Historic horse stable, home to rescue animals, faces eviction as UCSC moves to acquire coastal property

After about 50 years in operation, Coast Road Stables is facing an uncertain future for its dozens of horses and their owners as UC Santa Cruz pursues purchasing the land it sits on — about 200 acres of coastal farm west of the Santa Cruz city limits. 

Jennifer Gogan has two horses at the stables, where over the past 2½ years she’s built a community that regularly hosts movie nights and holiday parades, and helps clean and feed fellow owners’ horses. She said after months of uncertainty, she and other boarders found out last month they’ll likely have to leave the property by next June. 

“It’s a whole community of people and animals and tenants that have been there for 50 years,” she said. “And they’re kicking everybody out.”

UCSC, through a conservation organization, is in the midst of purchasing the 200-acre property adjacent to its coastal campus and the Seymour Marine Discovery Center from the Youngers, a longtime Santa Cruz family, sometime next year. In late August, the university closed on a deal to acquire another 214-acre property from the Younger family adjacent to the university’s main campus.

Located about a half-mile outside of the Santa Cruz city limits off of Highway 1, Coast Road Stables has about 67 horses who are cared for by 46 owners like Gogan. Adjacent to the stables, and also included in the coastal property sale, Gogan said, are other businesses and tenants, including a ranch home with a resident-farmer and a business that sells hay for livestock. 

Tenants of the coastal property were recently told that business owners, including Coast Road Stables, were given notice that their leases will be terminated by the end of June 2026 if the purchase is successful. 

“We feel like we’ve been kind of left in the dark,” Gogan said. “We don’t really know what our future is.” 

Gogan says that it’s “heartbreaking” that Coast Road might disappear, particularly as it’s become a home for rescued horses to live out the rest of their lives. She said because of that, they’re not an investment for owners to sell. 

“Without places like [Coast Road], these horses have no place to go,” she said. “It’s a sad truth that horses that are deemed ‘useless or invaluable’ – you sell them to somebody, and that person turns around and sells them to kill pens that go to Mexico or to Canada where they get whatever they can out of them.” 

UCSC spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason told Lookout via email Thursday that the university and The Conservation Fund, which is helping purchase the land, are still raising money to buy the property. He said the organizations raised $8,159,834 to purchase the first 214 acres next to the main UCSC campus – which are undeveloped and will be permanently conserved as environmentally sensitive land. 

He declined to clarify whether or not the university would allow the stables to remain, if the purchase of the second, coastal property was successful. He added that “many inspections” still need to happen before the deal can close.

“There’s no guarantee that UC Santa Cruz will ultimately be the stewards of the coastal property, but we are working with that intention,” he wrote, declining to clarify further what he meant. “However, it is not within the campus’s current mission or vision to become stewards or landlords of a horse boarding facility.”

Dan Medeiros, senior field representative at The Conservation Fund, didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Lookout’s attempts to reach Coast Road Stables owner Amy Rinaldi directly were unsuccessful, and numbers for the stables were disconnected.

Gogan and other boarders, or people who keep their horses at the stable, say they’re not opposed to UCSC taking over the land. Instead, they’ve been trying to find out if they can remain at the stables under university ownership, or at least stay there until they can find a new suitable home for their horses — many of which are rescue horses with significant medical conditions, like partial blindness or collapsed trachea that can make breathing difficult — and can’t move easily because it will cause them stress. 

The location of the stables on the coast is also important for their horses, as the coastal breeze keeps it cooler for the animals. Gogan said she’s concerned that stables in hotter climates, like in the Santa Cruz Mountains, would be hard on horses with health conditions. 

Fighting tears, Cathryn Palmer said she’s feeling “hopeless” about the future of her three rescue horses, two of which she saved from kill pens. Horses end up at kill pens – where they’re slaughtered for their meat – for a wide range of reasons: They’re sent there by owners who can’t take care of them or they’re abandoned.  

She saved Odin, an Icelandic horse, from a kill pen about three years ago after seeing a photo of him among a network of people she knows who save horses. He had been abandoned and was in horrible shape, with his hooves grown long. 

“He was a really, really sad soul,” she said. “I was able to give him a really happy life.” 

Odin has several medical issues including founder – a painful condition that weakens the hoof, and he also has insulin resistance and eye inflammation, which leads to blindness. Palmer said he’s now doing well and she manages his conditions, but moving him would be a major challenge. She said that even for a healthy horse, it could take them anywhere from six months to a year to adjust to a new home. 

She’s worried she’ll have to put Odin down instead of causing him potential suffering in a new environment.

“Rather than have him maybe suffer or end up in a bad situation — a kill pen again — I’m thinking I have to put him down,” she said. 

Palmer said since she was young, she’s saved animals like kittens and puppies. It’s hard for her to explain why, it’s just something she’s always done. 

“It just feels like the right thing to do,” she said, crying. “They save you right back.” 

Palmer and Gogan said finding another location to keep their horses will be challenging because there aren’t many stables in the county, most have waitlists, not all of them have stalls with a connected fenced-in outdoor area, and Coast Road Stables is an affordable option. 

The stables allow boarders to clean their own stalls, picking up manure and urine, which needs to be done daily. Many other stables instead charge a fee for paid staff to clean the stalls. Palmer and Gogan said many boarders, like them, also enjoy the labor and prefer to do it.

The boarders estimate that any new place they move their horses to will charge them at least double what they currently pay to board their horses. Gogan said she pays about $350 for each of her horse’s stalls, and she thinks the total cost including cleaning fees at another stable would reach about $700 a month. 

While she’s starting to look for other stables and getting her name on waitlists, Gogan is still hopeful that boarders will have a chance to stay longer until they find a viable option to move to, or that they’ll be able to stay under new ownership. To advocate for those goals, Gogan started a Facebook group, called Friends of Coast Road Stables, to start organizing the boarders and community members.

“I’m exhausting every possibility,” she said. “To try to save something that you love.”

She said she hasn’t heard back after sending several emails to The Conservation Fund, the nonprofit helping UC Santa Cruz through the purchase. 

“I understand that, as things currently stand, we have to be out,” she said. “What I haven’t given up on yet — because no one has tried — is to have conversations with the potential new owners.”

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