Growth Demands Are Shaking a Sleepy San Clemente Awake

Every chance he gets, Drew Brophy surfs some of the world’s most celebrated breaks off San Clemente’s coast, catching the same waves that once washed over the black wingtips Richard Nixon wore strolling along the beach during his exile at the Western White House.

Along the secluded shoreline, Brophy feels as far removed from the bustle of life as Nixon did escaping here from Washington after the Watergate scandal.

At the southern tip of Orange County, in the shadow of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, San Clemente has long been a reminder of what California coastal towns used to be, with uncrowded beaches and an old-fashioned downtown free of the big-box retailers that dot the rest of suburbia.

But time is finally catching up with San Clemente.

Up in the backcountry, huge housing developments are rising. Transportation officials want to carve a toll road through the city’s eastern end and build a second set of railroad tracks along the coast. And at San Onofre, the federal government wants the facility to hold buried radioactive waste, further unnerving residents who learned last week they would receive special pills in case terrorism or some other disaster causes a radiation leak.

Around downtown, the small bungalows that until a few years ago were considered among the last beach-side bargains in Southern California are being torn down at a rapid rate and replaced with grander homes.

Traffic is worse than ever, many longtime residents say, and they fear driving will only get worse over the next two decades, when San Clemente’s population is expected to climb 30%.

Brophy, 31, doesn’t like it one bit. An artist by trade, he moved to San Clemente in 1993, in search of the place he lost when his hometown of Myrtle Beach, S.C., “went from a sweet little beach town to a Las Vegas strip.”

Now, as he scans his adopted home, “it seems like every week there’s something new. It’s endless.

“It’s kind of scary to think this little treasure isn’t going to last. This is one of the last places in California where it’s still the way it’s always been,” Brophy said.

San Clemente sprouted up on the former Ranchos los Desechos (“Leftover Land”), which was abandoned because it was too steep and overgrown to graze cattle or sheep.

Ole Hanson, a land speculator and the city’s father, vowed to create a “Spanish village” when he pitched a white canopy tent along Old Coast Highway in 1927 and sold the first plots.

“I vision a place where people can live together more pleasantly than any other place in America,” Hanson wrote to a friend. “This will be a place where a man can breathe!”

Hanson’s white stucco homes now blend with the beach bungalows, townhomes and apartments that are tucked along narrow streets and alleys. Many of the seaside neighborhoods are within walking distance of Avenida del Mar, the main road leading to the pier.

*

Local Gems

San Onofre State Beach is one of the city’s most treasured gems. Steep sandstone bluffs stretch for miles. Picnickers grill hot dogs under thatched-roof huts. Anglers cast their lines from rocky shores. Out in the distance, surfers ride breaks such as Cotton’s Point, Churches and Trestles.

Nixon, often wearing suit and tie, walked these same sandy shores when he wasn’t entertaining foreign dignitaries, signing landmark accords or dodging demonstrators at Casa Pacifica (“House of Peace”), the bluff-top estate that became his retreat from 1969 to 1980.

For all the unwanted publicity he brought to San Clemente during his presidency and the self-imposed exile that followed his resignation, one of his other legacies was converting Camp Pendleton’s beaches into a state park and preserving them as a surfing haven.

Even as development exploded in south Orange County in the 1970s and 1980s, San Clemente remained an island of relative calm. Initially, it was less desirable for development because of its distance from large job centers. The city was further isolated because only two major highways ran through it, Interstate 5 and the Coast Highway.

Residents liked it that way. Voters passed a slow-growth measure in 1988 that permitted only 500 new homes a year until 2006.

*

Then Came Toll Road

But over the past decade, urban sprawl has reached San Clemente’s doorstep. In the mid-1990s, the San Joaquin Hills toll road opened to the north, providing more access to San Clemente. Office towers and business parks sprouted up in Irvine and Costa Mesa, creating jobs closer to town.

“When the [tollway] opened up, it became an entirely new picture,” said John Martin of Martin & Associates, an urban planning firm in Newport Beach. “It was a huge transformation in commuting patterns.”

Several upscale housing developments that are in the works on the northeastern edge of the city will add more than 5,000 homes. Such growth is permitted because some of the developments lie just outside city limits, in county territory.

A little to the north, Rancho Mission Viejo wants to build 14,000 homes and more than 5 million square feet of office and retail space in one of the largest swaths of open space remaining in Southern California.

Through this same open space, the Transportation Corridor Agencies propose an extension of the Foothill South toll road that would wind 16 miles through those same 23,000 acres of wilderness and eventually connect to the Santa Ana Freeway near San Onofre State Beach.

Many residents fear the massive new projects will kill what is unique about the town.

Steve Netherby, a former editor at Field & Stream magazine, discovered San Clemente in 1973 when his Chevy Camaro broke down there on the freeway. The first door he knocked on for help happened to be the home of a real estate agent who soon showed him the home he has lived in ever since. It is now worth 10 times the $49,950 he paid for it.

“I used to run and hike in the backcountry and would rarely see another footprint,” he said. “And now all the developers and builders are dueling over this great space with wonderful natural resources that has kind of been overlooked for a long time. And those of us who live here want to preserve what we have.”

The new development is not without supporters. The slow-growth policies of the 1980s are blamed for chronic financial shortfalls at City Hall, which have led to cuts in city services. Those backers say the growth will provide the city with badly needed revenue.

The city is more united on the issue of double-tracking the rails along the beach. Amtrak hopes to add a second track as part of a 20-year program to expand service, increase capacity and reduce the time of train trips. The tracks would run right along the beach, in front of San Clemente’s landmark pier.

“The problem is, the beach is narrow enough right now as it is,” said Gavin Herbert, who now inhabits Nixon’s villa. He points down toward the tracks that once brought Franklin D. Roosevelt to town to play poker with Ham Cotton, the original owner of the estate.

Herbert has started a foundation that has raised $40,000 to fund a public relations campaign against the plan, one of an assortment of efforts under way on the issue.

City Councilwoman Stephanie Dorey, who ran on a quality-of-life platform in 2000 and regularly holds grass-roots meetings in her living room, hints that she will lie on the tracks if she has to.

All over town, lawn signs trumpet the slogan “Derail the Rail.”

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, residents have also been taking a second look at their imposing neighbor to the south: the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. They have been pushing for tightened security at the plant as well as distribution of potassium iodide tablets to help prevent thyroid cancer after a radiation leak. The state last week agreed to distribute pills to residents living within 10 miles of San Onofre.

The federal government now wants to house a long-term repository for spent nuclear fuel, which would be stored in dry casks.

Residents fear that the casks would be damaged in a powerful earthquake and could make San Onofre an even more attractive target for terrorism.

All the worries over nuclear storage, train tracks and growth frustrate old-timers, but they try to keep it in perspective.

In the courtyard of Hotel San Clemente, a group of retirees shares coffee and stories, something it has been doing every day except Thursdays for 11 years.

Dorothy Fuller, who lives on the third floor and is one of San Clemente’s earliest residents, shows up with the photographs she sells from the lobby during weekend street festivals.

“This is my dreamscape,” said Fuller, 76, a former columnist for a local newspaper. “My magic carpet. It’s a great place to be inspired.”