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Meandering toward the front entrance of my neighborhood Ralphs recently, I was faced yet again with a petition being thrust in front of my nose. Normally I respond with a flip of my hand and a brusque "I don’t sign petitions." This is based on a paranoia that someday my signature on something, even an initiative, would come back to haunt me.
But not on this day. Instead, I stopped and asked the offerer to elucidate on the substance of the petition to earn my signature. As I suspected, he was not terribly enlightening. "This one has to do with preserving our rural areas," he said, unable to articulate what would be accomplished. So I asked him one more question: "Are you a volunteer for this cause, or are you being paid?" And his answer: "I’m being paid." I declined to sign, and watched him turn and approach the next breathing adult.
Direct Democracy
I have problems with the concept in the state of California that somehow we are practicing a purer form of democracy when we can bring issues directly to the voters. We elect our representatives to study and digest the pros and cons of matters before them. The initiative process has become a tool to circumvent representative democracy, enabling elected officials to skirt their responsibilities, proclaiming "let the voters decide." It is the coward's way out, and we mostly let them get away with it.
If we do not like their decisions, then vote them out. That is how it is supposed to work. You and I, no matter how much more intelligent we think we are than our elected representatives, do not usually take the time to consider the issues. Certainly not in front of Ralphs and usually not at the ballot box. The result is a hodgepodge of public policy that often doesn’t work.
If I could change one thing, it would be the ability to pay signature gatherers. Let the truly passionate collect these signatures themselves.
The Urban Limit Line
This year the initiative process has brought us the Rural Heritage and Watershed Initiative, a county-wide measure that backers are trying to qualify for the November ballot. Its purpose is to restrict future development of nearly 600,000 acres, or 25 percent of all unincorporated land in the county. The way it plans to do that is to establish a sort of urban-rural boundary beyond which relatively little housing could be built, principally in the eastern two-thirds of the county. Property that now can be split into two- to 20- acre lots would not be allowed to subdivide into parcels smaller than 40 and 80 acres.
This initiative probably does not pack the growth control punch of predecessors, particularly a city of San Diego mandate from a decade ago that requires a vote of the people to develop properties in the city's designated future urbanizing areas. Principally impacting the vast North City corridor along future Interstate 56 from Carmel Valley to Penasquitos, that measure took the notion of direct democracy to the absurd. It has slowed down growth in the impacted areas by replacing earlier designs of efficient, master-planned communities with low-density housing suitable principally for the upper-middle class. And theoretically more acceptable to the voters. That measure, and other, sometimes more subtle controls throughout the county, are the direct cause of a housing market habitually short on supply. This year we will build 10,000 to 13,000 housing units in a market that could accommodate at least twice that many.
But the rural initiative is the first effort of this economic cycle to re-address growth issues. The rise in local economic prosperity has brought about this effort to curb new growth. Trust me, others are coming. During a recession we worry about our jobs. Yet, when we are growing jobs and shrinking unemployment, we worry about population growth.
History Repeats Itself
We were in a similar stage in the mid- to late 1970s. That was when growth control became a term of public parlance. The issues were similar. Once you have moved here, you want your surroundings to stay exactly the same as when you arrived. It is human nature.
Yet, if we want our community to be enriched with new cycles of economic prosperity, then we have to accept some growth. Curiously, this most recent (and many prior) forms of growth control attack the symptom of economic growth, which is housing development, which in turn is fueled by population growth. Proponents were curiously silent during the first half of this decade when Southern California suffered through a prolonged recession. (San Diego County still grew by the annual rate of 30,000 to 35,000 persons during the 1993-1996 period, all because of the natural increase of more births than deaths. During those years we actually experienced more people leaving the county than moving here.)
The problem with the latest initiative is it assumes either that it will stop growth, which it cannot, or that it can force growth elsewhere, which it can. However, an urban limit line is not likely to direct growth to our already urbanized areas. Homeowners in established communities have not readily accepted new housing — which brings with it higher density, and taxes the existing infrastructure such as schools and street capacity — not to mention raising concerns about the threat to a community's character. Only limited segments of new homeowners will accept housing in urbanized areas.
The rural initiative is targeted to forestall development in places like Ramona, a community that will be under pressure to develop over the next decade. It is a matter of philosophy: where I see this as a logical place for growth as the infrastructure can begin to accommodate it, the backers of the rural land initiative bemoan the loss of our rural heritage.
Regardless, the result is that growth will leapfrog past the so-called limit lines to areas outside of the jurisdiction. The best example is the growth of southern Riverside County, which owes much to demand spillover from San Diego-employed persons (at least 60 percent of the demand in Rancho California) choosing to commute to their San Diego-based jobs from homes they can afford.
Affordability is the heart of the issue. Efforts to achieve it result in more sprawl, traffic congestion and air pollution. And the accomplishment of nothing, except perhaps the inevitability of business persons voting with their capital to locate and expand elsewhere, ultimately weakening our economic base.
Regional Issues
We should argue land use matters on a regional level. After all, this is a one-county metropolitan region. That is a gift compared to other metropolitan places such as Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area, both faced with multiple counties and cities all protecting their fiefdoms. It seems to me that the San Diego Association of Governments, or another regional agency, is the right forum for our elected representatives to debate the great issues of big projects and land-use policy.
In the meantime, new initiatives with half-baked solutions, weak leaders who mostly won’t take a stand, paid signature gatherers and costly campaigns without limits ought to be the prime subjects of our great debates. These are debates I would prefer to visit in the halls of our public agencies, not in front of Ralphs supermarket.
Gary H. London is president of The London Group Realty Advisors Inc., providing real estate consulting and economic analysis. Check him out on the Web at
www.londongroup.com.
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