South Bay : Stepchild Image Quickly Fading as Area Tackles Boom

It’s called the South Bay, that stretch of land from National City south to the Mexican border, and it’s on the brink of an unprecedented building explosion fueled by relatively cheap land, pent-up demand, a robust economy and a group of local politicians hustling for growth.

Covering all of three cities--Chula Vista, Imperial Beach and National City--as well as a boot-shaped appendage of the City of San Diego and parts of San Diego County, the area sprawls from the Pacific and San Diego Bay to arid inland valleys and mesas, from the U.S. Naval Repair Base just north of National City to the edge of the United States. In all, the South Bay encompasses about 120 square miles.

What’s surprising--in a county that has lived on booming growth for 30 years--is that only now has large-scale development begun to protrude into the South Bay.

“This is one of the last places in the county that can experience a lot of growth and stay affordable,” said Mike Vogt, an industrial broker with Merrill Lynch Commercial Real Estate, whose specialty is the South Bay real estate market.

“Up until two or three years ago,” Vogt said, “there was not a lot of attention given to the area by large developers. Now you have a combination of available labor and the land. . . . You can’t hold it back.”

But critics fear there will be no holding back the problems either: crowded schools, overburdened streets and freeways, more people packed into more homes and apartments, polluted air, insufficient parks and open space--in short, a diminution of the qualities that attracted people to the South Bay in the first place.

The area is certainly populated, as it is home to about 245,000 people.

Despite the fact that many find it a pleasant, affordable place to live, the South Bay has for decades labored under the burden of an image problem.

Long and treeless boulevards, fast-food joints and haphazard strips of commercial businesses, acres of car lots, heavy industry, poor and blue-collar neighborhoods, toxic waste dumps, a heavily Latino population, low land values, cheap housing, inadequate planning, a backwater--those have been the area’s hallmarks, at least to outsiders.

The South Bay--like no other place in California--also labors with the ebb and flow of millions of undocumented workers from Mexico who wash through its canyons, river bottoms, freeways and city streets in their search for jobs. Though many are merely passing through on their way north, they are as much a part of life here--economically, culturally and in perception--as the land itself, which makes few physical distinctions between the United States and Mexico.

The images and reality have been compounded by a local political structure that, until recently, was weak and ineffective outside its own boundaries.

“The South Bay has been used too long . . . as the safety valve and dumping ground,” said former Imperial Beach mayor and current San Diego County Supervisor Brian Bilbray, an aggressive promoter of growth, particularly in the South Bay, which covers much of his district.

“Overall,” he said, “the area doesn’t have socioeconomic clout . . . and that’s why it suffers.”

Echoing that theme, Barry Ross, president of Robinhood Homes, a company that has been active in the South Bay since the early 1950s, said: “There are only so many accountants, lawyers and doctors living down here, though there are pockets like Bonita.

“This is blue collar. While things are changing, there are more of the bigger companies still in the North County, in places like Rancho Penasquitos,” Ross said. “From a political standpoint, there’s more clout up there.”

Traditionally, if you were a developer or politician, the place to live and work in San Diego County was in the north, in enclaves like La Jolla, Del Mar, La Costa, Rancho Santa Fe, Rancho Bernardo, or closer-in areas like Mission Hills and Point Loma.

Developers made fortunes in Kearny Mesa, not Otay Mesa. While land in Rancho Bernardo, Scripps Ranch and North City West was turned into vast housing tracts, Otay Mesa and eastern Chula Vista remained rural and Imperial Beach teetered on the edge of bankruptcy as it contended with Tijuana sewage polluting its beaches.

“It’s kind of been the stepchild,” explained Ted Owen, director of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce’s office in the Golden Triangle area east of La Jolla.

“Do you come from Des Moines, Iowa, to vacation in Chula Vista?”

But Owen is among the many who say that, although images die hard, change is slowly occurring.

Led by a home-grown contingent of young, pro-growth, pro-business politicians, the South Bay is actively pushing development, both along the water and inland.

“I think there’s going to be a significant transformation,” said Greg Cox, Chula Vista’s mayor, who is part of the new generation of South Bay politicians. “No longer is this a sleepy little town.”

“Ten years ago the only impression (of Chula Vista) was a series of auto dismantling firms, Rohr (Industries Inc.) and SDG&E;,” which has a large bayfront power plant, Cox said. “Unless someone got off Highway 5 . . . the impression was that there wasn’t anything really occurring.”

Ironically, the neglect has had one unexpected benefit. While bulldozers carved up North County, land in the South Bay--mainly east of Interstate 805--remained relatively untouched, leading to a vast reservoir of property, much of it in large, single-ownership parcels, which are easier and more economical to develop.

While an acre in the Golden Triangle may cost $1 million, an acre on Otay Mesa, adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border, costs around $75,000. This differential is also evident in the housing market.

For example, the price of a new South Bay house can be anywere from $10,000 to $30,000 less than a comparable house in the north, according to builders. These relative bargains, combined with some of the lowest interest rates in years, explain why people are waiting in line for weeks to buy affordable homes at developments such as EastLake.

“The land values are much more economical for builders and that is passed on in the end product,” said Kent Aden, project manager for EastLake Development, the huge residential-business-industrial complex in Chula Vista’s eastern foothills that will eventually be home to 30,000 people.

Since going on the market April 19, almost all the homes in the initial offerings at EastLake--the South Bay’s first so-called planned community--have been sold.

While EastLake has received much attention, it is only the first of several major residential developments planned for the South Bay by builders such as Pardee Construction Co. and Robinhood.

Lower land costs have also played an important role in transforming already developed sections of the South Bay, where new projects in old neighborhoods are responsible for a tremendous upsurge in new apartments, townhouses and condominiums--again at prices lower than found in the north.

In San Ysidro alone, San Diego city planning officials estimate that 1,000 multifamily units will be built each year for the next three years.

Projections by the San Diego Assn. of Governments show that, by the year 2000, multifamily housing units will outnumber single-family dwellings in National City, Chula Vista and San Ysidro, a border community annexed into San Diego 29 years ago.

Along with the 3,073-acre EastLake project, there are several other huge land holdings east of Interstate 805 that are in the hands of a few large companies, such as McMillin Development and Union Oil, which jointly own several thousand acres they are planning to develop.

In 20,000-acre Otay Mesa, sandwiched between the border and the Otay River valley, the pattern is similar. Ranchers and farmers there retained ownership of large plots of land. Now, as speculators and developers move in, that property is being sold and subdivided, primarily for industry.

Sometime in the next month, Sanyo Industries, the Japanese business giant, is expected to start first-phase construction on a 700,000-square-foot assembly and storage plant just north of the border crossing at Otay Mesa. It will be the first project of its kind on the mesa, according to Yasuo Sasaki, a Sanyo vice president.

The largest single landowner in the South Bay is United Enterprises, which owns about 24,000 acres and leases 10,000 more, a Texas-size chunk of real estate reaching from Chula Vista eastward nearly to Jamul. This property is so immense, it could easily fit two Mission Bays within its boundaries.

Representatives of United Enterprises have approached the county about developing their property--also known as Otay Ranch--although a formal, detailed proposal has not yet been made.

“This is the hole in the doughnut,” said Kaare Kjos, senior land planner for San Diego County, who says that eventual development by United Enterprises could add thousands more people to the region.

Mike Spata, a San Diego attorney who represents United Enterprises, says a formal proposal to amend the county’s general plan to allow building probably will be filed by the end of the year.

“We’re doing our internal planning now,” said Spata, who was reticent about discussing United Enterprises plans in detail. “We will propose a master-planned, phased community that would be self-sufficient with a variety of land uses . . . including residential, educational, open space, recreational--the gamut.”

Because of its sheer size, it will take United Enterprises several decades to reach its building limit, according to county planners. In this regard, it shares a trademark common to most properties east of Interstate 805, where construction is expected to continue well into the next century.

By the year 2000, population forecasters say, the onslaught of new growth--spanning industrial, residential and commercial--is expected to swell the South Bay’s population by about 58%, hitting about 400,000.

If that happens, the South Bay will outpace most of the San Diego region, with the exception of North County communities such as Carlsbad and Del Mar-Mira Mesa, which are expected to grow faster.

Equally significant is an expected increase in jobs, led principally by industrial growth in Otay Mesa, where San Diego city planners have projected 40,000 new jobs over the next 20 years. More bullish real estate brokers and developers are saying the area will eventually accommodate 70,000 workers.

Both planners and developers agree that the bulk of these new jobs will be blue-collar ones required by the assembly, light manufacturing, distribution and warehouse facilities slated to occupy Otay Mesa.

“Traditionally, employment has gone north of Mission Valley,” said E. Michael Stang, a principal planner for the City of San Diego. “What we’re talking about here is a labor pool from Mission Valley south. There’s a lot of unskilled labor in this area.”

In the midst of all the optimism surrounding the South Bay’s future, there are people questioning the consequences of large-scale new growth on streets, sewers, schools, quality of life and the environment. Some of these impacts are already evident.

“I think it will be just criminal if we allow all that land to get away and be paved over,” said Emily Durbin, a Sierra Club spokeswoman.

The Sierra Club has waged a legal battle against Chula Vista to stop the city from developing a $500-million, 681-acre bayfront project that includes a major hotel. Part of the project would cross habitat supporting two endangered species--the California least tern and the light-footed clapper rail--and an endangered plant, the saltmarsh bird’s beak.

There are also concerns over the future development of the Tijuana River valley, part of which is frequently awash in sewage from Tijuana.

But Durbin acknowledged that, until now, environmental groups for the most part have ignored the South Bay--adding yet another dimension to its neglect.

“Basically, we didn’t do much in the South Bay until the Chula Vista bayfront plan,” Durbin said.

Instead, the Sierra Club has focused its energies on North County, where most of its local members live.

For example, the impetus for the November approval of the Proposition A growth-control initiative came from North San Diego residents fed up and frustrated by rampant development.

“I think the South Bay has sort of an inferiority complex in the way it has been treated . . . and perhaps accurately so,” Durbin said. “There is a lot of open space land there and salt marshes, and as an amenity . . . it’s as valuable as the coastal lagoons and coastal bluffs in the North County area.”

Other people, such as Dan Pass, head of advance planning for Chula Vista, say that for many years most people in the South Bay couldn’t afford the luxury of debating issues affecting their quality of life. Their concerns, he said, were more immediate.

“If you just arrived from Mexico, you’re notably interested in getting settled, getting a car and money for a house, and these things are of cardinal importance compared to more esoteric things,” Pass said.

“You have a different type of people in the north; university-educated people who are more sensitive to the environment. For a long while here, you had ranchers, blue-collar workers, immigrants--people struggling to get a piece of the American dream.”

And yet, Pass said, real problems endemic to urbanizing, such as more traffic congestion, noise, air pollution, higher government spending on services and the like, exist.

“If you put all these (developments) together, you can kill the environmental quality if we don’t plan it right,” Pass said.

Although they may be few in number, some South Bay residents have stepped foward to criticize their community’s headlong plunge into urbanization.

“I think it’s going to become another Orange County and that’s sad,” said Gretchen Burkey, a Bonita resident and member of that community’s local planning group. “Development is premature and there’s a lot of leap-frogging going on.

“The new philosophy down here is that bigger is better. I think they were premature with EastLake . . . the area is growing so rapidly we can’t handle all the traffic now. I feel very depressed about what’s happening.”

Negative effects from rapid and dense development are already evident in some overcrowded schools, principally in San Ysidro, which is being inundated by a wave of large apartment projects.

“The rapid and apparently uncontrolled growth of apartment complexes in the San Ysidro area has alarmed the community and many public agencies,” Supt. Anthony J. Trujillo of the Sweetwater Union High School District said in a letter to San Diego Councilman Ulvaldo Martinez, who represents San Ysidro.

“In our discussions with other public agencies in the South Bay, it is our mutual consensus that without a logical growth pattern . . . the South Bay area below the Otay River . . . will become a ghetto. High-density apartment complexes located in sequential rows throughout the town are destroying the community’s ability to handle the population.”

That April letter was followed this month by a school district resolution asking the City Council for an outright building moratorium.

Even the staunchest boosters of growth say that, if existing communities and neighborhoods become overburdened by traffic, noise, pollution and a lack of government services and open space, the South Bay’s political leaders will have merely repeated the same mistakes that have dogged the North County, risking a backlash by frustrated voters.

At the same time, these proponents contend, the area shouldn’t be denied the opportunity to develop.

“The next five years will make or break the South Bay,” said county Supervisor Bilbray. “We’re learning from the mistakes up north.”

It’s unfair, he said, for outsiders and environmental groups to complain about proposed development plans along the bay, for example, when San Diego has had virtually free reign to build projects such as Shelter and Harbor islands.

At stake is a struggle, Bilbray said, “between the haves and the have-nots.”

MONDAY: South Bay cities weigh their tomorrows.