San Diego’s Paradox: Growth Encouraged, Limited at Same Time

Hoping to stem the tide of urban immigrants, the San Diego City Council two weeks ago passed a landmark ordinance designed to check growth by drastically cutting back the number of housing units that can be built in the next 18 months.

Meanwhile, the same growth- conscious City Council is shelling out millions of dollars a year to lure a steady stream of tourists, conventioneers and industries to San Diego with the promise of a balmy climate and sun-drenched beaches.

It is an apparent contradiction that has not gone unnoticed during the most recent public debate over how to control San Diego’s burgeoning growth.

And now, some are saying that cities such as San Diego that are scrambling like mad to put the cork on development have themselves been stoking the fires of urban expansion through promotions and boosterism.

‘Pure Hypocrisy’

“I think it’s pure hypocrisy,” said Sanford Goodkin, a longtime local real estate analyst and now national executive director of Peat Marwick/Goodkin Consulting Group.

Goodkin argues that every dollar spent by government to attract tourists to San Diego is a dollar that encourages growth.

Such civic coups as building a new waterfront convention center and being host to the 1988 Super Bowl will underscore that San Diego is a great place in which to live as well as play, Goodkin said.

“It’s like merchandising on TV, like merchandising a product that people will go into a store and pick off a shelf,” Goodkin said. “And the brand name of the product is San Diego.

“I think tourism influences people very favorably in retiring here, living here or recommending to someone else that San Diego is a nice place to live.”

But Mayor Maureen O’Connor and other local officials, including those in the tourism industry, don’t agree that government is working against itself.

First, they point out that development limits imposed in San Diego County and by voters in North County cities such as Oceanside, Vista and Carlsbad are not absolute: They are intended to slow, not stop, growth.

It’s a ‘Balancing Act’

So to continue to attract tourists and industry becomes a “balancing act.”

“The main concern of the chief executive officers at high-tech companies is that we do control the growth,” O’Connor said.

“They say we’re not going to attract high-caliber companies unless we have some kind of growth management because they (outside companies) don’t want to come here and have this city like what they left, which is the East Coast,”

she said. “I don’t think we’re at cross purposes.”

The debate over whether governments work at cross purposes by fostering growth through economic development and tourism isn’t new.

In 1980, a controversial study by the San Diego Assn. of Governments (Sandag) urged the City and County of San Diego to withdraw their subsidies to tourism to help slow the growth rate, rather than resort to relatively harsher measures such as housing limits and land banking.

Millions for Tourism

The government money is given to the nonprofit Convention and Visitors Bureau, which in turn advertises in magazines, newspapers, on radio and television to lure tourists and conventioneers to San Diego. In its most recent budget deliberations, the San Diego City Council voted to pay ConVis $4.7 million for the coming year; the county’s share is considerably less.

To limit growth, the 1980 Sandag study said the subsidy to ConVis should be cut. By deliberately maintaining a lower profile San Diego could keep 11,000 people from coming to live in the city by 1985, mainly because of the loss of jobs in the tourism industry.

The study also said there was a correlation between growth and efforts to promote economic development, but it concluded that governments should continue promoting industrial development because the benefits in controlling growth would be negligible.

Sandag board members--representatives from local governments--voted to shelve the study and it was never officially released by the organization. But Goodkin argues that the premise is still valid.

He asserted that the pressure for San Diego to grow will become greater when the $100 million waterfront convention center is completed.

“A lot of people convene in San Francisco and say, ‘Gee, I would love to live here, but the weather isn’t good. It’s foggy and it doesn’t make sense to me,’ ” Goodkin said.

“But that’s not true about San Diego. It is very conducive in terms of environment,” he said.

County Supervisor George Bailey agrees that tourism attracts possible immigrants to San Diego, but he said the bonus for local residents outweigh the risks.

Bailey said tourism is a relatively clean industry--people visit, spend their money and then leave. The result is that San Diego is not despoiled by smokestacks, he said.

Meanwhile, some of the hotel taxes paid by the tourists go to fund local museums and theaters, he said.

Like Bees to Flowers

“If we are to keep our way of life, our enjoyable way of life in San Diego, which attracts tourists, you’re going to have a number of people who want to come here and live here,” said Bailey. “You might as well not have a zoo, you might as well not have beaches . . . “

“You can make a premise that sweeping the streets promotes growth because it makes the city nicer,” said Bailey.

Tourism officials say they are working on attracting visitors, not new residents.

They agree that the jobs created by the tourism industry could be a draw for people who want to move here, even though most positions are low-paying. Tourism is San Diego County’s third-largest industry, accounting for $2.5 billion in the local economy, he said.

But they also refer to studies undertaken for ConVis in the 1970s that show that tourism ranked fifth as a reason why people moved to San Diego. More important magnets, the surveys showed, were the military, visits to friends or relatives, job offers and the fact some had lived in San Diego before.

Dal Watkins, president of ConVis, said the group tries, through selective advertising, to attract the kind of upscale visitor who is not likely to relocate to San Diego.

“There are people that are upscale income people, so they are usually people who have a job back home that is high paying, they have children in school, and they are leaders in their community,” said Watkins.

“These are not people who come out here, fall in love with the place and move out here three weeks later,” he said.