When Will the County Be Mature Enough to Stop Growing?

“Massive Development Approved in South Orange County Construction: Supervisors override meek opposition, allow 8,100 homes in the hills east of Mission Viejo” (Oct. 18). I read the story last fall with a mixture of awe, incredulity and disgust, but not surprise. Our supervisors couldn’t possibly surprise me anymore.

They’ve managed to attain alarming new heights of myopic simple-mindedness with this one though. What could they be thinking?

Certainly not about the death grip that the thousands of additional cars would apply to our already strangled transportation infrastructure. A morning “shuttle” from Dana Point to Lake Forest now requires up to 45 minutes. (It used to take that long to get to Long Beach!)

Northbound Mission Viejo onramps resemble Disneyland’s parking lot entrance, with the Santa Ana Freeway completing the analogy. Picture thousands more minivans all leaving their nearly identical garages one morning and oozing down freshly scraped and terraced hills onto Oso Parkway. They’d create a 71.7-mile, bumper-to-bumper traffic jam. Given the five-second onramp meter, the last guy would creep onto the freeway almost 35 hours after leaving his tastefully decorated but repetitious home.

Lends new meaning to the term “gridlock,” doesn’t it?

Developers’ lobbyists will leap to assuage such “unsupported fears” with soothing words and numerous references to the new carpool lane and toll roads. Foolishness. These efforts will, at best, only partially relieve existing traffic loads. Seventy-one miles of nose-to-tail cars would fill both toll roads completely and jam a carpool lane from El Toro to Camp Pendleton. That assumes that a third of commuters will double up to use the carpool lane--an optimistic and erroneous supposition, given 20 years of fruitless attempts by Big Brother to curb our wretched solo-driving habits.

Perhaps the most ridiculous argument in support of the plan came from someone who commented that massive development is an accepted, even expected result of living in a desirable area: “It happened in L.A., so why shouldn’t it happen here?” That’s a positive endorsement? Do we want to emulate that miasma up north? Ever crawled along La Cienega or Fairfax Boulevard? Yikes.

But the gradual degradation of our quality of life--the open spaces, clear air, lack of congestion, good schools, low crime and relatively upscale demographics--is one of the less tangible results of development run amok. Let’s talk economics.

Money--more specifically the current shortage of it--is the big motivator in approving mindless development. It means more jobs--for awhile. But what kind of economic impact will another 8,000 spanking-new homes and apartments have on our already beleaguered home values? It doesn’t take a degree in economics to understand that the best way to reverse downward spiraling property values does not include increasing the supply and reducing demand. Yet that’s exactly what Orange County is continually, methodically doing.

So what happens when the financially stretched and over-leveraged developers are soon forced to offer bargain-basement prices, increasingly creative financing schemes and finally public auctions to fill their homes? Simple. Existing homeowners take another economic punch to the heart; property values decline, the tax base is reduced, lower-income buyers and renters move into the area, and our socioeconomic index slides a few more notches down the scale.

The offer of instant--albeit temporary--financial respite is tempting in a drowning economy, and developers are capitalizing mercilessly on Orange County’s foundering fiscal condition. They’ve thrown us a life ring, hoping that we’ll blindly clutch it to our chests just to stay afloat until our ship comes in. Like all life rings, there’s a long string attached. Only, instead of leading to a rescue ship, this one’s anchored to a muddy bottom. Let’s not seize the first thing to drift our way. Let’s ask our fearless leaders to be more innovative; to look beyond mass residential development for economic alternatives.

They wouldn’t even have to look very far. In fact, they could look just north of San Francisco to Marin County, one of the wealthiest in America. In addition to financial solvency, Marin has clean air, nice beaches, lots of lovely land, a short commute to a large metro area, virtually no industry and extremely high property values. Sound familiar? There’s a big difference.

Marin residents recognized their county’s attributes early and took steps to hang onto them. Growth is minimal and strictly controlled. Home values have never dipped. Whatever they’re doing, it works. What if . . . (perish the thought) Orange County simply . . . (better sit down for this) stopped growing for awhile?

What if we just maintained the status quo? Many charming European provinces have been happily not expanding for a thousand years or so.

These are not just the ravings of an enraged homeowner with a drawbridge mentality. I’ve had the good fortune to travel to, and/or live in a number of places throughout the world, and in no other community have I witnessed such a remarkable paucity of long-term social and economic vision as demonstrated here. Our supervisors’ blatant disregard for the area’s natural attributes is not only ludicrous, it’s self-destructive.

Orange County’s continued economic dependence upon residential growth will ultimately result in the loss of the very elements that make it so desirable.

Michael Ellick is a marketing consultant and copywriter who lives in Capistrano Beach. He is a native of Southern California.

Huge new South County housing projects will only make things worse. What’s so wrong with the status quo anyway?