Full-Bore Crusade in Half Moon Bay

Gisela Schecter gets a slightly guilty look when asked why she intends to vote for a city ballot initiative next month that would limit residential growth to 1% a year, one of the toughest anti-growth measures any California city has considered.

“It’s the ‘dog in the manger’ syndrome,” she said. “I’m already here, and I like my town the way it is.”

Schecter, a physician, moved to this coastal village 15 years ago to get away from San Francisco’s traffic and crowds. She loves running into patients on Main Street and rejoices in the surrounding fields of flowers and vegetables that make Half Moon Bay feel more like a Midwest farming community than a pricey suburb of Silicon Valley.

But to Schecter’s dismay, some of the big-city woes she fled have followed her to this town of 11,179, recently named the fastest-growing city in San Mateo County. More and more people are discovering the enclave, which is a 30-minute drive from San Mateo and less than an hour south of San Francisco on a lovely stretch of California 1.

The newcomers are snapping up homes, clogging streets with their sport utility vehicles and fueling a transformation of Main Street from a slightly seedy strip of diners and secondhand shops to an upscale collection of boutiques, art galleries, bakeries and cafes.

Becoming the darling of harried Bay Area professionals is making Half Moon Bay feel like a city under siege, growth control proponents say. Already, said City Manager Blair King, most of the city’s work force commutes either to San Francisco or the eastern side of the peninsula each day, causing monumental traffic jams on California 1 and California 92 during rush hours.

“We are drowning,” said City Councilwoman Deborah Ruddock. “We have highways that are congested to the point of gridlock. We have schools that are overcrowded; we have views that are threatened. There is no law that says we have to destroy our community by allowing overdevelopment.”

Determined to slow the pace of growth, Ruddock co-authored Proposition D, which would allow no more than about 40 new homes each year.

There is no organized campaign against the initiative, not even an argument opposing it in the ballot pamphlet. Developers, farmers who want to build on their land and other opponents say they are tired of fighting anti-growth forces in elections. Instead, foes say, they will head straight to court if this measure passes, as it is expected to.

“This will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” said Dave Worden, a commercial real estate agent and former president of the Chamber of Commerce. For years, he said, the town has been bitterly divided between those who are determined to impose tough growth control measures and those who say Half Moon Bay will stagnate without some growth.

The debate reached a nadir in 1996, when someone torched a hotel being built on a strip of coastline. Several prominent no-growth activists said they could understand the sense of desperation that might have driven someone to burn down the structure, which blocked views of the bay that the town is named for.

No one was ever arrested, and the hotel was completed.

Shortly after the fire, an anti-growth majority was elected to the City Council.

Three years ago, voters approved a measure limiting residential growth to 3% a year. Despite the limit, the town has continued to grow, as construction took off on subdivisions approved years ago by more pro-growth councils.

The City Council is overhauling Half Moon Bay’s general plan, holding public hearings on whether to drastically slash the total number of homes that ultimately could be built within city limits. A 1% growth limit, advocates say, would simply stretch out the years it would take the city to become built out.

The dispute about how to limit growth has divided the community. “There are hostilities, veiled and otherwise,” said Amy Worden, a partner with her husband, Dave, in their real estate business.

People on both sides of the debate, she said, tend to be middle-aged professionals who were social activists in the 1960s and 1970s. But growth-control proponents, she said, have turned their backs on teachers, firefighters, police officers, clerks and other workers who cannot afford to live in a town with ever-rising home prices.

“Sometimes I think the anti-growth advocates may have lost their compassion, their heart,” she said. “We need to care about people as much as we care about the environment.”

If Proposition D passes, said Dave Worden, “the city will be spending a great deal of taxpayers’ money to defend this in court.”

Actually, said City Manager King, the city already is spending a lot of money defending its land use laws, and the amount keeps rising.

In the 1997-1998 budget year, he said, the city spent about $150,000 on legal bills, most of it battling lawsuits brought by developers and residents thwarted in efforts to build. This past year, he said, the city shelled out more than $250,000 on legal expenses. That’s a big chunk, he said, for a city with an annual general operating fund of $5 million.

“Right now we have five active . . . land use lawsuits,” King said. None has yet to come to trial, but when they do, he said, “our offices will be turned into war rooms,” and legal bills will soar.

It’s not hard to understand why developers find Half Moon Bay worth fighting for. In a largely built-out region, more than 50% of the land inside the city limits remains open space, much of it farmland where vegetables and flowers grow. Main Street is a charming, four-block stretch of one- and two-story, 19th century storefronts. Shop windows are crammed with pumpkins in anticipation of this weekend’s annual Art and Pumpkin Festival, expected to attract about 200,000 visitors.

The median price of homes is $429,000, well above the county average. Most undeveloped land is flat and easy to build on. Every year, there are far more applications for building permits than the town’s current 3% growth limit would allow.

One of the perennial applicants is Leonard Beuth, who inherited subdivided lots from his mother and sister 30 years ago and has been trying, without success, to win the right to build homes on them ever since, said his lawyer, William Walter. Beuth is suing the city over its 3% growth limit and will probably file another suit if the 1% measure is enacted, said Walter, adding that his client’s efforts have also been frustrated by a series of building moratoriums over the years.

“What is going on in that town is a terminal case of NIMBYism,” Walter said. “There is a desire not to have any residential growth at all. My client’s mother owned those lots and passed away, never having been able to obtain any economic benefit from them. His sister passed away not able to obtain economic benefit from them. Last year, my client turned 60, and he is still being told to just wait.”

Developers aren’t the only ones alarmed by the prospect of stricter growth limits. Michael Rawson of the California Affordable Housing law project recently wrote city officials, protesting the measure as unfair to low-income people.

“The basic problem is that it is going to have the effect of excluding affordable housing from the community,’ Rawson said. “It will have a discriminatory effect on low-income people, minorities and families with children--those are the folks who are shut out.”

Councilwoman Ruddock disputes that contention, noting that whenever a developer builds more than 10 units, the city requires that 20% of them be affordable to very low- to moderate-income people, as determined by a complex formula.

“This argument that if we would just allow the residential population to grow in an unconstrained way, we would get more affordable housing is bunco,” Ruddock said. “Before we added the affordable housing stipulation,” a few years ago, “there wasn’t a stick of affordable housing built here.”

To date, there still isn’t. But 12 units are included in housing developments that have been approved though not yet built.

“Our town is a great place for the people who live here,” said Mayor Jerry Donovan, who opposes Proposition D. “But I don’t think people who want to come here have much of a chance.”

Ruddock bridles at that charge.

“Nobody is being told to stay out of Half Moon Bay,” she said. “This measure would not reduce building densities or rezone land. It just sets a growth cap, and we are permitted to do that under the Constitution.”