Planning for Growth

by Councilman Scott Peters
for the La Jolla Village News
November 2002

On October 22 the City Council approved a modified version of the Strategic Framework to the City's General Plan, also known as the "City of Villages" strategy. The idea is to link private and public transportation with land use, connect housing with job centers, and preserve open space by putting development where we already have concrete instead of sprawling into the hillsides and backcountry. No one disagrees with these principles; in fact, they have been talked about for decades. However, they have rarely been implemented.

The past decades have not always seen great progress from population growth here. Too often, traffic is bumper-to-bumper on I-5, I-15 and I-805, as middle class people find affordable housing in Riverside County or even Mexico. There's really no public transportation to speak of in our area, even though Sorrento Valley, Sorrento Mesa and University City have combined to become the region's major job center. And many of my constituents lament the loss of green space to new roads, office parks and housing subdivisions. That's what the current planning regime has brought us, and that's what the new strategy aims to change.

With our history here, it's no surprise that many people say that our response to growth should just be to stop it. I sympathize with people's frustration, but I don't think we should expect to stop population growth. Growth is a result of births and jobs, not government action or inaction. Our city government cannot regulate births (nor should we) and we spend virtually no time recruiting new businesses. In fact, economic development is conspicuously absent from the Mayor's 10 goals for San Diego. Yet, it seems to happen just fine.

Even if we hoped for slower growth or no growth, it's extremely unwise not to plan for it. If we plan for greater growth and get less, we'll still be OK. But if we plan on small growth and get more than we planned for, we will have far worse traffic, diminished open space and larger quality of life problems than we can even contemplate today. As our mothers taught us, it's prudent to hope for the best and plan for the worst.

I believe that the City of Villages will provide the foundation for an honest conversation about growth in this City. The strategy realizes that while San Diego is one city, it is already comprised of a number of different neighborhoods, or "villages." The strategy aims to protect the character of each village and to link the villages with transportation. We will do this by focusing neighborhood identity around village centers designed for public gatherings with accessible public spaces such as plazas, transit centers, parks, and urban trail heads.

The Mayor sees the strategy as a redevelopment tool that would channel private and public investment to revitalize old and run down areas. He has promised that he would not force any increases in density on any community that does not want it. In fact, he, Councilmember Toni Atkins and I all signed a memorandum that removed from the strategy a plan to increase densities by 17,000 units over the units already planned for in existing community plans, and the Council did remove the additional densities before approving the plan. The strategy will likely have very little direct impact in District One, where there are no truly run down areas and no planning groups clamoring for additional densities. However, the plan holds great promise for areas like San Ysidro and Linda Vista, which are willing to accept greater growth and density in exchange for greater public and private investment.

In La Jolla and University City the City of Villages strategy holds out the opportunity for relief from the traffic congestion that erodes our quality of life. The plan will help achieve this goal by putting new homes closer to downtown and the urban core, eliminating additional freeway trips from Temecula and Mexico that clog the roads. The structure of villages will also allow us to create a real and useable transit system. Too often our transit agency decides to put expensive transit investments near the fewest numbers of users. This, of course, makes it easy to site the facility, but builds in an immediate disincentive to transit use. The City of Villages aims to change that mentality by actually thinking about mobility at the time that new developments are designed.

The City of Villages is also the first step toward a Park Master Plan that will look to better distribute and connect park facilities throughout the City. Older communities like La Jolla and University City stand to gain the most as we invest in new park infrastructure with an eye to bring the older areas in balance with the new. We could not start this master planning process, though, until we had a clear framework to plan from.

When I ran for office two years ago, I advocated that we should plan for future growth. It is foolish to think we can stop it, and even more foolish to bank on that wish. Jaime Lerner, a world-renowned planning and transit visionary has said that "creativity means certain risks. It's important to start, then make changes [because] the ideal can easily be the enemy of the possible." The City of Villages offers an appropriate way to prepare for and channel that growth in the future. I'm willing to try to make it work.