Growth initiative coming your way? - California's development surveys - Sunset's 90th Anniversary Special Report

Sunset, May, 1988

Growth initiative coming your way?

Of all Western voters, Californians have tried hardest to manage growth through ballot initiatives: 75 in 1987, according to the California Association of Realtors. Seventy percent of the growth control measures passed. Upcoming June and November ballots include initiatives in Pasadena and Manhattan Beach, and in San Diego and Orange counties.

Some measures cap commercial development, others residential. Still others limit development until infrastructure exists to handle it. What all the measures share is controversy.

"All we're doing is hurting ourselves," says Los Angeles developer Richard Weiss. He and other opponents believe the true crisis is one of taxes: propositions 13 and 4 have denied local governments money to keep up with inevitable growth. Trying to halt growth by initiative is dangerous: caps on commercial development cost jobs, and caps on residential development price many people out of the housing market. Comments Bradley Inman, real estate columnist for the San Francisco Examiner: "We have a right to maintain the quality of life, but when it contradicts such a basic right as owning a home then it's not acceptable."

Some charge the measures exacerbate the problems they try to solve. Argues Douglas Porter of the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C., "Many places want to down-zone everything in sight. And that only encourages low-density sprawl, making traffic and other problems worse."

Slow-growth proponents respond that development--particularly residential development--rarely pays its way in taxes, and that, too often, it destroys the very amenities that make a place worth living in. Unbridled growth, some charge, strangles some neighborhoods while at the same time others--notably inner cities--go neglected. Says Los Angeles city councilwoman Ruth Galanter, "We just want to steer growth to places that can handle it, that need it."

Proponents also see the initiatives as a necessary last resort. Says San Diego city planning commissioner Lynn Benn, "People only use them when they've exhausted all hope of communicating with elected officials." It happens that San Diego exemplifies many of the dilemmas fast-growing cities face. It began trying to manage growth back in the 1970s. Because "leapfrog" development costs more to service, infill was encouraged. Much land was placed in an urban reserve, to be developed in sequence. A pay-as-you-grow policy tried to ensure that when the city grew faster than its tax base, developers would help fund schools and parks.

But the city has grown by 325,900 people since 1970, an influx that would strain even the best plan. Lands in the urban reserve were developed--so rapidly that in 1985, unhappy citizens voted to give themselves veto power over growth there. In 1987, the city council passed an interim ordinance that put a temporary 8,000-unit cap on residential construction. Now city and regional committees are trying to formulate growth policies, and three growth-control initiatives are slated for upcoming ballots. Stuart Shaffer of the San Diego Association of Governments says the current argument is more vocifierous than before, "partly because growth has been sustained longer, partly because people are more sophisticated, partly because there are simply more of them to get riled up."

Complicating the growth-control picture are two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions: Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and First English Evangelical Lutheran Church of Glendale v. County of Los Angeles. Both deal with land use issues. Some observers feel they may limit the ways in which governments can regulate private property. Others feel their potential effect has been overstated. Future litigation looks inevitable.

Perhaps the prospect of continuing, costly litigation will get all sides talking with one another. So far only small steps in that direction have been taken. UCLA's Public Policy Program hopes to encourage discussion in a June conference, "The Growth Controversy in California." The San Francisco-based California Environmental Trust has begun researching the long-term effect of growth initiatives; it hopes to help developers and citizens' groups search for common ground. Says the trust's Joe Bodovitz, "The initiative battles have focused people's attention on the issue. But they've split people apart. Now we need to bring them together."