Heated Debate : Slow-Growth Sentiment Builds Fast

In San Diego, it began when ant-like columns of new condominiums began to march up and down the city’s beloved canyons and hillsides.

In San Francisco, it happened when a new picket line of high-rise office buildings blotted out the sun in the downtown financial district.

Some trace the origins in Orange County to the day that drivers first had to wait an hour or more to clear the traffic bottleneck that forms where the 5 and 405 freeways merge near El Toro.

And in Los Angeles, residents worry about traffic, smog, water quality and about sewage and landfill systems that are nearing capacity.

Important Phenomenon

For all these reasons, in all these places and more, the “slow-growth movement” has emerged. Both friends and enemies call it the most important political and socioeconomic phenomenon to sweep the state since Proposition 13, the property tax-cutting initiative, a decade ago.

Some critics label slow growth a greedy, middle- and upper-class movement, intended to benefit those who already own homes and other property, at the expense of those who do not.

“To a certain extent, it’s a classic haves versus have-nots issue,” said Joel Singer, chief economist for the California Assn. of Realtors.

Others predict that if the movement is successful, economic ruin will follow.

“It will stop economic growth, lower revenue and increase housing costs, unemployment and social welfare costs,” said Kim Kilkenny, legislative counsel for the Construction Industry Federation of San Diego, a builder-developer organization.

Still others say the movement is doomed to failure by underlying demographic and economic trends that cannot be resisted.

More than 28 million people now live in California, and demographers predict that there will be 32 million by 1995. Until recently, newcomers were arriving in San Diego at the rate of 1,000 a week. Some economists say the state’s economy is so strong that, barring a worldwide depression or a great natural catastrophe, there will be so many new jobs, and people seeking those jobs, that the slow-growth forces will be overwhelmed.

“If you want to stop growth in California, you’ve got one helluva tough fight on your hands,” said Steven Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

But slow-growth leaders are not discouraged. They believe that the rate of growth can be slowed, if not stopped, and that future growth can be more intelligently planned.

“I don’t think we have to accept Levy’s ‘free-market’ approach,” said Solana Beach lawyer Dwight Worden, who has drafted many of the state’s slow-growth initiatives. “He says growth is inevitable and we can’t touch these ‘natural forces,’ but I say we can and should change these forces in order to achieve some equilibrium in this state.”

Whoever is right, many experts agree that the debate is one of the most important in recent California history.

“This is not dull, academic stuff,” said Joseph E. Bodovitz, president of the California Environmental Trust and former executive director of the California Coastal Commission. “This is really the future of California we’re talking about.”

Once thought to be the peculiar preoccupation of people who live in hot tubs in places like Santa Barbara, slow growth has turned into a mainstream movement.

“I think it’s like Proposition 13,” said Madelyn Glickfeld, a Los Angeles planning consultant and a member of the California Coastal Commission. “There’s a lot of fervor about this around the state and it seems to be building.”

Increase in Measures

From 1971 to 1981, according to the California Assn. of Realtors, Californians voted on 46 local land-use proposals, but since 1981 there have been 202 such ballot measures. In the last 2 1/2 years alone, there have been 76 growth-control votes in the state, and 70% of the measures have passed.

San Franciscans have voted to reduce new office space drastically. Residents of Petaluma, Redlands, Camarillo and many other cities have limited the number of new dwelling units that can be built each year. Riverside voters have established tight controls over development in a citrus-growing “green belt” and in hillside areas, and have curtailed the city’s authority to annex new lands.

In 1986, Los Angeles voters approved Proposition U, a sharp reduction in commercial and industrial zoning for much of the city. Last year, they threw out of office City Councilwoman Pat Russell, who was perceived as being too cozy with developers, and replaced her with slow-growth advocate Ruth Galanter.

Gaining Momentum

Despite a stunning setback in Orange County in June, when a $1.8-million, developer-financed campaign defeated an initiative that would have curtailed growth in unincorporated parts of the county, the slow-growth movement still seems to be gaining momentum. Ten of 19 growth-control measures have been approved this year throughout the state, while only four of 14 pro-growth proposals have passed.

In recent years, the controversy has moved from Northern to Southern California.

From 1971 to 1981, only 6% of land-use ballot measures were in Southern California, the California Assn. of Realtors statistics show. But so far in 1988, 42% of the votes have been in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties and only 24% in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Major Battlegrounds

The next major battlegrounds will be Riverside County and the city and county of San Diego, where citizen-initiated slow-growth measures will be on the ballot in November.

The whiff of dilettantism rises from some of these campaigns. For instance, an invitation to one San Diego fund-raiser said the event would be “an old-fashioned ice cream social, held in an endangered river valley.”

But if builders, developers and property owners once laughed at the slow-growthers, they now take them very seriously indeed.

“This movement taps into powerful sources of hostility and frustration,” said Lee Grissom, president of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce and a leading opponent of that city’s “quality of life” initiative. “They are not to be underestimated.”

After a period of uncertainty, the development community now is fighting back on several fronts--in the courts and in the state Legislature. The campaign that defeated the Orange County initiative in June not only was well-financed but was skillfully managed, and more of the same can be expected in Riverside and San Diego this fall.

Tactic Seldom Works

There are lawsuits to keep growth-control measures off the ballot. This tactic seldom works because judges, subject to voter approval themselves, are generally reluctant to interfere with the public’s right to express an opinion on a controversial policy matter. Besides, the initiative might lose, and then the matter becomes moot.

Opponents now fight slow-growth initiatives with professionally run, big-money campaigns. Of the $1.8 million raised to defeat the Orange County measure, $1.4 million came from builders and developers. Almost $500,000 came from just three developers--the Irvine Co., Mission Viejo Co. and Santa Margarita. In contrast, the initiative’s somewhat overconfident backers spent only about $50,000.

Fred Wilson, who is directing the effort to defeat the Riverside County initiative in November, said his “Residents for Responsible Planning” group already has raised more than $200,000, about 60% of it from builders and developers.

John Roth, president of the group sponsoring the initiative, said, “We’ll be lucky to raise $50,000.”

Legal Fights

If an initiative passes, opponents then dispatch squads of attorneys to court to contend that the measure is illegal--because it is inconsistent with a local land-use plan, or interferes with state annexation laws, or does not provide enough “affordable housing” opportunities, among other arguments.

Frequently, these are lengthy, expensive legal battles that well-heeled opponents are better able to sustain than the measure’s backers.

In Sacramento, the California Building Industry Assn. has sought legislation to make it more difficult for slow-growth initiatives to qualify for the ballot and to limit the impact of such measures.

For instance, one new law allows local county officials to enter into “developer agreements,” which exempt developers from the limits imposed by slow-growth measures if they agree to provide new roads and other necessary infrastructure. Riverside County supervisors are now considering developer agreements that would exempt more than 100,000 new dwelling units from the countywide measure that will be voted on in November.

Reluctant Legislators

But stemming the slow-growth tide through legislation has been difficult. Even though many legislators depend heavily on developers for campaign contributions, they are reluctant to tinker with the initiative process for fear that they might be swept out of office by public outrage over growth-related problems.

“There is no way legislators are going to limit these initiatives,” said Carlyle Hall, co-director of the Center for Law in the Public Interest in Los Angeles. “They’re too close to the voters.”

High on the list of problems fueling the slow-growth movement is traffic congestion--the grinding, merciless crush of automobiles and trucks that fills the state’s roads and freeways day and night, maddening some drivers to the point of homicide.

Underlying Causes

As California’s population has soared in recent years, few new highways have been built and maintenance of existing roads has declined. Federal spending cutbacks are partly to blame. So are Proposition 13, the “no new taxes” approach of Republican Govs. Ronald Reagan and George Deukmejian and the “small is beautiful” philosophy espoused by Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., the Democrat who served between them.

“We have at least a 10-year history of not putting enough money into roads and other infrastructure,” said Cynthia A. Kroll, a regional economist for the Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley.

New suburban “office parks” have placed an additional burden on already strained highways, especially in Orange County and in the East Bay area of Northern California.

‘Jobs-Housing Imbalance’

Two-hour, one-way commutes have become common as Los Angeles, Orange County and San Francisco workers move farther inland to find affordable housing. This “jobs-housing imbalance” is bemoaned at conferences and in learned papers, but no one has figured out what to do about it.

An Orange County business executive said his company only schedules meetings between 10 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon because traffic is so bad that no one can reach the firm’s offices at other times of the day.

Traffic has been identified as the San Francisco Bay Area’s most serious problem in the last two annual surveys conducted by the Bay Area Council, an organization of business leaders.

“Traffic is a surrogate for all the concerns of the slow-growth movement,” said Angelo J. Siracusa, president of the Bay Area Council.

Local Issues

Some growth issues are local. In Walnut Creek, 30 miles east of San Francisco, many residents were appalled when several 10- and 12-story office buildings sprang up near the Bay Area Rapid Transit station; in Morro Bay, on the Central California coast, pro- and anti-growth factions have clashed over the proposed construction of a gazebo in a small city park; in San Diego, many young professionals became slow-growth enthusiasts after moving into older neighborhoods near downtown, only to find that the streets were in bad shape, the sewer system was inadequate and the schools were overcrowded.

Other problems are at least statewide--gridlock, air pollution, water quality and sewer capacity among them. The public’s lack of confidence in government’s ability or willingness to solve these problems seems to be an important contributing factor in the increase of slow-growth initiatives.

‘Not Doing the Job’

“Government is not doing the job the citizens expect it to be doing,” said Lennie Roberts, president of the Save Our Coast Committee of San Mateo County, which sponsored a successful initiative to limit development in the Half Moon Bay area after appealing in vain for elected officials to take action.

Recent polls have shown a widespread belief that elected officials cannot deal fairly with growth issues because too many of them are heavily financed by builders and real estate interests.

“There is a distrust of government on the growth issue,” said Frank Hotchkiss of the Southern California Assn. of Governments. “People are not going to trust it to government--they’re going to do it themselves.”

Leaders of the slow-growth movement have been labeled upper-class elitists by their opponents, but slow-growthers reply that gridlock, polluted air, poor water quality and inadequate sewer capacity are problems for all Californians, not just for the upper classes.

Many Forms

Slow growth takes many forms, including zoning changes, the imposition of strict architectural standards and stiff fees leveled against developers to pay for schools, parks, sewers and myriad other services. But slow-growth ballot initiatives usually set flat limits on new construction or tie the number of new building permits to the provision of adequate infrastructure.

Natural forces sometimes provide better growth control than political campaigns do. Slow growth has become a way of life in the Santa Barbara area because of a chronic water shortage.

On other occasions, politicians are forced to adopt slow-growth policies, whether they like them or not. In Los Angeles, lack of sewer capacity has forced Tom Bradley, the city’s pro-development mayor, and the City Council to impose restrictions that could reduce new construction by as much as 30% in the next few years. The cutbacks also will affect 27 other cities and agencies that use the Los Angeles sewer system.

Housing Price Argument

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has threatened to withdraw more than $100 million in sewer construction funds if the city does not impose tougher anti-smog rules.

Slow-growth opponents argue that strict controls drive up housing prices and rents.

“It’s fundamental logic,” said Siracusa of the Bay Area Council. “If fewer units are built, the demand will be greater and prices will rise.”

California Assn. of Realtors economist Joel Singer noted that only 25% of California households earned enough in June to be able to make payments on a $167,400 house, which was the median sale price throughout the state.

“Housing prices are the Achilles heel of the California economy,” Singer said. “They push wages up, reduce mobility and make California less competitive.”

‘No Clear Evidence’

“That’s the developers’ best argument,” acknowledged Larry Orman, executive director of People For Open Space, a private planning organization with a slow-growth orientation in the nine-county San Francisco Bay region. But he insisted, “There’s no clear evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between slowing down the rate of development and the cost of housing.”

After studying the proposed San Diego city initiative recently, UC Berkeley researchers Cynthia A. Kroll and John D. Landis concluded that the measure would increase housing costs in the city only slightly.

Because slow-growth policies are said to lead to higher housing costs and fewer jobs, critics contend that interest in the movement is slight among lower-income groups, especially among racial minorities.

‘Anti-Immigrant Feeling’

In two months of attending slow-growth meetings across the state, a reporter saw only a handful of minorities.

Linda Martin, co-chairman of Citizens for Limited Growth in San Diego, said she was “bothered by a strain of anti-immigrant feeling” within her group.

“We must be careful about that,” she said. “A lot of our support base is very liberal and they would see this as an unholy alliance.”

But Sandy Brown, a director of Friends of Westwood, noted that slow-growth candidate Galanter received a strong black vote in her upset victory over Russell last year and that slow-growthers throughout the city had joined with blacks to defeat the Lancer trash-to-energy incinerator project that was to have been built in South-Central Los Angeles.

After surveying much of the literature in the field for a recent Los Angeles growth management conference, Elizabeth Deakin, assistant professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, concluded, “Little confirmation has been found for the argument that growth-control support is limited to members of the upper and middle classes, or that it is motivated primarily by desires for exclusivity.”

May Not Be Feasible

Slow-growth critics also say that initiatives are a poor way to do city or county planning because they mandate plans that may not turn out to be feasible.

“You can’t summarize complex land-use issues in a simple initiative,” Riverside County Supervisor Kay Ceniceros said. “You have to provide flexibility.”

A slow-growth initiative “is like a nuclear strike,” said Ray Becker, president of the Building Industry Assn. of Riverside County. “Once you launch it, you can’t call it back. . . . Once the damage is done, you can’t say, ‘We didn’t intend that to happen.’ ”

Kansas City attorney Robert H. Freilich, a leading growth management authority, said citizen groups “usually lack the planning information” needed to devise sound growth-control plans. He said local elected officials, using their own staffs and experienced consultants, can design better controls.

But if local officials refuse to act, growth-control advocates say, they have little choice but to take the initiative route.

“I don’t think much of ballot-box planning,” lawyer Dwight Worden said, “but it’s certainly better than doing nothing.”

STATE TARGETS FOR ‘SLOW-GROWTH’ California, the most populous state, is having second thoughts about growth. Convinced that elected officials cannot or will not deal with traffic congestion, air pollution and other problems resulting from rapid growth, citizen groups have turned increasingly to the initiative process to slow the population boom. In the last three years, there have been 76 growth-control ballot measures in the state, and 70% of these have passed, according to the California Assn. of Realtors. Most have been opposed by builders, developers and property owners. Among the major battles:

1. PETALUMA: In 1972 the City Council imposed a limit of 500 new residential units per year, one of the first slow-growth measures adopted in the state. A builders group sued but lost in federal appellate court and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case.

2. SAN FRANCISCO: Proposition M, sharply curtailing new office space, was approved by voters in 1986, after a building spree added a picket line of new high-rise structures in the city’s downtown financial district.

3. LODI: A 1981 initiative created a “green belt” around this Northern San Joaquin Valley community and required a public vote before new projects could be built on this land. Since then, voters have approved only four of 22 proposed projects.

4. WALNUT CREEK: A spate of office building construction in this prosperous East Bay suburb led voters to pass a 1985 initiative prohibiting most construction until traffic improves at 75 gridlocked intersections. In 1987, slow-growth forces took control of the City Council, but the traffic problems remain.

5. VENTURA COUNTY: Nine of the county’s 10 cities have some kind of growth controls. The county as a whole has a “green belt” plan that tries to channel development into urbanized areas, leaving open space between the cities. But development pressures threaten both the “green belt” idea and the individual cities’ growth limits.

6. LOS ANGELES: Proposition U, approved by voters in 1986, reduced commercial and industrial development in much of the city. In recent City Council elections, slow-growth advocates Michael Woo and Ruth Galanter have defeated incumbents who were considered to be more favorable to development.

7. REDLANDS: A 1978 initiative limited new residential units to 450 per year, but several years later the City Council exempted apartments from this restriction. A sharp increase in apartment construction triggered another citizens revolt and last year a second initiative passed, limiting annual construction to 400 dwelling units of all kinds.

8. RIVERSIDE: Proposition R, a successful 1979 city initiative, strictly controlled development in the city’s citrus-growing “green belt” and in hillside areas. Last year voters approved Measure C, which stripped the City Council of the right to exempt property from the earlier limitations and also set strict limits on annexations. A countywide initiative on the November ballot seeks to limit population growth in unincorporated parts of the county to the statewide growth rate of the previous year.

9. ORANGE COUNTY: The slow-growth movement suffered its most important setback to date in June, when a $1.8-million, developer-financed campaign defeated an initiative that would have tied future development in unincorporated county areas to improved roads and other services.

10. SAN DIEGO: In November, city voters will be asked to approve a “quality of life” initiative that would limit the number of new residential units that can be built each year until traffic congestion, air pollution and other growth-related problems are solved. A similar initiative will be on the county ballot. Both the City Council and the County Board of Supervisors are expected to place less stringent measures before the voters.

(Bulldog Edition) WHY SLOW-GROWTH?

Some of the reasons for the popularity of the “slow-growth” movement can be found in projections prepared by the Southern California Assn. of Governments for the six-county (Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and Imperial) region:

Population July 1, 1987 13,600,000 Year 2010 (projected) 18,300,000 Jobs 1984 5,900,000 Year 2010 (projected) 9,000,000 Housing Units 1987 4,900,000 Year 2010 7,300,000 Traffic Volume 1984 40,200,000 in “Person Trips” Year 2010 58,300,000 Traffic Congestion 1984 628,600 in “Hours of Delay” Year 2010 2,000,000