City Growth Plan Calls for Building Cap of 7,590 a Year

The San Diego City Council, approving unprecedented measures in hopes of controlling the city’s unbridled growth, agreed Friday to cap residential construction for the next five years at 7,590 homes annually.

In completing its work on a landmark growth-management blueprint that will be submitted to voters Nov. 8, the council eliminated requirements that the city meet tough standards on air and water quality, solid waste disposal, sewage treatment capacity and traffic congestion.

The council members also jettisoned a controversial proposal that would have forced commercial developers to pay a fee toward the construction of low-income housing. But they agreed to exempt low-cost housing and redevelopment areas from the home-building cap.

Mayor Calls It ‘Historic’

Mayor Maureen O’Connor described the unanimous council vote, reached 18 months after she appointed a committee to begin work on the plan, as “historic” for a city of San Diego’s size.

“Two years ago, when I was elected mayor, there wasn’t one control on growth,” O’Connor said. “It was business as usual, and anybody could have whatever they wanted. To get to this point in 24 months, I think, is incredible.”

A formal council vote next month to place the measure on the ballot will set up the long-awaited competition between the city plan and a similar but more restrictive version written by Citizens for Limited Growth, a community group. Both contain provisions that tightly restrict home building on hillsides, canyons, wetlands and flood plains. The plan that receives the most votes will govern city growth into the next century.

Stricter Cap

O’Connor claimed that the city-sponsored plan actually would enact a growth cap smaller than the CLG’s measure because of the way the competing plan treats homes that have already attained a “vested right” to be built. But Peter Navarro, a member of the organization, said his group’s measure would impose the stricter cap.

Navarro and representatives of the Sierra Club and the Building Industry Assn. sharply criticized aspects of the city plan and predicted dire consequences if it is enacted by voters.

Calling the city plan “a no-growth manifesto,” Stephen Coury, spokesman for the BIA, predicted that the cap and environmental restrictions would tighten the supply of housing and drive home prices sharply higher.

Coury predicted that young families seeking their first homes, middle-income homeowners seeking to “move up” and senior citizens would bear the brunt of higher housing prices, which he said would also create more homelessness.

But he stopped short of saying that the powerful building association will oppose the measure this fall, noting that the competing initiative sponsored by the citizens group is far more onerous to the building industry.

Navarro said the council severely weakened its plan when it eliminated the air, water, sewage, trash and traffic standards. Those standards are the centerpiece of the CLG’s Quality of Life Initiative, which would set home-building caps of as low as 4,000 a year until the goals are met.

Should the city plan be enacted, San Diegans will quickly recognize its faults, Navarro said.

“They’re the people who sit in traffic,” he said. “They’re the people who breathe the air. They’re the people who have to drink polluted water. They’re the people who have to see sewage when they swim in Mission Bay.”

Councilwoman Judy McCarty, who led the bid to have those standards removed, said they would be impossible to attain and would have raised false hopes for city residents. She also said that a separate section that commits the city to measuring a development’s impact on those five standards adequately replaces the goals.

Sierra Club Criticism

Kathy Giles, a Sierra Club representative who has monitored the city plan for the 13,000-member San Diego chapter of the environmental organization, said she could not recommend its endorsement by her group. The Sierra Club has already endorsed the CLG initiative.

Giles said she opposed the inclusion of a “killer clause” in the city plan, which voids all provisions of the citizens initiative should the city measure receive more votes. She also criticized the removal of the environmental standards, and said the plan’s traffic congestion element was “gutted.”

The annual home-building cap is actually two caps: a 3,990-home limit on homes already in the planning process and a 3,600 lid on new homes.

The larger cap is for homes scheduled to be built primarily as part of large projects in the city’s northern tier, or “urbanizing area.” Most have obtained at least a qualified right to be built because they are far along in the city’s planning process.

Robert Freilich, the land-use consultant hired by the city to help write the plan, said Friday that the cap approximates the rate at which builders, acting under the restrictions of market forces, would allow construction of those projects.

But Councilman Ed Struiksma showed city planners several instances where their statistics were inaccurate, and Coury said it is impossible to predict the effect of market forces five years from now.

Would Monitor Building

The smaller cap would govern applications to build homes not yet planned. Planners would monitor the home-building rate in each category, and the council could switch unused allocations from one category to the next.

Within the smaller cap, top priority is given to homes to be built in the city’s urbanized core. Second priority is dedicated to single-family homes on pre-existing lots, and third priority is set aside for low-income housing.

Without such a priority system, Councilman Bob Filner said, developers would have no incentive to build housing for the poor, which is not as profitable as higher-priced housing. Under the city’s existing Interim Development Ordinance, which caps home building at 8,000 residences a year, very few low-income homes have been built.

Although they adopted a five-year plan, council members agreed to bring the measure before voters again in the next three to five years to allow adjustments, a safeguard that many wanted to protect against unforeseen changes that could make any part unworkable.

Within the same period, the council also promised, it would bring voters a plan for financing the construction of more than $1 billion in roads, parks, schools and other public facilities the city is lacking, primarily in its urbanized core.

Only Filner supported a controversial proposal to assess a fee on commercial and industrial projects to raise money for construction of low-income housing. Even Councilman Ron Roberts, who helped write the city plan and earlier this month strongly backed the so-called “linkage fee,” voted against it.

Only O’Connor voted against the “killer clause” invalidating the citizens measure if the city plan wins.

“The bottom line is that this is winner-take-all language,” said Councilman Bruce Henderson. “So let’s go out, and may the best initiative win.”