San Diego Seeks To Become A 'City of Villages'

Gail, as San Diego's Planning Director, you introduced more than three years ago a City of Villages strategy for coping with explosive growth and helped design pilot projects to implement this strategy. The City Council has taken up your proposals and a compromise appears to have been reached. Please describe the status of these growth management efforts.

The most exciting thing we're doing is our pilot village projects. Our Action Plan called for the identification of three specific locations where the city would partner with the community and prospective developers to build visible examples of the "City of Villages" strategy. The communities competed in order to win one of these coveted spots and finally five-two more than we had hoped for-were selected. These sites will be given the highest priority for infrastructure investment and expedited processing of plans and permits as well as other incentives. There is a great deal of excitement around these prospective projects! We hope they will provide "models of possibilities" for other neighborhoods in San Diego.

We also are using our City of Villages strategy to infill and redevelop many of our older neighborhoods where development pressure and existing plan capacity allow densification. The largest challenge, of course, is that we don't have the money to make up for the existing infrastructure deficiencies in our older communities. Without a real commitment from the city for infrastructure money, many communities continue to resist any additional development, even the density allowed in the adopted plans.

After years spent engaging with the community in an attempt to positively channel anti-growth sentiment, a smart growth consensus was reached and, like all planning directors and planning commissions, you were then faced with the fact that the Planning Department didn't control new resource investment in these communities to meet the expectations of residents. Is this a universal lesson in local government finance? What are the take-away lessons?

That is a common issue in California. All California cities are struggling with the same infrastructure problems that we have in San Diego. Much of it is a result of Proposition 13 and the lack of resources over the past 20 years to invest in the older neighborhoods. I've always been a little amused by the claim that smart growth is less expensive. My question has always been "less expensive to whom?" In many California cities, including San Diego, suburban developments require the developer to pay for all of the infrastructure to support that growth. That is certainly less expensive to the public sector than trying to do smart growth in the older neighborhoods, where we are going to have to come up with billions of dollars in order to bring those neighborhoods up to some reasonable standard before they can accept new growth.

While private sector development on the urban edge may be less burdensome to municipal budgets on the front end, one could argue that it is more expensive operationally in the long term. Your thoughts?

In San Diego, the growth did happen in an orderly way. That may not be immediately obvious when you look at our landscape because of the open space system and the sensitive lands and canyons that had to be preserved. But, the reality is that San Diego's growth did not sprawl, it occurred in an orderly way and worked its way out as it should have.

In terms of providing the infrastructure, the cost to the public sector was an appropriate cost and was not more expensive because of where it happened. The ultimate burden was less locational than situational. In many of the newer communities, the amenities that were provided were beyond even city standards. Many of the developers built parks, community centers, recreation centers and libraries, beyond any city requirement. These facilities met the desires of the more affluent suburbs but ultimately placed a burden on the entire city in terms of operational cost.

You have noted often that smart growth puts burdensome requirements on the private sector for sustainable building and green building. Cities are often pushing the private sector-its contractors and builders-to do the new thing, which is always more expensive than doing it the old way. And the private sector typically rebels because the costs imposed are higher. Who should pay for the "new" as we try to build smarter and greener?

In San Diego, we have been trying desperately to entice developers to use different technology, to make initial investments that will pay off over the long term. What we are finding is that, because most of those developers are builder developers who are going sell these developments, the benefit reaped over the long term cannot be realized by these builders. So, the initial cost is too high. The developers also maintain that it is even more difficult to process because the bureaucrats are not familiar with them. Permitting and inspections are more difficult. So most developers are unwilling to build these cutting edge projects.

Until we can come up with some way to transfer some of that long-term benefit to the developer who is fronting the cost, we are not going to achieve the changes we are striving for. I do agree that the appropriate party to make the first move is the public sector. If public agencies are building libraries or public facilities, this is a good opportunity to advance the use of newer technologies. It is much easier for the public sector to reap the long-term benefit of that investment, while concurrently helping the development community learn the skills to do the new buildings and educating the bureaucrats on how to facilitate the process.

SANDAG is scaling up its regional efforts to link land use and transportation in a smart way. Since the city of San Diego is the 900 lb. gorilla in SANDAG, what's your perspective on their effort at linkage?

SANDAG is taking an important first step to come up with a land use plan that is a regional plan. The city of San Diego, because we are already committed to a smart growth strategy, wants to support any effort that will bring the other jurisdictions to the table. We are fortunate in the San Diego region to have other large jurisdictions like the County and Chula Vista working on smart growth plans to appropriately accommodate growth and preserve our rural lands. But, we have other jurisdictions in San Diego that are very reluctant to plan for growth and want to remain exactly as they are. So, anything SANDAG can do to bring everyone to the table is helpful.

SANDAG has but a few tools to incentivize planning for smart growth. They can use their transportation money to incentivize smart growth. If they can invest in transportation projects that support smart growth, and if they are willing not to invest in transportation projects that don't support smart growth, then we will have made a tremendous step forward.

Regional entities like SANDAG or SCAG have been unwilling, typically because of their governing structure, to pick winners or losers and put in place dollar incentives and disincentives to encourage regional smart growth initiatives. Is there anything on the horizon-we're doing this interview at a conference on smart growth and regionalism-that leads you to believe that going forward these regional entities will be able to link land use and transportation more intelligently?

We have to be encouraged by the fact that they are even attempting to come up with comprehensive land use plans. And while they may not achieve all of the objectives that we hoped for, we do have to be realistic and understand how important it is to make that step. Of course, it is their governing composition that will ultimately decide whether we continue to equitably distribute our limited resources or we use those resources to support the projects that meet our regional objectives. Many of the regional entities, like our local SANDAG, do provide for a weighted vote based on population. The larger jurisdictions could band together and exercise that vote to support regional objectives. In San Diego, that has rarely happened.

Let's return to our discussion of San Diego's pilot village projects. Is the adoption of this approach for prioritizing resources an example of a jurisdiction picking winners and losers?

While San Diego did not have a new and separate pot of money to invest in those smart growth projects, the city was willing to reprioritize the infrastructure dollars they did have and to make the pilot villages the highest priority for those dollars. When you're looking at individual projects and limited resources-you either underfund everything or you pick and choose. In the short term, there are winners and losers but, in the long term, the whole city wins.

Lastly, given the dearth of resources available in San Diego to fight last year's fires and to invest in neighborhood infrastructure, is there any sense that San Diego's voters may opt to provide more funds to the city and county vis a vis tax reform?

San Diego taxpayers appear to be satisfied with the level of service they are getting. They have even been resistant to user fees. Part of the problem is that, despite dwindling resources, the city continues to provide the expected level of visible services, such as library hours and parks and recreation hours. We tend to make the cuts in areas that are not so obvious to the public, such as infrastructure investment and operational budgets-all critical, but not necessarily high profile from the public's perspective. Until the City is willing to let the public literally see the consequences of that lack of investment, we are not going to make any progress.