After Years of Unchecked Growth : Developers Encounter New Opposition

Not so long ago, the San Gabriel Valley was a choice locale for any developer with a bank account and a big idea.

A project that turned virgin land into a checkerboard of tiny bungalows. A shopping mall wedged into the middle of a business district like an ostrich egg in a swallow’s nest. Low-budget condominiums that deluged unprepared communities with newcomers. All of these were proposed by developers, and all were given carte blanche approval by local governments in the wide-open spaces east of Los Angeles, critics have alleged.

“For years, the attitude of city councils was: ‘If it’s good for the economy, let’s put it in,’ ” says Christopher Sutton, a lawyer representing several homeowner groups fighting major developments in the area.

There was little thought about the big picture, critics frequently charge. “On the whole, they just slapped up buildings and built to the absolute limits of zoning restrictions,” contends Pasadena preservationist Anthony Thompson, talking of that city’s most recent period of accelerated development in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Opposition Grows

But today, builders who show up with sheaves of plans and tract maps are liable to find every step they take countered by a well-organized opposition, whose ranks often include members of the city council as well as sign-waving protesters.

Bemoaning changes in their once-tranquil neighborhoods, protesting the loss of wildernesses to tract developments and complaining, above all, about the endless vistas of traffic, people are riled up. And they are spurring many city governments to take measures to put the brakes on construction projects that threaten neighborhoods.

Developers and their supporters argue that such constraints raise the cost of housing and are dealing young families out of the housing market. “The immediate beneficiary is the property owner” who can command a higher price for his house as the supply dwindles, says South Pasadena condominium developer David Mi. “It’s like a Catch-22. The consumer ends up paying more for a home.”

In many cases, it means not buying a home at all. “For every action there’s a reaction,” says San Gabriel City Administrator Robert Clute, whose city has elected not to restrain multiunit construction. “Suddenly those single-family homes are going for $300,000 or $400,000. That’s not a price a 25-year-old or a 30-year-old can usually afford to pay.”

City officials often defend local development projects as the source of financial health, particularly in cities with thriving downtown commercial sections, such as Pasadena and Monrovia.

But increasingly, the apparent laissez-faire attitude toward development in some of the diverse communities of the San Gabriel Valley is giving way to stubborn resistance.

Dean Anderson calls them “dingbats”--rigidly drawn little housing plots that developers want to pound into the gentle green hills just south of his property in Rowland Heights, an unincorporated community south of West Covina.

He describes the layout of the would-be homes scornfully. “A five-foot walkway separating the houses, a little patio out back, and that’s about it,” says the retired civil engineer, who moved to the tranquil area of open pasture land and one-acre lots 28 years ago.

That was back when you were liable to spook pheasants if you walked through Anderson’s backyard and when deer often ambled past like pedestrians on a city sidewalk. Slowly, though, the developments have been moving in. “You can’t stop progress,” says Anderson with a shrug. “You can’t stop somebody from building on his own land. But you can regulate it.”

For more than two years, Anderson and fellow residents of the small community have been leading a successful fight against a plan by Walnut-based Shea Homes to build 1,500 homes and a shopping center into the La Habra Hills. They have hounded the County Board of Supervisors and the Regional Planning Commission, drawn up a plan for “controlled” development of the hills and, when county Supervisor Pete Schabarum agreed to meet with them two weeks ago, showed up 300 strong, with signs and fiery speeches.

So far, Shea Homes, which did not return phone calls to The Times, has been forced to shrink its housing plans to 744 units, and the targeted ground-breaking date has been pushed back until next year.

“They’d be building up there right now if it weren’t for us,” says Anderson.

Doug Peake drives through Alhambra and, despite the signs of construction everywhere, he sees decay. “Two years ago, this was a nice ranch-style home,” he says, gesturing angrily at a large half-built structure that bristles with peaked roofs and windowpanes. “Now it’s 25 apartment units.”

Multiunit structures seem to sprout everywhere--20 new apartments on Woodward Avenue, 23 condominiums on Palmetto Drive, a multistory commercial development on Valley Boulevard--and they’re pushing aside Alhambra’s long-held idea of itself as a tranquil, manageable “small town,” Peake contends.

That’s not progress, suggests Peake, a schoolteacher who ran for the City Council last year on a “no-growth” platform and lost by an eyelash. “The word is impaction ,” he says; it means overcrowding, being jammed in, like teeth in a jaw too small to accommodate them.

Peake’s contention that Alhambra residents are being crowded out by newcomers gets some grudging support from city officials, who acknowledge that traffic is often close to gridlock during peak travel hours, the Police Department is undermanned for a city of 71,000 and schools are close to bursting.

An amateur at politics, Peake took his case to the voters last fall. First, he and supporters tried to get a no-growth initiative on the ballot; then Peake himself took on Gloria Messina for a City Council seat. Both campaigns failed (Peake lost by 293 votes out of more than 13,000 cast), though the political pros marveled at the fervor they aroused.

The City Council has responded by adopting changes in the city’s general plan, cutting the maximum allowable expansion of Alhambra’s population by more than 25%. And the no-growth forces have vowed they’ll be back for the 1988 election with a candidate who shares their views.

When the county Parks and Recreation Department last fall handed out some sketchily drawn plans to put apartments, theme villages, restaurants, hotels, 5,000 new parking spaces and an aerial tram in sylvan Bonelli Park, some residents of San Dimas acted quickly.

Describing the plan as an attempt to turn a huge chunk of unspoiled parkland into a Disneyland-like “fun zone,” they patched together an opposition coalition, jammed a public hearing with protesters and started telephoning legislators and state officials.

“The plan is tragically short-sighted,” said activist Denis Bertone, co-chairman of the Coalition to Save Bonelli Park, standing dolefully on a bluff overlooking a stand of oak trees on the bank of a small stream, where parking lots and a 3,000-seat amphitheater would be built. “It sacrifices the future for momentary monetary gains.”

Traffic was foremost in some opponents’ minds. Raging Waters, an amusement attraction in the park, already draws hundreds of thousands of visitors in the summer, they said, and the eastern end of the Foothill Freeway, which skirts the park, is clotted with traffic during rush hours. “How much more traffic and pollution can an area absorb?” demanded one coalition member.

But they worried about the loss of wilderness parkland, too. “Wildlife can’t be sustained on parking lots and tennis courts,” says Bertone.

So far, the two sides have fought to a draw. The county, under pressure from the coalition (700 strong, leaders claim), has scaled down its proposal for the park, which is named after the late county Supervisor Frank Bonelli, a development booster. But there are major battles ahead, according to opponents, who say they are prepared to go to court if the plan stands.

The “no growth/slow growth” movement, as some developers have dubbed the diverse collection of municipalities across the country which have imposed development restraints or where residents have forced builders to scale down proposed projects, has arrived in the San Gabriel Valley.

While development-minded cities such as West Covina, Pomona and Baldwin Park continue to make big plans, South Pasadena, Alhambra, Rosemead, Monterey Park, Pasadena and San Marino have put restrictions on the building of multiunit apartment buildings.

In at least a dozen other communities, such as Azusa, Diamond Bar, Rowland Heights and San Gabriel, residents are rebelling against sweeping new development plans, and people all across the San Gabriel Valley are fretting about the prospect of unbridled growth in their communities.

Watch your backyard, advise activists, who often portray developers as sharklike profit seekers with little concern for the communities where they build. Says one environmentalist working against the development of Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco wilderness: “If there’s any piece of land that hasn’t been built upon, you’d better keep your eye on it.”

“If there was a plan to build a nuclear waste dump, they’d just line up to do it,” Alhambra’s Doug Peake says of local developers.

Motivations Vary

The motivations for resistance are varied. Some anti-growth advocates worry about preserving the small-town character of their communities. Some want to protect historic buildings or the natural environment. Some, it has been charged, want to stop the influx of Asian immigrants into the San Gabriel Valley.

All are concerned about traffic.

“That’s usually what brings it to the surface,” says Beverly Hills-based urban consultant Christopher Leinberger. “Growth is taking place in places nobody expected it. People find a tranquil semi-rural community, and all of a sudden, five years later, they’ve got traffic congestion and they’ve got office parks growing up next to their property.”

According to slow-growth leaders, the waters have been stirred to a froth recently by two factors: the increasing profitability of multiunit dwellings and some provocative predictions from regional planners about a gridlocked San Gabriel Valley with wall-to-wall people.

“When there was double-digit inflation, people weren’t so concerned,” said John Bernardi, city manager of South Pasadena, which last fall put a 60-unit-a-year cap on new development. “But when interest rates got back down to about 9%, the construction of apartments and condominiums started (to make financial sense). The profits were there again. Suddenly, the city had to worry about developers buying out whole blocks of single-family homes and replacing them with high-density condominiums. We felt we were a prime target for development.”

Supply and Demand

Interest rates could go back up, regional planners suggest, but the supply-and-demand dynamic may be sufficient to keep the development pot boiling.

According to the Southern California Assn. of Governments, the East San Gabriel Valley--stretching roughly from West Covina to Pomona and from the Orange County line to the San Gabriel Mountains--will experience by far the greatest rate of population growth of any region in Los Angeles County between now and the year 2010. The population of the area, with its stretches of still-undeveloped real estate, will increase by 57%, SCAG researchers say--from 740,000 to about 1.2 million.

The Pasadena/Glendale area, with a predicted growth rate of almost 21%, will be the third-fastest-growing region in the county, lagging half a percentage point behind the San Fernando Valley, researchers say. The region’s population will increase from 1.2 million to 1.5 million.

Traffic, one of the major by-products of rapid development, will increase in quantum leaps, according to SCAG, as the San Gabriel Valley becomes the major east-west corridor connecting new housing in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties with new jobs in Los Angeles.

‘Greatest Needs’

Again, the East San Gabriel Valley will catch the brunt of it. “The subregion is one of the two with the greatest needs,” said SCAG researcher Judy Hamerslough. (The other is Southeast Orange County.)

SCAG has predicted that, by the year 2010, more than 85% of the time motorists spend traveling in the East San Gabriel Valley during rush hours will be spent in delay--that is, at speeds “less than free flow,” said Hamerslough.

The prospects frighten many. In communities such as Diamond Bar and Rowland Heights, some streets are already being used as high-speed shortcuts for freeway motorists during peak hours, residents complain.

Phyllis Papen, president of the Diamond Bar Improvement Assn., pulls out a map to show how motorists, encountering traffic jams on the 57 and 60 freeways, race through her community along Golden Springs Drive and Diamond Bar Boulevard in an effort to make up time. “In the past year alone, there’s been a 141% increase in accidents on Golden Springs,” she said.

More of the Same

Diamond Bar is bracing for more of the same as the soon-to-to-built Gateway Corporate Center on Grand Avenue, with a total of 100,000 square feet of new office space in 23 parcels, gets under way.

The picture is similar in Rowland Heights.

Sandy Grinkey, a member of the Rowland Heights Coordinating Council, talks about complaints from communities along Fullerton Road, which motorists have discovered as an alternate route between Orange County and the Pomona Freeway. “La Habra Heights has fender-benders,” she says. “We have deaths. There are a lot of questions in people’s minds.”

The Los Angeles County sheriff’s station in the City of Industry reported 10 accidents on the Rowland Heights section of Fullerton Road during one three-month period late last year, including one fatality.

The road would be the main artery into Shea Homes’ proposed 744-unit development.

Major Factor

Traffic has been a major factor in slow-growth actions in, among other cities, Azusa, where homeowners are resisting the conversion of a golf course into a 1,164-unit housing development and industrial park; Claremont, where voters last year turned thumbs down on a 340-unit apartment complex, and West Covina, where homeowners have forced a development company to reshape a condominium project at a lower density than it had planned.

In the western part of the region, it’s not just gridlock that people complain about. All those new condominium residents are overburdening municipal services, anti-growth organizers say.

In Alhambra, for example, “some of our grade schools are on double session,” says Councilman Michael Blanco. “We have sewage overflowing into the streets. I’ve had people call me to say their insurance rates have gone up because Alhambra’s streets are so crowded there are more accidents.”

School Overflows

Alhambra High School’s burgeoning student body of 3,400 makes it one of the largest in the San Gabriel Valley. “There are classes in the auditorium, there are classes in nearby churches,” said Lawrie Hamilton, a research technician for the school district. “And of course, they have trailers in every available open space.”

The city manager’s office says Alhambra has been making do with some management innovations--such as using canine patrols and civilian employees to beef up the police--but officials acknowledge that there are frequent traffic problems. “It’s from a combination of things--more residents, the failure to complete the Long Beach Freeway and other factors,” says assistant city manager Mike Paules.

Nevertheless, the city last fall modified its general plan, reducing the maximum allowable expansion of the population by more than 25%. “One of the things that residents feel very strongly about is keeping Alhambra’s small-town atmosphere,” Paules said.

Such growth-restraining measures are becoming commonplace. Besides Alhambra and South Pasadena, Rosemead, Pasadena and Monterey Park have taken similar actions.

Racism Alleged

Opponents of the measures say that they inhibit the natural growth of a community and that, in some cases, they reflect racist attitudes, in response to the recent massive influx of Taiwanese, Chinese and Southeast Asians.

“There’s certainly been public comment about condominium construction,” said San Gabriel administrator Clute. “Frankly, the comments have been more or less anti-Asian. People are frightened about an invasion. They want to keep San Gabriel the way it is. That may be desirable, but it can’t be done.”

Allegations of racism and distrust of outsiders have been made in other communities, especially Monterey Park, a burgeoning center of Asian population, where the City Council has imposed a yearlong moratorium on multiunit construction.

Clute contends that, because of the current high costs of housing, communities like San Gabriel are being forced to reassess their ideas about home ownership. “Condominiums have taken the place of the single-family home of 20 or 30 years ago,” he says. “Because of land values nowadays, you can’t build single-family homes on some property. That’s why it’s not feasible for us to downzone.”

But rancorous citizen response this week to a proposed commercial complex in Clute’s city shows just how hot development issues can get in the San Gabriel Valley. More than 150 residents jammed a City Council hearing Tuesday night on a zoning change required to build a proposed hotel and restaurant on the 11.5-acre site of a former drive-in theater.

One speaker after another stood up to excoriate the depressed-looking council members for allowing “uncontrolled” development in the city and to speak longingly of a “lost” San Gabriel of single-family homes, friendly people and singing birds that existed before developers began building condominiums there. So many trees have been lost to development in recent years, protested several speakers, that birds have taken to nesting on people’s front porches.

“I used to tell people that they named the city after me,” said Gabriel Valenzuela. “But I don’t do that anymore. I’m not proud of the city. . . . I’m 21 years old. It’s time for me to look for a new place to live. I know it’s not going to be in San Gabriel.”

So overdeveloped has the community become, said some speakers, that traffic is worse on local streets during rush hours than on freeways. “I take a bus called the Freeway Flyer home from work,” complained Edith Aguilar. “It takes 10 or 15 minutes from Wilshire Boulevard to Del Mar Boulevard on the freeway. But it takes 22 minutes just for the bus to get up Del Mar. In another five years we’re going to have gridlock.”

Some residents complained about the quality of the condominiums going up and the lack of advance warning to neighbors. “There are no patios, no pools, no places for kids to play,” Gary Meredith said of the new multiunit buildings. “They’re just cement driveways with some rooms above.”

“I had just started remodeling my house when I looked out my back door and saw these condominiums going up,” said Manny Gutierrez. “Now I’ve got dirt in my pool and I’m probably going to lose my natural breeze, because they’re putting up a cinder-block wall. I wish I had known before I put $25,000 into the house.”

Though there were some anti-Asian remarks at the meeting, many hastened to reject bigotry. “It’s a sensitive issue,” said Meredith. “People here are open and unbigoted. But we’re watching a wave of humanity coming here from Asia. People are just freaked out about what’s happening where they live.”

The council postponed for 30 days a decision on whether to approve the zoning change.

New Levels

The no growth/slow growth movement seems to reach new levels of sophistication in Pasadena, a development-minded city with aspirations to be a mecca for corporate headquarters.

All the elements of the condo resistance are there, city officials point out. “We did a survey to get people’s views,” says city Director William Cathey, who was defeated in the March 10 election. “A surprising number brought up the problems they associated with the increasing number of multifamily units. We were a little surprised at how strong the feeling was, even from people already living in those kinds of buildings.”

But there’s also a tradition of high-minded social activism on environmental and preservation issues, with both liberals and conservatives carrying the ball, longtime residents say. “The conservatives see it as the preservation of their investments in their homes,” says attorney Sutton, whose law office, Gronemeir, Barker & Huerta, is located in the city. “Liberals see it as controlling irresponsible, unaesthetic, environmentally destructive development.”

The focus of this kind of slow-growthism has been on saving buildings like the Huntington Sheraton Hotel or blocking development of the city’s arroyos, long tongues of wilderness that thrust into populated areas. “We have a city where coyotes and deer can run right through urban areas,” says George McQuilkin, chairman of the Friends of the Arroyo Seco, strolling through the wooded area near the Rose Bowl early one morning. “It would be a shame to see that slope over there loaded with cantilevered houses.”

But most Pasadena leaders acknowledge that downtown development during the 1970s was instrumental in restoring the city to financial health. “It was a matter of either falling into the swamp of economic decay or turning the city around,” said Mayor John Crowley. Projects such as Plaza Pasadena and the BankAmerica office building, he added, “in effect succeeded in regenerating downtown Pasadena.”

Even the activists in Pasadena say they’re far from being “no-growth” extremists. “We’re not white-knuckled fanatics, chaining ourselves to fences to stop the developers,” says Kit-Bacon Gressett, a leader of Pasadena Heritage, an organization dedicated to preserving historic structures. “The issue of growth-versus-no-growth is a bogus one. The real question is what kind of growth do we want? Very few people around here will sit there, look you in the eye and say they don’t want growth.”

No-Growth City

But that, to the envy of some adjacent cities, is exactly what they do in San Marino, the archetypal no-growth city. The small, affluent town, which seems to have enough terra-cotta tile to pave a freeway to Mexico City, is firmly dug in as a community of single-family homes, despite increasing pressure for expansion.

“Basically, it’s a no-growth town, and it will always be that way,” insists City Councilman Paul Crowley, looking you in the eye. “It would require a massive change in philosophy to change that, and it will never happen under the current city fathers.”

Nevertheless, city officials acknowledge, there are strong pressures to allow home expansion in San Marino, whose residential areas have been zoned for single-family homes since the town was incorporated in 1913. “Twenty years ago, if someone needed more room, the usual solution was to go out and buy a bigger house,” said James Hutter, chairman of the Planning Commission, which handles up to six requests a month for permission to build second stories or extensions.

When Proposition 13 froze property taxes at 1978 levels, it created a “tremendous pressure to stay put,” said Crowley.

Now, when a growing family decides to sell one house and buy another, there is a reassessment at current value. “There are situations where people living in one house are paying $2,000 in taxes, while new residents in an identical house pay $4,000.” said Crowley. The common solution in San Marino is, therefore, to expand at home.

The no growth/slow growth forces in the San Gabriel Valley don’t think of themselves as belonging to a movement. Their concerns rarely extend beyond their own city lines. Their achievements could hardly compare with, say, Los Angeles’ Proposition U ballot initiative in last November’s election, which put rigid new development constraints on 85% of the city’s commercial land.

But they have already had some successes in the hardball politics of development.

One piece of the proposed Bonelli Park development proposal, for example, was a 220-unit apartment building on 32 acres at the eastern edge of the park. “The county described it as an ‘unkept’ site,” says Denis Bertone huffily. “We said that being unkept wasn’t an argument for building apartments on it but for cleaning it up.”

Bertone’s coalition dug out the document of agreement that the state had required when it turned the park over to the county in 1970. There, as they suspected, were some crucial words about how the county was supposed to maintain the park: Bonelli Park must be “wholly devoted to park and recreational uses,” it said. The housing plan seemed a clear violation of the agreement, said Bertone.

But there remained the job of convincing the county. Coalition members contacted state parks officials and Assemblyman Bill Lancaster (R-Covina), who expressed their doubts about building housing in the park.

The county’s withdrawal of the housing proposal last month--citing “restrictions in the deed”--was like the crack of a bat, propelling a ball toward the outfield fence, says Bertone.

Not the game-winner, he acknowledged. “A small victory.”