Canyon Problem Persists

Planning for growth in San Diego is a lot like fiddling with one of those children’s puzzles that requires you to move numbered squares around in an attempt to arrange them in numerical order--to move one piece toward its proper place, three others must be moved farther away from theirs.

In the late 1970s, under the leadership of then-Mayor Pete Wilson, the City Council took two seemingly wise actions concerning growth. First, the council asked for voter approval to issue $65 million in bonds for the purpose of buying up canyons and other precious open spaces to protect them from development. The voters complied. Then the council adopted a policy of accommodating growth through “in-filling,” that is, encouraging the building of new housing units on unoccupied lots in the central parts of the city. The idea was to prevent additional developments like Rancho Bernardo, miles away from the urban core, where providing city services becomes much more expensive.

As it turned out, those two well-intentioned policies were in almost total conflict. For “in-filling” to work, some canyons had to be developed. And with canyon building suddenly in vogue, the price of canyon lots escalated, making it more difficult for the city to purchase them.

Because of these and other inconsistent policies, the city today has a hodgepodge approach to the protection and development of canyons. As Times staff writer Ralph Frammolino pointed out in his recent series on canyons, one developer might win approval to build housing in a canyon while another developer might fail to get permission to build in an almost identical canyon right across the street. Each proposal ends up being fought out between developers and neighborhood residents who want to preserve the canyon in question.

It’s going to take some doing for the City Council to sort out this puzzle. For starters, it should impose a moratorium on canyon building for a reasonable period while it defines what a canyon is and begins spending the remaining $20 million in bond money authorized for the purchase of open space.

The city does have an obligation to be fair to the developers and landowners. But it also is obliged to exercise caution when allowing the obliteration of topographical features that are such a large part of San Diego’s uniqueness.