Developers, Politicians Wary : Slow-Growth Forces Gain in Escondido

The anti-growth sentiment spreading inland from North County’s coastal communities has now crested like a tidal wave onto Escondido, upsetting an Establishment that for decades had promoted the idea that bigger is better.

The slow-growth attitude is creating anxiety among developers and bitterness among politicians whose policies were designed to forge Escondido as North County’s kingpin community.

The fast-paced growth in Escondido, particularly the recent rush of apartment construction, has created a powerful anti-growth backlash.

The growth has gotten out of hand, many residents are saying. All around town, new apartment complexes have sprung up and have hung out huge banners beckoning tenants, sometimes with free-rent incentives.

Those banners might as well be red capes being waved in front of a raging bull. Given events in recent months, it signals nothing short of a full-scale charge by slow-growth activists who, until recently, were about as effective as a gnat trying to unsettle Paul Bunyan.

Unlike past efforts by smaller slow-growth groups, 1987 growth foes smell success because this time they have a stronger case: jammed intersections, overflowing elementary schools and the perception that avocado groves and pastures are being turned into apartment parking lots.

These slow-growthers are frolicking with the realization that maybe this time they’re in a position to make some changes.

Their expectations are not unfounded:

- Last June, pro-growth Councilman Ernie Cowan, a local businessman, was reelected by the skin of his teeth, narrowly beating a grass-roots slow-growth candidate who spent a fraction of what Cowan did.

- Earlier this month, slow-growthers turned in referendum petitions to pressure the City Council into overturning a general plan amendment calling for the construction of a 256-unit residential complex and an 80-bed convalescent home on property now zoned for half-acre and one-acre single-family homes. About 4,000 signatures are required to force a special election on the issue; nearly 7,000 were collected in 30 days, and they are now being verified by the county’s registrar of voters. On March 11, the City Council will consider simply overturning its earlier approval of the development.

- The backers of that referendum have formed the Greater Escondido Homeowners Assn., a loose-knit organization intending to become a citywide lobbying group on behalf of residential property owners, to counter the political influence wielded by the Chamber of Commerce, Realtors and other established groups historically aligned with growth and development.

- On Thursday, another citizens’ group, Citizens for Growth Management, began circulating another petition--this one proposing an ordinance that would slow growth by dramatically limiting the City Council’s discretion in increasing zoning density in the city.

Given this momentum, slow-growthers see next year’s City Council elections as an opportunity to turn out Cowan’s two allies who fill out the council’s three-man pro-growth majority, and to replace them with politicians less inclined to give ground to developers.

The 1988 targets are Mayor Jim Rady and Councilman Doug Best, each of whom has championed virtually unbridled growth and development since their elections in 1976.

Rady says he doesn’t plan to run for reelection. “I’m discouraging support and I’m not raising money,” he said in a recent interview.

Best says that, politically, the decision of running for reelection might be out of his hands, if the slow-growth forces are able to sustain their momentum for another 18 months.

“If we were to run today, there wouldn’t be a chance, in my opinion, for Jim or Ernie or myself to be elected,” Best said. “This (slow-growth activism) is as serious as it’s ever been in Escondido.”

Both Rady and Best say slow-growthers are naive and short-sighted and will do the city more harm than good by stifling the local economy. Rady, for instance, points to the construction of a new civic center, plans for downtown redevelopment, construction of an auto sales park and the first-year success story of North County Fair shopping center as signs that the city is a better place to live because of the council majority’s pro-growth philosophy.

Furthermore, Best says slow-growthers are in fact no-growthers and no-growth is nothing short of un-American.

“I cannot conceive of anything more selfish than telling an American citizen that you don’t have the right to live where you want,” he said. And it’s a community’s job, he said, to provide housing for those who want it.

But Rady and Cowan, in the face of the outpouring of anti-growth sentiment, now concede that perhaps the city has grown too much, too fast.

In his state-of-the-city address to the Chamber of Commerce last month, Rady, a banker, surprised his audience--which had expected to hear him sing the praises of growth and development--by conceding that growth does not seem to be paying its own way in Escondido and “perhaps now we need to reexamine the philosophies of the ‘60s and ‘70s.”

Growth per se isn’t the culprit, Rady said; the guilty party, he said, is the City Council, which has been hoarding the millions of dollars generated by developer impact fees to help mitigate the pressures growth has brought on the city. It’s time to spend that money to widen streets, install traffic signals and make other improvements to make growth a little more palatable.

Rady, however, carefully and specifically did not embrace the city’s historical slow-growth advocates and their leader, City Councilman Jerry Harmon, long identified as the city’s most articulate slow-growth champion.

Instead, Rady called on “the mainstream, the responsible portion of the community” to work together to better manage growth.

“Don’t overreact to quick initiatives and referenda and petitions,” he pleaded. “Let’s worth together--the mainstream--to acknowledge, to identify and to solve the problems of this community.”

Rady said later that he wasn’t so much reacting to the upsurge in slow-growth politics as he was coming to his own realization that Escondido’s public facilities and amenities aren’t keeping pace with growth.

But Harmon, gloating that the mayor was taking a second look at his own bigger-is-better attitude, contended that the mayor was “trying to catch up with where the mainstream already is going.”

Cowan suggests that Escondido has been the beneficiary--or the victim, depending on one’s point of view--of a vibrant growth economy in recent years--both in terms of lower interest rates for new construction loans, and a strong regional economy creating new jobs and attracting migration into the county from outside the area.

“The past few years have been a very good time (economically), and we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. Some things have been approved, especially apartment complexes, that maybe shouldn’t have been, in our zeal to meet federal housing standards,” he said, referring to federal grants dispensed with the promise that a city will provide a well-rounded mix of housing for different levels of income earners.

Escondido is one of the fastest-growing cities in the county. According to the most recent figures compiled by San Diego Assn. of Governments, the region’s umbrella planning agency, the population of Carlsbad grew by 8.7% in 1985 and Vista grew by 5.2%, while Escondido’s population grew by 4.4%. Oceanside grew by 4.3%, San Marcos by 4.2% and Poway by 4.1%. Figures for 1986 have not yet been compiled.

Overall, Sandag reported, North County is growing faster than the balance of San Diego County.

Now Escondido is catching up with other North County cities, which already have well-established slow-growth movements.

- Carlsbad voters in November approved not one but two measures designed to put a limit on the city’s population growth. Receiving greater support was the proposal by the City Council itself, setting the city’s ultimate population at 135,000--about 2 1/2 times the current population. The other measure, a citizens’ initiative, called for a limit on the number of new homes to be constructed any given year.

- San Marcos voters in November passed an advisory measure asking the City Council to call for public votes each time an increase in residential density is sought by a developer. The City Council this month ordered a 45-day moratorium on new apartment and condominium construction while it studies growth management.

- Vista and Oceanside voters will decide on their own, Carlsbad-type growth initiatives in April.

Escondido’s population in January, 1986, was estimated by Sandag at 79,605, up from 64,355 in 1980. Today it is the fifth-largest city in San Diego County; the city’s ultimate population may exceed 200,000, planners say--not only due to additional development within the city limits but also because of anticipated annexations.

It is more than just a perception that Escondido has experienced a flurry of apartment growth in recent years. Throughout the county, according to Sandag and Escondido city records, multi-unit residential construction outpaced single-family home construction in 1975 by a ratio of about 1.5 to 1; in Escondido the ratio of multi-unit to single-family construction was about 3 to 1--2,017 apartment units to 712 single-family homes.

The apartment-building frenzy continued to a slightly lesser degree in 1986 in Escondido, according to figures from the city’s Building Department. Last year, 1,787 apartment units were built in Escondido, compared to 1,404 single-family homes.

“If anything, we have been derelict in allowing too many apartments to be built,” said Cowan, noting that “apartments are a political lightning rod” in focusing criticism of excessive growth.

If in fact growth in Escondido does moderate--as just about everyone now expects--there may be a rush for accepting credit or laying blame.

Some suggest that apartment construction will slow down because of market conditions, not politics.

“Growth is a function of economy, and the economy is slowing down. The whole process is an ebb and flow,” Cowan offered. “We’re heading for a slowdown, just naturally and even if the City Council did nothing about it.”

A case in point is Don Short, who took advantage a few years ago of a City Council incentive to developers to build additional senior-citizen housing by offering increased density bonuses. He built two apartment complexes near the intersection of Centre City Parkway and El Norte Parkway, totaling 551 units on less than 20 acres, and he said he is done building, for now.

“Growth is self-regulating,” Short said. “You had what amounts to a shortage in housing which encouraged persons like myself to build more housing, and we had a tendency to overdo that, to build too much housing. Now we have a surplus, and a problem marketing our product. We’re probably overbuilt for a while. That’s just the way things work.”

Others, like Jerry Harmon, say the City Council majority’s arrogance in approving new development over the objections of neighborhood groups has backfired; developers are now the victim of their own success.

“Even when there were 20 or 30 residents opposing a zone change, the council majority would still just brush them aside--as they had done hundreds of times before. They could get away with that because the people have been disorganized,” Harmon said.

“But now, when a neighborhood stands up and says, ‘Hey, we’ve had enough,’ it’s getting a lot easier for me to say, ‘Guess what, you’re not the only ones, and I’ve got the names and addresses of a whole bunch of others. Let’s put something together with some long-lasting political clout.’ So that’s what we’re in the process of doing, and it’s no secret.”

Harmon insists he is not endorsing no-growth policies, but simply sticking to the city’s general plan that was drafted in 1969. Had the city stuck to the planning blueprint, he said, there wouldn’t be the outcry that is being heard today; instead, however, the City Council majority has consistently voted to increase zoning densities, often overturning its Planning Commission which usually has voted for more moderate growth.

Even if the City Council were to stop making zoning and general plan amendments, growth would continue and major projects are still looming ahead:

- A general plan amendment already has been approved allowing Daley Ranch, a 3,048-acre site north of Dixon Lake, to be developed with 3,263 units. The area had been zoned by the county Board of Supervisors for one unit for every five acres, but the city annexed the land and changed the zoning. The property owner is searching for a developer to build the project.

- A similar general plan amendment calls for the development of 640 homes on 900 acres of Cloverdale Ranch, on the eastern fringe of the city north of the San Diego Wild Animal Park. That region, too, previously had been zoned by the county for one unit for every five acres.

- A developer has won approval to build 510 homes on mostly small lots, plus a golf course, in a project known as Palos Vista, northwest of the Escondido Country Club neighborhood. The builder has since asked the city for permission to scrap the golf course and, instead, build an additional 272 homes. The property had previously been zoned by the county for one unit per five acres.

- On the southwest side of town, another developer is constructing more than 200 homes on half-acre lots in an area known as Rancho Verde.

Mayor Rady said the city is better off increasing the zoning density on large parcels of land around the city, and to guide its construction under the umbrella of a single developer, than to pass the buck.

“Do we, in our time, try to guarantee that the inevitable development is quality development?” Rady asked. “I say yes, rather than to pretend it won’t develop, and let some future generation take a crack at it.”