in November has the posthumous blessing of one of the 20th century’s biggest names in entertainment: Bing Crosby.

The controversy surrounds an 80-acre parcel of land in Dublin, a city testing the limits of its own prodigious development in the geographic center of the Bay Area megaregion between San Francisco and Sacramento. Dublin’s location, in combination with abundant open space and development-friendly policies, has in a matter of decades transformed the city from a ranching crossroads to an urban center studded with new townhouses.

This summer, the Dublin City Council approved Measure II. It asks voters to amend a decade-old open-space initiative that established an urban-growth boundary so the city can extend Dublin Boulevard, a major thoroughfare, eastward into neighboring Livermore with the goal of eventually building warehouses and potentially Amazon-style distribution centers alongside it.

The parcel being eyed for warehouses and distribution centers sits on rolling pastures owned by Crosby’s trust. The singer and actor was a resident of Hillsborough, just south of San Francisco, and a man about town in the Bay Area. Since Crosby’s death in 1977, the “White Christmas” crooner’s trust has invested widely in land across California.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Dublin nearly doubled in size between 2010 and 2020, explosive growth driven in large part by a growing Asian American community and the approval of thousands of new housing units.

But mid-way through that decade, in 2014, as the green hills that surrounded Dublin were increasingly dotted with tan apartment complexes, public sentiment shifted against continued growth and sprawl. Environmental activists qualified a ballot initiative to draw a line on Dublin’s east side that created a ring of open space around the city, including the land owned by Crosby’s trust.

The city council, with some members facing their own reelections, unanimously chose to adopt the initiative before it came to voters.

Now, 10 years later, the city is asking whether voters believe the city should accept a 100-acre land donation from the Crosby property in exchange for allowing “limited commercial development” on the 80-acres the trust would continue to own along the new boulevard.

The city council was split on the proposal, voting 3-2 to place the measure on the November ballot. Groups that helped enact the open-space law quickly leapt into action to protect their hard-fought boundary, including Friends of Livermore and Save Mt. Diablo, which led the effort to collect signatures for the 2014 campaign.

“Dublin has never seen a piece of land that they didn’t want to develop,” said Friends of Livermore board member David Rounds. (Staff with the City of Dublin did not reply to requests for comment about the initiative.)

Dublin’s expansion has positioned it as one of the few booming Bay Area cities in a region that overall has lost population in recent years. Those dynamics have led to economic opportunity, and also complaints over traffic and overcrowding. Arguments posted in favor of the initiative say the measure would provide traffic relief, continue to protect open space and add public bike lands and trails.

“If you’re tired of bad traffic on the East Side and 580 – vote YES on II,” reads an argument in favor of the measure that is posted to the city website.

Save Mt. Diablo is taking the threat seriously, said the group’s Land Conservation Director Seth Adams, by courting major donors and hiring professional campaign staff. In Adams' view, this is no minor land-use battle but rather the beginning of a coordinated campaign to develop the remaining open space around Dublin.

Although there is a group that has emerged to pass Measure II, it has yet to launch a website and the campaign has not identified its funders.

Crosby once sang that “the best things in life are free,” but given the level of resources gearing up against the measure, any campaign will not be.