Home-Building Cap Won’t Solve Growth Ills, City Study Says

A residential building cap will not slow San Diego’s runaway growth nor is it the best strategy for controlling traffic congestion, protecting sensitive lands or providing badly needed public facilities, states a long-awaited report released Thursday by the city’s Planning Department.

The report, which is the first step toward devising a growth-management strategy to be placed before voters in November, recommends controlling growth by linking residential building limits to ongoing forecasts of population growth.

Those limits should be complemented by measures enacted to protect environmentally sensitive lands, preserve neighborhood character, manage transportation flow and provide public facilities in an effort to manage a never-ending tide of growth, the report says.

Serious Approach Taken

Assistant Planning Director Mike Stepner said the recommendation “addresses the problems out there in a serious way and doesn’t take what I would say is the more simplistic approach of stopping development” at an arbitrary level by installing growth caps.

The 66-page document, “Alternative Growth Strategies,” contains the concepts that will be used by the Citizens Advisory Committee on Growth and Development to write a growth-management plan for the November election after review by the City Council.

The city-sponsored growth guidelines will compete with a citizens’ initiative that embraces the building cap philosophy, calling for a limit of 7,000 new houses, apartments and condominiums within city limits in the first year after passage. The number would decrease to 4,000 in the fourth year and would hold steady at that figure until the year 2010.

Those caps could be adjusted upward, however, if local government met environmental criteria. The measure, sponsored by Citizens for Limited Growth, qualified for the November ballot April 1.

A second citizens’ group is trying to qualify a Sensitive Lands Initiative for the ballot that would protect the city’s slopes and canyons from development.

The product of more than a year of deliberations by the citizens’ advisory group, the Planning Department report is strikingly similar to a plan released March 29 by District 7 Councilwoman Judy McCarty.

An aide to McCarty said she is pleased to see the similarity but more importantly is anxious to begin discussion on the plan.

“Judy McCarty wants to get the show on the road,” the aide said. “There is a lot of work to be done.”

Councilman Ron Roberts, who chairs the citizens’ advisory committee, said Thursday that he had not read the document and could not comment on it. Mayoral aide Ben Dillingham said Mayor Maureen O’Connor had not read it, either.

Tom Mullaney and Linda Martin, leaders of Citizens for Limited Growth, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

After examining the ramifications of annual building caps of 4,500, 8,000 and 12,000, the Planning Department document rejected the notion of caps of any kind.

“Residential building caps, by themselves, are unlikely to slow population and employment growth and do not address growth problems such as traffic congestion, protection of environmentally sensitive lands and provision of public facilities and services at time of need,” the report says.

Caps would not have an impact on housing prices overall but would affect housing prices in selected areas in combination with the city’s economy. Moreover, they would lead to a “loss in social diversity,” make socioeconomic balancing of communities more difficult, intensify racial and economic segregation and could create some homelessness, the report indicates.

The report concludes that caps would have some impact on traffic congestion, considered the most visible sign of the city’s explosive growth. Under a 4,500-per-year annual building cap, 65 miles of freeways would be congested by 1995. That number would increase to 69 miles under an 8,000-unit cap and 78 miles under a 12,000-unit cap.

The report also rejects a complete construction moratorium, which the City Council asked the department to study because it is unclear whether a such a ban would stand up in court.

The “growth-mitigation alternative” endorsed by the report would link growth limits to an economic and population growth forecast published by the San Diego Assn. of Governments. For example, the latest study forecasts a need of 41,829 housing units between 1989 and 1994, or an average of 8,366 units per year.

But according to Stepner, those forecasts are periodically revised, and the flexible strategy would allow the city to change its limits.

The growth-limit strategy would also be coupled with regional planning efforts; a policy of financing the $1.05 billion in public facilities needs; adoption of ordinances to preserve neighborhood character; adoption of an ordinance to protect environmentally sensitive slopes, canyons and coastal regions, and a traffic-management plan to reduce congestion.