Without a Regional Plan, Slow-Growth Votes Yield the Bel-Air Effect : Inland Empire: Riverside’s past moves have produced a new sense of community but also yielded some unintended side-effects.

Once the foothills south and east of downtown Riverside were wild, brown and barren. Now they’re green the year round, thanks to landscaping accompanying newly constructed houses, 4,000- to 6,000-square-foot mansions built on lots of from three-fourths of an acre to five acres. It’s the Mulholland Drive effect.

The houses range from $500,000 up. Some are $1-million homes with 7,000 square feet of space--bargain prices by Los Angeles or Orange County standards. And the homes have sold. Their prices will survive and, in time, will only rise, as the differential inevitably evens out between the west and east sides of the crowded Southern California basin.

This isn’t exactly what most Riverside voters envisaged when they passed strict growth controls in 1979, and again in 1987. At the time, developers inundated voters with ultimatums of boom or bust: Either carpet the hills with houses or Riverside would wither up and die. It did not turn out that way; the blackmail didn’t sell.

Yet just outside Riverside, another sort of community emerged: Moreno Valley, where thousands of entry-level homes were built all across the hills and plains. You can see the difference as you drive southeast from Riverside on Alessandro Boulevard. One side of the street has been protected by slow-growth legislation, while the other has been left to sprawl. It’s an observation worth considering, as a struggle emerges between cities that succeed as liveable communities and those that fail to incorporate massive housing projects into decent towns.

What the voters of Riverside had wanted, back in 1979, was to keep Riverside the same--to keep the greenbelt green, the orange groves fertile and the human population down. They were voting for nostalgia, for the days when Riverside was Palm Springs, the kind of country place that weekend visitors traveled to by train to and from Los Angeles. A place where a man who would be President could proudly take his wife on honeymoon at the Mission Inn, as Richard M. Nixon did.

But those halcyon days are long gone. In recent times, the fabled Mission Inn turned into an apartment house for lonely hearts, under interim city management. Riverside became the butt of jokes. Los Angeles and Orange counties sent their polluted air inland and then laughed at the smoggy overcast. The voters were ready for revenge, their sense of community pride badly hurt.

The major impact of the 1979 legislation was to limit growth on hillsides, to preserve the sight lines of Riverside that establish its natural borders, along with the Box Spring Mountains, Mt. Rubidoux and the Santa Ana riverbed. And when the City Council began to make exceptions to restrictions imposed on hillside growth, another measure was passed to stop growth anew.

But these two slow-growth measures, designed to preserve the city as it once was, resulted in the unexpected--the birth of a Bel-Air within Riverside.

Open spaces turned into wealthy places. The sparsely populated hills turned green and offered a pleasing perspective to those living down below, just as their own home values rose. And since the kind of people buying such estates were not prone to commuting their day away, this served as some incentive for entrepreneurs to develop new businesses in town.

This, in turn, encourages further economic growth. These high-end residential areas are not cut off from the rest of town, but are interspersed within a city of many apartment buildings and thousands of middle-class properties. As a result, this diversity of housing blends together into one, facilitating a sense of overall prosperity knit together into a single city.

As a result, Riverside’s future seems assured. Compared with nearby communities where growth has been unfettered, the crime rate is low. The public school system works well in the heart of the city since nearly all children attend; many parents work as volunteers. Employment is up and there is a new-found sense of confidence. People get involved, from 10K races to weekly street festivals downtown, from ethnic fests to foreign films at the old Fox Theater, where “Gone with the Wind” once premiered.

Unlike the bedroom communities of Diamond Bar or Chino, unlike so many other commuter cities, Riverside kept its identity intact. There are relatively complex reasons why cities prove successes, but the formula that generates success is fairly simple. A certain balance must be maintained for building up a town, neither entry-level homes alone nor gated communities walled off on their own. Cities are much like ecosystems. If towns are to succeed, some balance must be found for housing every economic class, thus retaining one community.

Without a common workplace, what else is there to provide a hub to a community? Neighbors who only nod at one another while mowing lawns on Saturday or apartment dwellers who run into one another only at the mall or mailboxes are not enough to make a city whole. Without a sense of belonging to common city, developments turn out to be enclosed encampments, subdividing people instead of making real neighborhoods. Only when the ecosystem works can a city live. And that requires economic as well as ethnic diversity, rich as well as poor and middle class living close enough together to see themselves as one.

What happens when growth is uncontained is seen in towns like Perris and Moreno Valley. As Riverside has walled out seekers of entry-level housing, they bypass the city and move farther into the county’s unincorporated areas or into newer towns such as Menifee. At first, all growth is welcome. Then the problems come: traffic, crime, a paucity of schools and other social services, typical of bedroom cities where people sleep instead of live. Inevitably, growth controls are voted in. And the cycle will repeat itself.

Without a central plan to govern several counties as a single region, the only solution for each city is to protect its own, to try to keep the balance right so that the entire community will survive. The more a city does to keep its work force at home, to encourage self-sufficency, the better future that city faces in sprawling Southern California.