Kudos for Growth Caps

It is difficult, with overflowing sewers and increasingly clotted traffic, to fault the San Diego City Council’s action last week approving a temporary ceiling on new housing units. Indeed, the council should be praised and encouraged to move ahead.

The signs are everywhere that the community is losing its patience with what many perceive as runaway growth. And though there is a possible economic downside to the council’s vote, the action is a laudable response to the cry that San Diego should be growing more intelligently.

So pervasive is that cry that a proposed citizens’ initiative to put much tougher limits on new homes may have qualified for the ballot and passed if the council had not acted.

Instead, the council opted for a more orderly method, and in so doing made San Diego the largest city in the country to impose such strict growth controls.

The preliminary action--the council’s first to restrict, rather than merely manage, growth--sets a limit of 8,000 new housing units in the next year. That is a decrease of about 50% from 1986.

That 8,000 figure is a compromise, greater than environmentalists sought but slightly less than what the Planning Department and the Mayor’s Growth Management Task Force recommended.

The new measure, called the Interim Development Ordinance, is to be in effect for as long as 18 months. It is intended as a holding action on development while the council begins updating the 1979 Growth Management Plan.

The council additionally imposed “impact fees” on inner-city development and made special efforts to protect environmentally sensitive areas, such as canyons and wetlands. The lopsided 8-1 vote on such a controversial and far-reaching measure, one of the most important in recent city history, says much for Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s understated, behind-the-scenes leadership style. But there is much yet to be done.

Although the council was quick to congratulate itself, saying it is “now in charge of governing this city,” it, in truth, approved only the broad guidelines, leaving many of the details to be resolved.

Especially crucial are the questions of how the 8,000 permits will be allocated among developers and what areas of the city will be exempted from the ordinance.

By administrative fiat, the cutoff for permit applications was set at last April 29. Even so, permits already have been approved for almost 17,000 dwelling units, more than were built in 1986. So the economic effect on one of San Diego’s largest industries--home building--will be deferred.

But that effect surely will be felt, and one of the knottiest tasks will be to minimize the hardship in the construction industry while still honoring the spirit and letter of the ordinance for the good of San Diego’s future.

As with any act this complicated, imponderables abound. Will this law have the effect of shoehorning growth into other areas of San Diego County? Will exempted neighborhoods gain or lose quality development? To what degree will the ordinance be a factor in the upcoming council elections, already of historic proportions because of the number of seats at stake?

Most important, what’s going to happen in the next 30 days? Clearly, a lot of elbows will be thrown over the next month or so, as the city bureaucracy struggles with a plan for implementation and as the council members face up to the flak they will receive for taking such a strong stand. Perhaps even more telling will be the temptation to tinker with the spirit of the ordinance during the next year and a half that it is in effect.

Meanwhile, kudos are due the council for its action. We urge it to be resolute and even-handed in the months ahead.