By Lori Weisberg
Staff writer
If San Diego County intends to remain a desirable place to live in decades to come, its residents are going to have to make major behavioral changes, whether it means riding mass transit, moving to the inner city or accepting more housing in their neighborhoods.
That was the message conveyed by a coalition of diverse interest groups that had been meeting over a seven-month period to craft a package of "smart-growth" recommendations that could potentially help guide the growth that is coming to the San Diego region.
"If you like the way things are, keep doing what you're doing and you'll get more of the same," county Supervisor Pam Slater told a group of 50 people who gathered yesterday for Part 2 of a smart-growth effort that was inaugurated in March by Slater and fellow Supervisor Ron Roberts.
"We need to make change. We do know that what has happened already we don't want to replicate. We know we can't continue to sprawl out forever."
The idea behind the meeting was to forge a grass-roots effort that would bring together people who traditionally have battled one another over growth and land-use issues and to reach a consensus.
The result yesterday was a broad range of recommendations relating to transportation, housing, economic development, schools, parks and water.
While many of the suggestions sounded more like platitudes than a specific plan of action (build more housing, make mass transit more convenient, preserve open space), the consensus was that more attention will have to be paid to inner-city development, increased housing density and improved infrastructure in older, neglected communities. |
As the county prepares for the influx of a million more people over the next 20 years, a new attitude about development will need to take hold, the group agreed,
Better examples of attractive high-density housing need to be marketed to neighborhoods, and housing and commercial development need to be concentrated near existing mass transit, participants said.
A committee dealing with environmental issues agreed that there should be some kind of urban limit line aimed at preserving the county's backcountry, but there was no consensus on the controversial, question of how much housing should be permitted in the region's more rural areas.
Slater said she plans to ask the Board of Supervisors to forward the group's recommendations to the county staff to see how the suggestions can be folded into the county's effort to develop a 20-year blueprint for growth in unincorporated areas.
In addition, a packet of information including the recommendations will be mailed to mayors of the 18 cities in the county in hopes of arranging a meeting to discuss the issues raised.
Roberts, who is running for mayor of San Diego, took it a step further, suggesting that what is needed is a regionally elected board that would create a general plan for the county.
"It's absolutely ridiculous," he said, "that we have 19 general plans and that coordination among them gets little more than lip service." |
