Residents Rally to Prevent Sprawl

When Avalon Bay Communities arrived in north San Diego to build an apartment complex, it was greeted like an unkempt neighbor.

Despite its offer to create walking trails and a children’s playground, residents in the Scripps Ranch community rallied against the 378-unit project. They hired lawyers, lobbied City Hall and, during a Fourth of July parade, dressed up in cardboard costumes as trees and chain saws to dramatize what the development could mean to the eucalyptus grove in their community.

Executives at Avalon Bay were stunned by the opposition. After protracted negotiations with residents over 18 months, the Virginia-based company scrapped its $57-million project last fall.

“I think our development would have been a great part of that community,” said Scott Davis, Avalon Bay’s executive who was in charge of the Scripps Ranch effort. “The days of trying to force a product on cities and communities are over.”

Indeed, as Avalon Bay and others have learned, the key to developing housing these days isn’t so much getting approval from local politicians as it is overcoming resistance from local residents. Developers say community opposition is a leading factor in California’s building shortfall, and one in which there is no easy public policy solution.

Last November, slow-growth advocates won a majority of land-use measures statewide. And community protests have helped derail or cut back dozens of housing projects in recent years, as the movement against sprawl has intensified in fast-growing California.

“I don’t know of a single developer that doesn’t have to scale back a project and do less than what they want for every development they propose,” said Michael Herald, executive director of Housing California, a group representing affordable housing advocates. “There’s no question that it is having a huge impact on units built and density that developers can provide.”

Examples abound.

Nelson Chung, president of Pacific Communities Builders Inc., said his company recently eliminated 20% of the entry-level homes planned for Ventura. In the San Fernando Valley, Lee Group Inc. scrapped a previous developer’s plans for nearly 400 townhomes that neighbors had opposed and, instead, has started work on 186 single-family homes.

Olson Co., a Seal Beach builder of low-cost housing, had hoped to build about 150 condos for modest-income families in a neighborhood of mostly single-family homes near San Diego State. The company reduced the number of units to 78, then 51, and it sought to further appease the community by lowering the height of the buildings, from three stories to two.

Still, after months of debate, the community’s planning group failed to agree on whether to support the project. Laura Ribau was among those who opposed it, worrying that the new condos would be sold to buyers who would rent them to others.

“We were concerned that it would be a big multifamily dwelling with a bunch of different owners,” she said.

Olson appealed to the city planning department. And this spring, after three years of effort, the company finally expects to break ground on the project. But the delays and building concessions, the company said, would add about $30,000 to the starting price of the condos, to about $150,000.

“It’s a disappointment,” lamented Sherman Harmer Jr., Olson’s vice chairman.

Citizens’ groups have challenged all types of new home projects, but none more vigorously than apartments and condominiums. Besides overcrowding, many fear that dense development will hurt property values, reduce open space and create traffic congestion.

New Apartments, Condos Decline 75%

During the recent years of California’s economic boom, construction of apartments, condos and townhomes has fallen by 75% compared to the peak levels of the mid- and late 1980s. That’s more than twice the rate of decline of single-family homes for that comparable period, according to the Construction Industry Research Board, a Burbank research firm.

In all, Ted Gibson, chief economist at the state Department of Finance, estimates California’s new-housing shortfall over the last decade at 500,000. Community resistance, he says, has been particularly influential in thwarting construction on redeveloped sites in urban areas.

“Local homeowner opposition is a major impediment . . . especially the infill housing that we so desperately need,” he said.

In fact, the scarcity of land, especially in places like Los Angeles and Orange counties, means planners have to squeeze more housing into smaller areas. The likely result: more construction of apartments and condominiums.

“I see it getting harder each year,” said Vince Bertoni, Santa Clarita’s planning manager. “Some areas where housing is needed the most is where the most organized opposition is.”

California recently launched a program that provides cash incentives of up to $6 million for local governments to approve more housing. But it remains to be seen whether politicians will encourage such development, given the strong public sentiment against it in many areas.

“Until we build more attached units for sale, we won’t meet our housing needs in the state,” said Robert Rivinius, chief executive of the California Building Industry Assn.

For developers, the mounting anti-growth movement has added to their difficulties in a state with diminishing available land, strict environmental rules and financial incentives for cities to back retail and industrial development over new housing.

Many builders now try to gain residents’ support for a project before seeking city approval, in hopes of avoiding costly delays that opposition creates.

“Even if the city doesn’t require it, we meet with them anyway,” said Kevin Andrade, a partner at Trammell Crow Residential in Costa Mesa, a company that develops and manages multifamily properties across Southern California. “If it seems like there’s a great deal of risk that a neighborhood group would stop our project, we move on.”

But it’s not easy to anticipate or calculate such risks. Certainly Avalon Bay thought the odds were in its favor in north San Diego.

The company, which specializes in luxury apartments, selected a 20-acre site that was a former industrial park that had been sitting vacant for more than a decade. The area needed rezoning, but Avalon Bay’s hopes were bolstered when the city waived a requirement for a full report on environmental impacts. That sent a signal that the project could be voted on sooner than later.

What’s more, a pair of other developers also were taking steps to build nearly 300 senior homes and an assisted-living facility on adjoining parcels in Scripps Ranch, a community of 21,000.

Density of Development Major Issue for Scripps

Avalon Bay had grand plans befitting an area where many homes are valued at half a million dollars or more. Its apartments would have granite counter tops, private garages, high-speed Internet wiring and other luxury features that could yield rents from $1,000 to $3,000 a month.

Avalon Bay knew the planned community would need more open space with denser development, so it agreed to create walking trails and to upgrade a nearby greenbelt into a lighted park for soccer, baseball, volleyball and a playground for children.

But they weren’t enough, at least not to Scripps Ranch residents such as Gary Pryor, who were skeptical of some of the developer’s pitches. Pryor, a San Diego County planning official who became a leader of the opposition group, said that Avalon Bay was only making improvements to the park, not building a larger one.

Others felt the roads already were choked with cars and the nearby junior high school too crowded. A new school would be a better use of land, they said. Moreover, residents were opposed to rezoning land that had originally been set aside for industrial use.

Pryor’s group--which called itself Save Our Scripps Ranch--included a civil engineer, a traffic engineer, noise expert and other specialists who analyzed Avalon Bay’s proposal. “We had as much technical knowledge as Avalon Bay did,” Pryor said proudly.

The group raised $10,000 through membership fees, set up a Web site, and hired two lawyers, one to lobby city council members and the other to work on city planning officials. Some wrote letters to the local newspaper, others went door to door with fliers and petitions. Thousands signed, driven by fears of clogged traffic and diminished quality of life.

The density of the development became a major issue. Avalon Bay agreed to lower its demand from 30 units per acre to 24 and, later, to 19. The citizens group insisted on a lower rate of 15, and the two sides reached an impasse.

Finally, after 20 meetings over 18 months, a separate local planning group voted against the project last summer. “We just didn’t feel the benefits outweighed the detriments,” said Robert Ilko Jr., chairman of the Scripps Ranch Planning Group, a 20-member advisory body to the city of San Diego.

In October, when the city’s planning department met to vote on Avalon Bay’s bid, 175 members of Pryor’s group filled the room, and they cheered as each “No” vote was cast.

In unanimously rejecting the proposal, the commission cited a shortage of industrial land in San Diego. But Mark Steele, the commission’s chairman, also acknowledged that the vocal opposition was a factor.

Within days, Avalon Bay withdrew its bid.

Said Pryor: “The developer knew their proposal was dead on arrival.”

*

RELATED STORY

Fewer new homes: Southland home building is slowing. A1