Slow Growth May Come Slowly Under Initiative

Even if the countywide slow-growth initiative passes at the polls in June, don’t expect to see hammers stop in midair or blueprints crumpled in the wastebasket.

Slow growth or no, new commercial construction--office buildings, hotels, shopping centers and the like--almost certainly will continue at the breakneck speed for which Orange County has become renowned.

“If the initiative succeeds, people will not see changes overnight,” said Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, one of the leaders of Orange County’s slow-growth movement. “It is not going to end growth or even necessarily sharply curtail growth in the county. . . .

“But it will impose county standards in unincorporated areas that will bring relief because they will require infrastructure improvements. Beyond that, it will inspire citizens and city councils to mimic the county initiative by adopting a similar instrument for local purposes.”

The Citizens’ Sensible Growth Traffic Control Initiative applies only to unincorporated areas, not to cities where most development is occurring.

But even if separate slow-growth initiatives pass in cities where there have been efforts to get them on the ballot--such as in Huntington Beach, Seal Beach, San Clemente and Costa Mesa--commercial construction in those areas is unlikely to be slowed in the near future.

City councils and planning commissions already have endorsed most of the commercial projects in the pipeline, and officials say that others, with modifications made to appease concerns over traffic, are likely to be approved.

Moreover, as pollster Mark Baldassare, an urban sociologist and professor at UC Irvine points out, most Orange County residents are not opposed to all commercial development. Few objections are raised against shopping centers and movie theaters. It is the high-density office tower that provokes the most opposition.

“Typically, office buildings are among the worst in terms of their adverse effect on the quality of life,” Agran said.

Nonetheless, office towers are sprouting all over Orange County as the area continues its metamorphosis from a post-World War II residential suburb of Los Angeles into a self-contained urban hub.

“Historically, we started out late in the commercial development business,” Baldassare said. “But as more jobs, as well as people, started to move to Orange County, you had to develop an industrial base . . . and you had the need for commercial development as well.”

Rapidly increasing land values have also made it more profitable for builders to favor high-density developments, Baldassare said, and there seems to be no shortage of tenants, current or potential.

A Company a Week

Dick Sim, president of the Irvine Co.’s industrial properties group, said that for the past 2 1/2 years his division has been adding to the list of owners or tenants in the 2,600-acre Irvine Spectrum at the rate of a company a week.

“In 1988, we expect that will be two companies a week,” he said.

With 350 companies already doing business at the Spectrum, which its builders describe as an international center for research, technology and business, the complex is nearly a third complete. By the time it is built out--perhaps 20 years from now--about 80,000 people will be working there, Sim said.

In the Spectrum’s near future is a 15-story AT & T headquarters, which should be occupied by the end of the year. The Western Digital tower, where the company will consolidate its Orange County offices, should break ground this summer. And the Wolfe Co. has a 185,000-square-foot office building that already is under construction.

Inevitably, as any Orange County commuter can attest, such high-density expansion brings high-density traffic.

Although the Irvine Co., in compliance with city development requirements, said it already has spent $226 million to relieve traffic congestion within Irvine, the state Department of Transportation has no immediate plans to widen freeways near the Spectrum beyond adding car-pool lanes.

“The freeways were designed for 1 million people and we have 2 million people, and that’s our problem,” Sim said. “Growth is not our problem.”

Controversial View

That view, however, remains controversial, especially in areas that have seen intense development in recent years.

Costa Mesa Residents for Responsible Growth has begun circulating petitions to halt the 94-acre Home Ranch project, a $400-million office complex planned by C. J. Segerstrom & Sons, as well as the second phase of Arnel Development’s Metro Pointe project, which calls for three office towers. Both projects, scheduled to be built along the San Diego Freeway, have been approved by the Costa Mesa City Council.

“If I leave my house at 8 o’clock in the morning, it could take me 15 or 20 minutes just to get past that light,” said Steve Goldberger, president of Costa Mesa Residents for Responsible Growth, speaking of the intersection of Harbor Boulevard and Gisler Avenue near his home in Costa Mesa.

“I can almost get to my office faster by bicycling there. . . . The concern that we have is that this is turning into a traffic disaster.”

According to a study commissioned by the city of Costa Mesa, by the time the Segerstrom and Arnel projects, another by Sakioka Farms and a fourth by Curci-England/Transpacific Development Co. are complete, they will add 160,000 cars a day to the traffic in Costa Mesa. Currently, about 140,000 cars a day use the San Diego Freeway at Fairview Road.

“So we’re going to add 160,000 cars a day,” said David Wheeler, a Costa Mesa city councilman and slow-growth activist. “You don’t have to be a scientist to see the results.”

Back Up of Traffic

Wheeler said that although developers have agreed to make road improvements within the city, including the widening of freeway entrances, such measures ignore the havoc inherent in forcing even more cars onto already overcrowded freeways.

“None of it is going to mean anything anyway because the traffic will be backed up to get on the freeway,” he said. “The real solution is to stop the building until you build the roads.”

But developers and others associated with city planning argue that such an alternative may not be possible in areas such as Costa Mesa, where demand for even more commercial space is high.

“I don’t assume that it is going to be a nightmare,” said Don Lamm, director of development services for Costa Mesa. “People have a tendency to react when they hear a number (such as 160,000 cars a day) that it’s a nightmare. Traffic increases every day. Unless all development stops, it’s inevitable that it’s going to happen.”

Goldberger and other slow-growth activists passionately disagree.

“Most of us moved into the area to live in peace, to raise a family in a relatively suburban setting,” Goldberger said. “Well, developers want to turn it into an urban setting. We don’t care for that. We don’t feel that it is inevitable or right.”

‘Stake-Holders’ Council

In Santa Ana, a development firm known as BGS Partners was able to stem residents’ fears about traffic nightmares by forming a so-called “stake-holders’ council” to discuss plans for building its 65-acre development called MacArthur Place. The council included neighbors, developers and traffic consultants.

The result, after five meetings over about eight months last year, was a development plan almost unanimously approved by residents of Sand Pointe, across from the project site on the northeast corner of Main Street and MacArthur Boulevard.

The developers plan to allot space for park areas and build several entrances to the complex in an attempt to avoid traffic congestion in the neighborhood. Nearby streets and freeway access roads are scheduled to be widened.

“We felt if this project was going to be a good neighbor, it should involve the neighborhood,” said Roger Torriero, president of Griffin Realty and a partner in MacArthur Place.

“Looking back,” he said, “it had a certain element of risk in it, from the development point of view. But I thought it was the logical, fair thing to do. I learned a lot.”

MacArthur Place will be built on what was one of the proposed sites of the 20,500-seat Westdome sports arena, a project vehemently opposed by neighbors.

“I really believe that participatory planning is going to become mandatory in projects of consequence,” Torriero said. “There is a heightened public awareness of the development process, especially in the neighborhoods that would be directly affected.”

November Ground Breaking

Ground breaking at the site for MacArthur Place is tentatively scheduled for November. When completed, perhaps 20 years from now, the project will include 400 condominiums and 4.5 million square feet of office space, retail shops, hotel rooms and restaurants. It is expected to generate 16,000 jobs.

The lesson of MacArthur Place, it seems, also is being applied in Newport Beach, where a 1986 campaign by slow-growth activists shelved a major expansion at Fashion Island.

The Irvine Co. has recently begun meeting with members of SPON (Stop Polluting Our Newport)in an effort to smooth the way for development of the company’s remaining land in the city.

“We have realized that if we go on fighting, neither of us are going to get what we want,” said Newport Beach resident Allan Beek, one of the city’s most prominent slow-growth activists. “So we are hoping to reach some middle ground, maybe by June. That way we will both get the things that we really care about, and we will give up other things.”

Beek said one of the options slow-growth advocates may accept is allowing construction of high-rise office buildings in exchange for “lots of open space.”

Other planned commercial projects within various cities have aroused varying degrees of controversy, but most have been approved by city councils even in the face of opposition.

Projects in Planning

Among the projects in the planning stages are a 140-acre parcel in Fountain Valley that is to be converted into a retail-office complex and, in Huntington Beach, the Pierside Village residential-retail complex and the McDonnell Douglas Huntington Beach Office Park. Huntington Beach’s Waterfront Hotel Project, at Pacific Coast Highway and Beach Boulevard, has not yet been approved by the city council.

In the meantime, developers in the county’s unincorporated “slow-growth territory” are scrambling to clinch development agreements with the Board of Supervisors in an attempt to ensure that they can build on their land.

But the agreements, which are designed to protect planned development from changes in land-use restrictions, have never been tested in court.

“You have to assume that anyone who owns large acres of land and pays taxes on it will want to get something nailed down,” said Costa Mesa’s Lamm.

“That’s why you’re seeing these developer agreements, and I’m sure I will receive requests in this city for development agreements as well.”