Isolated Slow-Growth Groups Find Strength in Unity

When Gary Meredith moved back to his sleepy little hometown of San Gabriel after 15 years in other cities, he did not like what he saw.

Old single-family homes were being flattened to make way for condominiums, rush-hour traffic clogged the city’s main thoroughfares and developers were chopping down the shade trees.

San Gabriel used to be one of the leafier spots in the San Gabriel Valley, said the dismayed Meredith. “From the raised clubhouse that my father built for us when I was a kid, you could look out over the back yards, and it looked like a forest,” he said.

It was enough to plunge him into a rancorous slow-growth battle in San Gabriel. Meredith, 32, head of a small advertising firm that he runs out of his house, immersed himself in zoning ordinances and planning studies, helped to form a citizens group and became a leader in a long, bruising, ultimately successful battle for a moratorium on development in the city.

Now he and other slow-growth leaders in the San Gabriel Valley have taken the next logical step: building a coalition. They have formed Citizens Action Network, a loose alliance of slow-growth organizations, stretching from Pomona to Los Angeles and to the southern reaches of Orange County, and they are flexing their collective muscles.

According to community leaders from all over Southern California, “coalition building” is the latest development in the burgeoning slow-growth phenomenon (a misnomer, some say, preferring “responsible” or “planned” growth). The battle against “concrete happy” developers, they say, seems inevitably to spill across city lines, requiring a collective response.

By now, Citizens Action Network, called CAN, and others have thrown a kind of protective grid across much of the region: dozens of little groups connected by telephone, ready to circulate petitions, start a letter-writing campaign, telephone legislators, or hire a lawyer and go to court. All tend to move freely between “site-specific” issues and regional concerns; lately they have been jumping regional boundaries, showing up in each other’s turf to demonstrate solidarity in particularly hot debates.

So far, the new coalitions have provided much of the impetus for Proposition U restricting development on 85% of Los Angeles’ commercial land, which passed overwhelmingly in November, 1986, and the successful City Council campaign last year of slow-growth advocate Ruth Galanter. They also helped to defeat the proposed LANCER trash incinerator in South-Central Los Angeles and provided assistance to dozens of local groups waging war against big developments, frequently helping to put together campaigns for slow-growth ballot initiatives.

“I think the real turning point for this movement was the LANCER Project,” says Laura Lake, a leader of the coalition called Not Yet New York. The proposed trash incinerator in South-Central Los Angeles was dropped by the city last summer after environmentalists and homeowner groups from the Westside, the San Gabriel Valley and the San Fernando Valley joined forces in opposition with local protesters.

“It was an issue which swung both ways,” said Lake, echoing the common wisdom that the South-Central Los Angeles project would have cleared the way for similar projects in other regions. “Concerned citizens from South-Central needed help. People from all over the region came in.”

Besides the CAN organization, the region-crossing coalitions include:

- Not Yet New York, a 3-year-old alliance of Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley groups, which has been a force for “planned” development on the Westside. The group, which has a mailing list of about 800 organizations and individuals, has been particularly concerned lately about what leaders call the “noshing syndrome”--commercialism encroaching into residential areas. It was also the driving force last year for, among other things, an amendment to the Brown Act requiring city councils to give 72 hours notice to the public before voting on a development project.

- Coalition of Valley Committees, a 40-group alliance of San Fernando Valley associations, concerned with such “quality-of-life” issues as solid waste disposal, airport noise, off-shore oil drilling and transportation. Members of the 6-month-old coalition were particularly active in a campaign against the proposed light rail system in the Valley, as well as being the driving force in a proposed bill to put restrictions on signs and billboards.

- Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns., a coalition of 48 homeowner associations from the Santa Monica Mountains area with a membership stretching from Woodland Hills to Mount Washington. The organization, one of the rare slow-growth coalitions with a lengthy history (it was organized more than 35 years ago), lists as one of its “planned-growth” triumphs a successful lawsuit to get Los Angeles to eliminate differences between its zoning map and its General Plan. “We found that, in most cases, the city would opt for whichever was the most dense solution,” said Bennett Kayser, president of the group, which has also taken a special interest in Hollywood redevelopment and other local issues.

Gerald Silver, a leader in the San Fernando Valley coalition, even talks about organizing a statewide group. Using computers, Silver, a professor of business administration at Los Angeles City College, has already developed a 300-member data base of organizations in the Los Angeles Basin. Now he plans to connect all the California slow-growth groups.

“We often see a Balkanized situation out here,” he said. “Problems are dealt with atomistically instead of on a regional or statewide basis.”

Taken together, the coalitions already represent a potent political force. “It’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a general grass-roots movement,” Meredith said.

“The way I conceive of it is as a mutual assistance pact,” Lake said.

But the slow-growth advocates’ most potent weapon is still the ballot initiative, most members agree. The California Assn. of Realtors and two UCLA researchers have counted 198 “growth-control ballot measures” in California since 1971, with about one-third of them coming in 1986, with the slow-growth position carrying about 65% of the time. The growth-control initiative, largely a Northern California phenomenon during the early part of the study, is increasingly becoming a characteristic of Southern California, according to LeRoy Graymer and Madelyn Glickfeld of the UCLA Public Policy Program.

Graymer attributes the upturn in such ballot initiatives to the increasing sophistication of the slow-growth movement and to an upturn in construction since the recession of the early 1980s. “There’s more expertise there, more motivation to act on what may mobilize people,” Graymer said.

More Initiatives

There are more slow-growth initiatives in the works. The Los Angeles groups are talking about an initiative to force the city to adopt a system of 35 community planning areas, with a board from each neighborhood having authority on area development proposals, rather than having only an advisory role, as proposed by the City Council a month ago. CAN wants to start a city-to-city chain of initiatives, requiring voter approval for all zoning changes.

All of the collective action is enough to give builders gray hair. For example, the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California offered an all-day seminar recently for developers and government officials on “growth management.” Said the circular describing the seminar: “With an increasing number of initiatives being circulated to regulate growth at the ballot box, it is important that the public understands what it will mean to their local economy.”

Barely 6 months old, the Citizens Action Network can already claim a major share of the credit for scuttling a proposed “eminent domain” bill in Sacramento, as well as providing expertise in a dozen or so development skirmishes in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

The doomed bill, sponsored by state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), would have allowed the consolidation of “substandard” lots--small or geologically unstable or otherwise unusable pieces of property that were carved out under obsolete zoning laws--for development. The snag was, as far as the slow-growth forces were concerned, that owners of some of these substandard lots could have banded together and used eminent domain to seize the remaining lots, even if the owners of the remaining lots did not want to participate.

That was coming perilously close to putting the power of eminent domain in the hands of developers, said Sherry Passmore, who shares the leadership of CAN with Meredith and Joe Rubin, a transplanted New Yorker active in the resistance to rapid development in Monterey Park. “In America you have the right to live where you want without being forced out of your home because somebody wants to build a commercial center there,” Passmore said.

Until CAN came on the case, the bill appeared to be just another piece of low-profile, uncontroversial legislation, sailing easily through the Senate.

But last fall, the coalition cranked up the resistance--”Ninety percent of the work happens in phone calls,” said Meredith--and patched into other coalitions and homeowner groups. The result was a flood of letters, petitions and telephone calls to legislators, killing the bill in the Assembly.

Cross Party Lines

“The bill is dead,” said a glum Peter Detweiler, a consultant to the Senate Local Government Committee, who was helping to shepherd the bill through the Legislature. “There was a great reaction because, I believe, it was misrepresented to homeowners.”

“The issue showed what a sleeping giant we had here,” Rubin said.

Although not ruling out participation in the political process, CAN members seem to be held together by an abiding distrust of politicians and a conviction that independent citizen groups should be a central part of the planning process.

“My favorite political speech,” Rubin said, “goes like this: ‘If I ever run for City Council and get elected, don’t trust me.’ It’s not an expression of any intent to be crooked. It’s just that citizens should realize that it happens.”

As with other coalitions, the organizations cut across political party lines. Rubin describes himself as a liberal Democrat; Passmore and Meredith are conservative Republicans.

Rubin said the idea for the coalition came from a few neighborly phone calls. “I read in the paper that San Gabriel was having some of the same problems that Monterey Park had,” he said. “I was thinking that San Gabriel was so close by and that it was a nice little town. I drive through it regularly. So I called Gary (Meredith) to offer my help.”

Meredith was already talking to Passmore, an Arcadia resident who serves as a consultant to homeowner groups resisting redevelopment plans, about the do’s and don’t’s of fighting builders.

“We all said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all share our experiences?’ ” Rubin said. “It wasn’t supposed to be a regional pressure group but a way of helping each other.”

CAN was originally supposed to be an umbrella organization for nine slow-growth groups in the San Gabriel Valley, but new members kept showing up. “I can easily see it covering all of Southern California,” Rubin said. “It’s happening so fast, nothing would amaze me.”

In a Lonely Struggle

Community groups that resist development often find themselves in a lonely struggle, rank beginners in a high-powered public relations game, Meredith said. “You’re told you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “You’re told you’re racists. You find City Hall is suddenly being very uncooperative about requests for information. Then there’s an active campaign to discredit you.”

CAN provides not only moral assistance but technical backing to new groups. Because of the groups’ isolation, there is a lot of “reinventing the wheel” among newly formed slow-growth groups, Rubin said. CAN, because of its varied membership, comes in with a strategy to fit every development problem.

“No matter what the problem, somebody out there has done it before,” said Justina Martinez, a member of a Baldwin Park homeowner group that has joined CAN. “CAN provides a kind of library of situations. We have the names of the people. We can go to people and say, ‘Hey, you had this situation. How did you go about it?’ ”

Besides the series of zoning initiatives, CAN members are planning to run seminars to teach politicians and citizens the root causes of their movement. “We’d like the candidates to hear in advance what the groups’ positions are, rather than to have them just see us react,” Rubin said. They also talk about screening candidates for their positions on development.

Like Neighbors Talking

There is a striking informality to slow-growth coalitions like CAN. They are just folks, they often say. Leaders of CAN frequently compare their organization to neighbors talking over a back fence, saying, “We really ought to do something about this.”

The membership is deliberately kept loosely organized, and leaders have no special powers. “We want to guard against being captured by anybody,” Rubin said. “We don’t want some politician to come along and say, ‘I represent you.”’

“The coalitions don’t have officers and by-laws,” Lake added. “They just go and do. There are no power struggles. People just pitch in, and they seem to be tremendously effective. Who’s going to question the magic?”