North City West Critics Find Changes in Plans Disturbing

The war is over but the bitterness remains. And so do a few skirmishers in the battle over North City West.

Lynn Benn, a Del Mar Heights resident who has fought the massive San Diego development proposal for 40,000 residents for more than a decade, now is often a single voice when the changes in the plan come before the City Council or Planning Commission for review.

“They treat me like a necessary evil. I get my three minutes and then they go ahead and do whatever it is they intended to do anyway,” Benn said. In verbal battles waged during the 1970s, the San Diego council chambers were often filled with opponents from Del Mar and the unincorporated communities around North City West, “but they got tired of being called elitists because they didn’t want that great big city across the freeway” on San Diego’s northernmost city limits, she said.

Benn, chairman of the Torrey Pines Community Planning Group, admits to a certain bitterness over the futility of her often-lonely fight against what she considers major detours from the original North City West plan.

Benn’s home in Del Mar Heights, a neighborhood of San Diego, is buffered on two sides by the Torrey Pines State Reserve and safe from development, “so I could put out my moat and just forget about the rest of the world.” But she can’t. She continues to fight to preserve what she considers “an excellent plan” for North City West that she and others helped mold.

North City West--a name no one likes--is 4,286 acres of chaparral-covered hills and canyons destined to become a city roughly the size of Carlsbad or National City or La Mesa by the end of the century.

The development, which began as four plans by four developers in the 1960s, is not affected by the growth management initiative that will be on the city’s November ballot, according to Peggy Goldstein, assistant to Mayor Roger Hedgecock.

On Memorial Day, 1982, the first earthmover roared to life to rearrange the landscape. Now, on Thomas Bros. maps, the spider webs of winding streets appear on the once-blank land east of Del Mar and Interstate 5. Brightly colored pennants wave over new subdivisions--the Bluffs at Del Mar Highlands, the Lakes in Carmel Del Mar. The most recent local telephone directory, The Del Mar Blue Book 1985-86, contains a parenthesized line: (Including North City West).

In her continued watch over the city-within-a-city taking shape across the freeway, Benn has noticed some disturbing changes:

- The 14,000 houses, condominiums and apartments initially proposed for North City West have mushroomed to 16,000; an “employment center” of offices and light industry has more than doubled in size and nearly tripled in building footage.

- Five neighborhood parks and five school sites originally promised by developers have disappeared from the community plan, as has a 300-acre park.

- Open space, which developers once estimated would encompass one-third of the 4,300 acres, is shrinking to narrow lines of steep canyon slopes and to areas not planned for development until the 1990s or later.

- Legislation in Sacramento, progressing without much opposition, would relieve North City West developers from paying “facilities benefit assessments”--payments which now are collected when building permits are issued and which are intended to build schools and public facilities such as parks that the new community requires.

- Although only about 1,700 building permits have been issued, which is in line with the North City West developers’ early estimates of 500 new home starts a year, projections for construction this year and in coming years have risen to 800 units a year, accelerating the need for public facilities in the near future. New residents already are concerned over the lack of parks, schools and shopping centers.

- Precise plans covering nearly two-thirds of the sprawling new city have been given approval or will receive final approval by year’s end from the San Diego City Council. Theoretically, Baldwin Company, Pardee Construction Co. and the smaller developers could begin building nearly 10,000 more homes immediately. (Developers, however, say that practically speaking they couldn’t build houses much faster than they are already.)

- Developer fees for public facilities except schools are scheduled to drop from $8,346 for each single-family home to $3,615. Developers pay the fees to a city-held fund when they apply for building permits. Under a complicated formula adjusted every year, the fees are designed to finance acquisition and construction of parks, libraries, fire stations, transit centers, etc. Benn and some residents say that, for whatever reason, those amenities are not being completed according to schedule.

- Despite master plan restraints designed to keep the hilly terrain in its natural state, hilltops are being shaved and adjacent canyons filled.

“Some of those homes are being built on 60, 70 or 80 feet of fill,” Benn said. “I know that I wouldn’t buy one of them.”

John Fowler, San Diego deputy city manager and a veteran of the North City West wars, defends the builders: “There have been some changes in the plan but they have been as a result of council action. The developers have been going by the book.”

Pardee and Baldwin representatives agree, pointing out that half a dozen city departments are monitoring the progress of the new community. When Jeff Lundstrom of Baldwin and Adrian Vasquez of Pardee appeared last week at a planning group of area residents and landowners, they referred most of the citizens’ complaints over lack of urban facilities back to San Diego officials who monitor the multimillion-dollar funds for schools and public facilities.

Fowler said that what appears to be an increase in density in North City West is actually a population reduction “because we have changed the housing mix to meet the market.” More multiple-family units and fewer single-family homes mean fewer children, fewer people per housing unit.

Planners now project a population of 38,700 for North City West when it is completed in 2005. Jeff Lundstrom predicts that the northern portion of the planned community “will be pretty well complete” within the next decade and that the entire city will be built before the turn of the century.

The increase in multiple-family units--mostly condominiums and apartments--and decrease in single-family homes has allowed the Del Mar and Solana Beach elementary school districts to cut their projected school needs in half, Fowler said.

Supt. Ray Edmon of Solana Beach Union School District said early student enrollment projections were off because North City West is attracting “families with a Porsche and two bikes, not ones with a Chevy and two kids.” Five grade schools (with a surplus sixth site) will be plenty for the new community, which initially was expected to fill 10 elementary schools, Edmon said.

Five parks were deleted along with the schools, Fowler said, because schools and parks are being built together to allow joint use. But remaining park sites were increased in size, resulting in the same amount of park acreage, he said.

Fowler confirmed that the developer fees paid to the city for financing of public facilities had dropped drastically this fiscal year because some improvements--parks--were deleted and others were reduced in size and cost. Lower inflation rates and a larger number of housing units over which the costs can be spread also contributed, he said.

Lundstrom added that the community plan’s intent “is to provide the facilities the community needs at the time they are needed.”

“These assessments are ultimately paid by the homeowners as a part of the cost of their homes,” he explained. “We should minimize the costs to the home buyer by building only the facilities that are required.”

Fowler said that the state legislation that would do away with the fees should not be of concern to North City West residents because the bills--two separate proposals sponsored by Sen. Leroy Greene (D-Carmichael) and by Assemblyman Larry Stirling (R-San Diego)--will replace the assessments with other means of financing public facilities for newly developing areas.

Kim Kilkenny, legislative director for the Construction Industry Federation, said that although developers are eager to shift the nearly $10,000-per-home fees to some other source than the buyer, both bills have provisions that the industry “cannot live with.”

He predicted that neither proposal would pass this year and that, possibly, a compromise will be reached in next year’s legislative session.

Longtime residents echo Benn’s concerns about erosion of the carefully structured plan to build a community in which all the needs of the residents would be provided when needed and at no cost to other taxpayers.

Bea Wilson, one of a handful of residents who lived in North City West before the developers came, challenged the developers at a planning group meeting this week to explain why improvements scheduled to be completed were not even started yet.

“I was told by Steve Zimmer (a Pardee representative) that I was taking the word ‘completed’ too literally, that it actually meant that the paper work had been started,” Wilson said. “So ‘completed’ means ‘started.’ ” Wilson’s chief complaint is that a bridge-widening project over I-5 on Del Mar Heights Road was overdue. When queried, Vasquez said that the widening project was on schedule because design studies were under way.

Another pre-development resident of North City West, Michael Soule, touched on the most sensitive topic between developers and homeowners: what Benn calls “the rape of the land.”

“They just lop off the top of a hill and dump it in a canyon and have lots of nice flat building lots,” Benn complained. “I can’t believe that what they are doing is allowed under the city’s land use regulations.”

Soule, who has lived in North City West’s northeastern corner for more than 15 years, said that Pardee is proposing to do just that to a finger canyon near his home as it builds “Neighborhood 4a.”

Pardee officials “say they need someplace to put the excess dirt they have from grading. They want to put it in the canyon and build 70 units on it,” Soule said. “I say that it’s not the city’s responsibility to provide a place for Pardee to dump its dirt. And the plan provides that builders should avoid building in canyons or on ridges.”

Baldwin spokesman Lundstrom hedges a bit on the grading issue. “Of course we grade,” he said. “Everywhere you look out here is either a hill or a valley.”

Pardee is filling up canyons and building some units on natural slopes--but not violating city building codes, he said.

A North County planner, who asked not to be identified, said that she had been taking pictures of the massive grading going on in North City West to document “what I consider to be rape of the land.”

“And the same developers who are committing the rape chose to live in Rancho Santa Fe where the land use restrictions are among the strictest,” she said.

“Some day, parents will bring their children out to Rancho Santa Fe to show them ‘how it looked before the developers came.’ Rancho Santa Fe will be the last natural spot left along the coast before too long.”

NORTH CITY WEST, SAN DIEGO

1-Carmel Del Mar: 2,199 homes planned, 4 permits issued 2-Employment center and hotel 3-Del Mar Highlands: 1,160 homes planned, 464 permits issued 4-Carmel del Mar: 1,004 homes planned, no permits issued yet 4A-Del Mar Highlands: 422 homes planned, no permits issued yet 5-Carmel Del Mar: 948 homes planned, 430 permits issued 6-Carmel Del Mar: 1,782 homes planned, 530 permits issued. Also will have employment center and commercial development 7-Del Mar Highlanders: 1,858 homes planned, 146 permits issued 8-Property owned by several owners: 1,800 homes planned, no permits issued yet 8A-No plans yet. Development not scheduled until 1990s 9-Town Center: Shopping center, junior-high school and 1,800 homes planned, no permits issued yet 10-No plans yet. Development not scheduled until 1990s