From the planning commission hearing on Sept 5 

City Council Chambers

1 Civic Center Dr.

San Marcos

Ask anyone and they will tell you what they think it means.

The trouble is, while people say San Diego County is cursed with sprawl, everyone has a different definition for the pervasive and pernicious problem of urban creep. That makes finding a solution especially tough.

Regional leaders are making the attempt, anyway.

The San Diego Association of Governments, a regional planning agency, is promoting a solution called "smart growth" that it hopes local cities will adopt in the coming months.

"Smart growth" is a national trend that aims to keep city edges rural while focusing new construction on unused land in traditional downtowns and transit-oriented city centers.

"Smart growth is a new buzzword for an old strategy. It's not 'no growth' or 'slow growth.' It's 'smart growth,' and who could be opposed to that?" said UC San Diego economics professor Robert Engle, with a hint of humor in his voice.

The current debate is this: What looms in the county's future, "sprawl" or "smart growth"?

Residents feel the effects of growth

When politicians talk about sprawl, they debate lot sizes, zoning and general plans.

Residents have definitions that sit in their gut.

"It's traffic, it's congestion, it's too many cars," said plumber Bob Frost as he sat in his truck recently at North County Fair in Escondido.

"It's like rats in a cage," Escondido resident Linda Mason said. "When you have a lot of them crowded together, there's more friction, more agitation."

"It's great. It's money for me," home builder Joe Rodriguez countered. "Sure, it's crowded, but I don't care. I'll just make the money and run. I just bought 4.6 acres in Hemet."

The past four years have been good to Rodriguez and the construction industry in general, as San Diego County's economy has revved up and new homes have splashed across its rolling hills and valleys.

In the 1990s, the county added about 431,000 people and 97,000 housing units. That's 17 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

North County grew even faster than the county as a whole. During the 1990s, North County's population grew by 22 percent, adding 137,000 more people. That's equal to adding two new cities to North County the size of Vista and San Marcos. The number of homes jumped by 14 percent during the decade, or 32,000 units.

That kind of growth is expected to continue.

At least another 45,000 homes will be built around North County in the next few years, judging from city records.

As more and more typical homes are built ---- two-story houses built on quarter-acre lots ---- politicians and residents are debating anew how to deal with the sprawl those homes create.

"When San Diego was in the tank, jobs were more important than the environment," UCSD's Engle said. "Now that the economy is good, people are starting to see development and traffic, and they don't like it."

A history of sprawl

San Diego County, of course, isn't alone in debating the meaning of "sprawl."

After all, the trend has a four-decade-long, nationwide history.

It began with the great swaths of suburbs built after World War II to provide affordable homes for GIs and their new families. It continued with President Dwight Eisenhower's massive federal-highway building project to provide a transportation network for national defense.

Multilane highways were first seen as a boon to usher rural residents into the city, but the result was just the opposite. Suddenly, farmland and woodland miles from urban jobs were turned into housing tracts, linked to the city by a smooth ribbon of four-lane concrete.

The suburbs were a wide-awake dream for parents and their baby boom kids, who had a streetload of playmates and everyone knew exactly where to find the bathroom in their neighbor's house.

But by the 1970s, environmentalists and urban planners had slapped the word "sprawl" onto "suburban" and set off alarms about the housing revolution's dark side ---- traffic congestion, air pollution, vanishing open space, city centers crumbling in the face of a middle-class exodus.

Southern California's young cities suffered less decline. But the bulldozing of virgin land was greater.

Two years ago, the Sierra Club's national "Sprawl Campaign" gave San Diego County a dishonorable mention in its list of most sprawl-threatened cities in the United States.

One reason ---- the thousands of acres of sensitive native habitat that has been destroyed in a county with one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world.

"Ninety-nine percent of what's being built is sprawling development," said Deron Lovaas, the coordinator of the club's campaign. "All we're pushing for is more of a choice."

'Smart growth'

The "smart growth" philosophy hangs on two linchpins.

One element is that any new developments should be designed as dense, transit-oriented communities where people can live, work, shop and go to school with little or no driving.

The other element focuses on renovating traditional city centers so less virgin land is bulldozed. The hoped-for result is that much more open space can be preserved.

The way SANDAG planners figure it, the region's growing population means 400,000 new homes will be needed in the next 20 years. SANDAG experts calculated that current zoning laws around the county would only allow 312,000 new homes, mostly single-family houses, and those would sprawl across 625,000 acres.

To build enough homes and also save virgin land, SANDAG has proposed a "smart growth" plan to create the needed housing and do it on just 225,000 acres.

But the Region 2020 plan depends on convincing all 18 cities in the region and the county to build inward instead of outward, with more townhomes and single-family houses on smaller lots. The goal is for the cities to begin rewriting their general plans starting next spring.

It may be a tough sell.

"Naturally, every city sees their growth as smart, not sprawl," said county Supervisor Pam Slater, whose district includes the North County cities of Encinitas and Solana Beach.

What's sprawl?

Most politicians and urban planners agree with the Sierra Club's definition of sprawl: "low-density development beyond the edge of services and employment, which separates where people live from where they shop, work, recreate and educate ---- thus requiring cars to move between zones."

At SANDAG, the official definition is "low-density, spaced residential development spread across the region in a non-contiguous pattern of development," planner Mike McLaughlin said.

"Leapfrog development," UCSD's Engle said.

Key to the definition of sprawl is that new homes are built before adequate roads, schools, sewers or other infrastructure are in place.

At San Diego State University, urban studies professor Nico Calavita said the issue isn't lot sizes or locations, though he believes that the 10-acre lot size blessed by the county Board of Supervisors for rural areas draws enough new residents to constitute sprawl.

The real question, Calavita believes, is whether new back-country residents take root in the rural lifestyle.

"If you're connected to San Diego and drive there every day to work, then I would say that's sprawl," Calavita said. "It's your dependency on the larger economic environment that matters."

Views around the county

To avoid being tagged as sprawl builders, the county Board of Supervisors amended the county's general plan in April to set minimum lot sizes for 200,000 acres of unincorporated area.

They decided that a no-sprawl plan would mean one home per 10-acre lot in areas west of the San Diego County Water Authority boundary. In North County, that area includes Fallbrook, Rainbow and parts of Valley Center and Ramona. East of the boundary, the supervisors approved one home per 40-acre parcel. County officials figure that about 5,000 homes will be allowed under that zoning.

Slater said fewer homes may be allowed in the future, once the county finishes updating its entire general plan.

But activist Duncan McFetridge disagrees with the supervisors' plans so vehemently that his organization, Save Our Forests and Ranchlands, has taken the county to court over the issue.

His organization proposes a 40-acre minimum west of the water district boundary and 80-acre parcels to the east. He believes that smaller lot sizes will pave over more back country, destroy endangered habitats and send polluted runoff into streams that deliver the bacterial soup to the beach.

"In Southern California, where land is equal to money and we have so many endangered areas, it's tempting for people to masquerade as smart growthers while developing like crazy," McFetridge said. "You can start with the Board of Supervisors."

In Fallbrook, the community plan calls for 1-acre lots in the town center and 2-acre lots elsewhere. Folks there consider that zoning rural because 2-acre lots are big enough for commercial agriculture such as herb and fruit tree growing, said Jim Russell, chairman of the Fallbrook Community Planning Group. Russell grows and sells macadamias, persimmons and decorative gourds on his property.

In Ramona, the town center is zoned in half-acre lots and ringed with 1- to 4-acre parcels, said Brenda Forman, chairwoman of the Ramona Planning Group.

Forman said she judges sprawl on factors other than lot size.

"In the unincorporated areas, urban sprawl destroys the character of a country community," Forman said. "Growth has to fit in so a community maintains its charm."

Along the coast, Carlsbad's booming population has grown by 23 percent in the past decade. More than 5,000 new homes have been built and another 3,000 are now in the works. Most of the new housing developments have risen along the El Camino Real corridor on former ranchland.

But city Planning Director Michael Holzmiller said masses of big single-family homes ---- with prices higher than most people who drive to jobs in Carlsbad can afford ---- doesn't constitute sprawl. He looks at the issue from a countywide view.

"There's a push to have the areas along the coast accommodate the population growth and to preserve the East County's back country," Holzmiller said. "The best thing to do would be to encourage growth in cities that already exist, like Escondido and Carlsbad."

7/9/00