Urban Canyons Losing Ground to Developments

On the northern fringe of Mira Mesa lies a small, seven-acre canyon. It is a finger, or extension, of the vast Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve, itself a green gulf that cuts across the belly of San Diego.

Take a good look at that little finger canyon.

Soon, it will be gone.

It will be buried under 250,000 cubic yards of dirt, enough to fill about 15 stories in an average office building, and the small natural wonder will become the site for 24 houses in one of the city’s newest subdivisions.

Its fate symbolizes an issue that is once again stirring protests: San Diego’s heady growth is nibbling away at its canyons--in some cases swallowing them whole.

From Mission Hills to Golden Hill, Mira Mesa to Clairemont, residents are girding themselves for battle with developers who have targeted neighborhood canyons for apartments, houses and condominiums. Especially in inner-city areas, canyons are emerging as political and legal battle zones in the never-ending war over growth.

The reasons for the confrontations are complex and deeply rooted in San Diego’s historic ambivalence about what to do with its rich natural amenities. Developers and community groups are at loggerheads now because of simple economic laws, debates over private property rights and the city government’s “growth management” policy, which has inadvertently encouraged builders to build in canyons.

Those problems, in turn, are compounded by a government crusade to save the canyons that has become so cumbersome that seven years after voters approved a $65-million bond issue to buy choice canyons and other land vulnerable to the bulldozer, the city has yet to spend the last $20 million.

And while $10 million of that was supposed to be available in April--just in time to allow the City Council to defuse the canyon wars during an election year--fiscal considerations now force the city to wait two more years to get any money.

Meanwhile, canyons are disappearing.

“We are not only in danger of losing the canyons, we have lost many of them and are in the process of losing them,” said Mayor Roger Hedgecock, a lawyer who once represented a Clairemont group that fought to protect Tecolote Canyon from development.

“We are losing the basic identity of San Diego--those canyons that break up the pattern of development in the city and make it more liveable,” he said.

The main trunks of some large canyons, such as Tecolote and the Los Penasquitos Preserve, are off-limits to development. They are part of the city’s system of parkland called “open space,” property that is set aside in its natural state to serve as visual and psychological relief from the maze of streets, apartments and houses.

But lying unprotected are dozens of smaller canyons, appealing patches of relatively undisturbed land. Particularly in the inner-city neighborhoods, where development is more pervasive, these canyons are becoming the latest political battlegrounds.

The strongest war whoops can be heard in Mission Hills, north of downtown, where builders are eyeing property in and around the Dove and Florence canyons. Alarmed by the proposals, the local community planning group is asking the city for a moratorium on all construction in canyons and hillsides.

Battle cries can be heard elsewhere. Other skirmishes, current or recent, include:

- The 34th Street Canyon in Golden Hill, east of downtown. There are six proposals to build a total of 447 apartments and town houses in and around the mouth of the canyon, which empties into the Interstate 15 and California 94 interchange. Chilcote Homes Inc. has put a street in the bottom of the canyon, while its plan for 62 apartments awaits city approval. For now, the lone road attracts dragsters and motorcyclists, who race down the street and buzz over homemade trails on the canyon’s sides.

A second developer, Cal Street Builders, is suing the city over another proposed development. The suit attempts to overturn a restriction the City Council passed in 1979 to permit only 72 apartments on the company’s 6.6-acre site, instead of the 112 permitted by zoning. The council approved the restriction because of neighborhood concerns for traffic and the canyon, but the action was never officially recorded before Cal Street bought the property. At a hearing Wednesday, the judge took the matter under advisement.

- The Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve and nearby Lopez Canyon. In April, a handful of residents lost a bid to have the City Council alter a proposal by Fieldstone Development to build houses on the southern border of the preserve. They hoped to save the seven-acre finger canyon, and part of others in the area.

Now, a handful of residents are fighting plans by Genstar Southwest Development Co. to build 132 housing units on a ridge separating the preserve from Lopez Canyon to the south. The 132 homes are an eastern addition to a previously approved Genstar subdivision of 1,400 houses on 228 acres. Residents say the extra buildings will cover a finger canyon designated as open space on the community plan and will block a “wildlife corridor” for deer and smaller animals.

In addition, the City Council is taking a closer look at plans to build roads across Lopez Canyon and the preserve. The roads are called for in community plans to connect the fast-growing communities of Mira Mesa and Los Penasquitos. But some residents object to the plans, because the roads would affect the vistas in the canyons and encourage denser development on the canyon rims. A report reevaluating the need for the roads is expected from the San Diego Assn. of Governments (Sandag) next month.

- A 19-acre finger canyon in North Clairemont. Residents won a protracted court case in March when the California Supreme Court let stand a narrow technical ruling scuttling plans for 78 condominium units in the canyon, off Regents Road. The ruling was a defeat for the city, too, which approved the 78 units in a controversial vote, although zoning called for 62. The City Council voted Monday to rescind its approval, and now must pay the residents’ $14,400 in attorney’s fees.

Of course, there isn’t a noisy fight over every canyon. No one raised an uproar when roads were built for industrial and residential development in Carroll Canyon in Mira Mesa, parts of which had been exploited in quarry operations.

And nobody is objecting to plans by the owner to sell a sliver of a Golden Hill canyon on C Street, just west of 28th Street. The “for sale” sign brags that the small canyon could hold as many as 17 apartments and condominiums.

Rick Nestor, the owner, estimated it would take 7,500 cubic yards of dirt to fill in the lot for construction.

“Right now, it turns into a garbage dump,” he said. “It’s people at the bus stop throwing things down in there. The people in the adjacent area are interested in seeing something done with it.”

But preservationists are quick to sound a general alarm over the city’s canyons.

“We’re losing a precious resource,” said Lynn Benn, a member of the Torrey Pines community planning group who also served on the city’s Growth Management Task Force.

“As long as you can continue to cut off a 40-foot top of a hill and push it down and fill another 40-foot canyon, you’re losing a precious resource,” she said.

From the beginning, the canyons, along with the sea, have been San Diego’s most striking feature. If James Michener were to write a novel about the city, he would start with the day the earth heaved and created mountains in the East County, sending water rushing westward to the Pacific Ocean.

The water made the canyons, part of a natural drainage system that dissected the land into mesas. Over time, the canyons became an independent ecological system of vegetation, filled with plants such as chaparral and California buckwheat, and with animals, such as quail, hawks, rats, coyotes, skunks, deer and bobcats.

Canyons were largely ignored when, in the late 1800s, the modern city of San Diego was born under the direction of Alonzo Horton. A 1981 Sandag report on canyons said those plans “totally negated the mesas and valleys of the topography. The old, traditional east/west street pattern was imposed on the land.”

“Central San Diego shows the effects of that thoughtlessness,” the report said. The result is the huge number of streets that frustrate drivers by coming to a dead end at a canyon, throughout inner-city neighborhoods.

The incongruity of the street pattern over the rolling hills and canyons--the imposition of Eastern ideas on a Western landscape--was the first indication of San Diegans’ ambivalence about their environment. John Nolen, hired in 1908 to prepare a comprehensive plan for San Diego, lamented:

“No topographical map of the city has been prepared, and until very recently, no contour streets have been laid. The method of building city streets . . . has required cutting through innumerable hills and the filling in of deep valleys and canyons. It has meant . . . a destruction of a rare opportunity to significant beauty.”

Yet canyons were to shape people’s lives. The profit motive led developers to the cheaper, flat mesas to build their communities. By default, the canyons became the boundaries for such communities as North Park, Golden Hill, Kensington and Talmadge.

The result, said Philip Pryde, San Diego State University geography professor, is that people in San Diego “feel they belong to a community. They’ll help to make that community viable, a good liveable community. They will work harder to keep it up, keep the houses painted, keep the streets attractive and so forth.”

The contrast is Los Angeles, Pryde said.

“You go from Norwalk to whatever the next town is, and you have no idea unless you see a city limits sign that says you’ve entered into a community,” he said. “People don’t feel a sense of identity (in Los Angeles). They don’t feel that they belong to a little area that they can take pride in.”

Many people, however, see canyons in a less cerebral way. They are simply the open invitations for hikers and naturalist, hide-outs for children bent on adventure or mischief.

In the early 1970s, the bucolic life of the city’s canyons began to change. Development edged in. Many canyons had been buried in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Clairemont and Kearny Mesa communities were created.

Booming construction in San Diego devoured much of the mesa land. Escalating property values made neglected canyon lots more economically feasible to develop. Improved bulldozing techniques allowed builders to cut notches out of canyon slopes for building pads.

A warning about the collision course of development and canyons was sounded in a landmark 1974 report called “Temporary Paradise?” prepared for the prominent, environmentally activist Marston family of San Diego by two East Coast planners. After a review of the city, the planners wrote:

“It is of great importance that San Diego now, at the last moment, preserve all the remaining undeveloped valleys and canyons. Keep the building up on the expansive flats above. Protect the valley sides and rims, as well as the floor, so that the rural character of the valley is preserved.”

Canyon wars had begun.

The granddaddy battle of them all was over Tecolote Canyon in Clairemont, a prolonged political and legal skirmish that stretched over most of the 1970s. Residents used their numbers and savvy to fend off development by taxing themselves to buy the land for open space.

The city government itself inadvertently applied greater pressure on canyons when it adopted its “growth management” plan in 1979. Meant to discourage Los Angeles-type urban sprawl, the city used special fees and land restrictions to redirect construction from outlying areas into established neighborhoods close to downtown--neighborhoods with vulnerable canyons.

The plan worked so well that 60% of the new housing in San Diego was built in those established neighborhoods between 1980 and 1985, the Growth Management Task Force reported in December.

Part of that equation was a desire by developers to cater to a generation of middle- and upper-class professionals, who shunned the suburban kind of existence of tract housing and long commutes to work. They were looking for convenient and distinctive housing close to their downtown offices.

“Canyons are choice for the middle-class professionals who want to live close to town, close to the hospitals,” said Gary Thomas, a developer now putting the finishing touches on an 11-unit condominium building along Dove Canyon in Mission Hills.

“You get some views in the middle of the city where, normally, you don’t get any views,” Thomas said, explaining the allure. “You can look down into the canyon and you can see hawks, skunks, gray foxes and all that kind of thing, as long as you don’t abuse them.”

What constitutes abuse?

The answers run the spectrum.

Some canyon purists, like those in Mira Mesa, believe the pattern of development should be altered--and profits lost--to save hillside views and small endangered flowers like the Mesa Mint and endangered geological forms like “vernal pools,” natural puddles that exist in the late fall and winter.

“We still have wildlife in the canyons--deer as well as smaller mammals, birds and reptiles,” said Pam Stevens of the Mira Mesa community planning group. “When there is a canyon in your community, you don’t have to drive to the mountains to hike or commune with nature. The smaller finger canyons are easily overlooked, but they are an important part of the open space system that is here now.

“Each time one is filled, we lose wildlife habitat and a chance for kids to explore and learn about nature. But each time a subdivision is designed around one of these finger canyons, we win. We win a place to live that retains the natural qualities that makes us want to live there.”

Jim Williams, a lobbyist for the construction industry, confesses that native vegetation in canyons “doesn’t do anything for me. I think it is ugly as hell.”

“It is a hell of a lot of land sitting there that is going to go to waste unless someone builds on it,” Williams said, adding that canyons are an “asset that should be utilized, especially because of the desperate need we have for housing.”

That feeling was echoed by Keith Johnson, vice president of Fieldstone Development. Asked how he feels about his company’s plans to fill canyons for houses, he said:

“I have a delight in driving through the subdivision on Saturday morning and seeing all the families enjoying living there--washing cars, enjoying gardening. That’s a psychic benefit to me and an important part of our society.”

But any discussion about canyons usually boils down to a philosophical debate about rights of private property.

“There’s no constitutional right to have your canyon preserved,” said attorney John Thelan, a powerful lobbyist for developers in city government. “There is a constitutional right to make a reasonable use of your property.”

The only way to preserve the canyons and not infringe on private property rights is to buy the land outright for open space, developers say. City officials are loathe to use their zoning powers as a way to preserve canyons, fearing that they would be in effect condemning property and making the city liable for financial penalties.

So the city has tried to buy as many canyons as possible. To date, the city has spent about two-thirds of its allotted $65 million from a 1978 bond issue approved for open space. At the time voters gave their approval for the bonds, it was estimated the money would preserve 10,000 to 11,000 acres, much of it in canyons.

However, the results are lagging. The city has purchased slightly more than 3,100 acres.

To supplement the effort, city officials try to augment their stock of open space by persuading developers to donate part of their subdivisions. So far, the city has obtained an additional 3,321 in free canyon slopes and other land from developers, who many times point to their largess to win concessions for their projects.

The biggest and most significant gift was the Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve from Genstar Southwest Development Co.--a 1979 donation of 1,806 acres.

Still, the city’s efforts cannot protect all the canyons. And while the city is applying greater regulatory pressure to developers who want to build in canyons--such as two recent ordinances that make it tougher to build on a slope--there are some conflicting signals in the tapestry of local government over just what to do.

For instance, zoning maps, used to tell a developer how many houses or apartments he can place on his land, were largely made with no regard for topography. In some instances, they legally permit mid- to high-density development in canyons.

At the same time, community plans, written by the city staff and neighborhood residents, often acknowledge the canyons as significant and suggest no development be allowed along their rims or slopes.

Now, those mixed messages are helping foment rebellion as developers take the wraps off their canyon projects. Residents are mobilizing for war, and the ultimate decision may be made on the political battlefield before the City Council.

Such was the case with the small, seven-acre canyon in Mira Mesa.

The battle was April 16, when residents appeared before the City Council to seek a change in the plans of Fieldstone Development, in conjunction with Genstar Southwest Development, to build Mirador Park, a subdivision of 452 houses over 130 acres on the southern border of the Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve.

Fieldstone wanted to fill in the finger canyon as part of the project. In addition, it asked to fill in a head--about 2.3 acres--of a second canyon to build a road and put in houses.

As it happens, the Mira Mesa Community Plan had conflicting information about what to do with the two canyons. One map showed the seven-acre canyon open for development, while on a more detailed drawing it designated the canyon as open space. One map showed the second canyon as open space, while another showed a road running through it.

Residents tried to use the contradictions to save the canyons, arguing that the community had set them aside for open space. But Johnson from Fieldstone argued that “the economic costs far outweigh the environmental benefits.” He said one suggestion to change the alignment of the road would cost his company $400,000.

In addition, representatives of Genstar reminded the City Council of their firm’s open-space gift of 1,806 acres. As part of the gift, the city had signed an agreement allowing Genstar to develop land that it owned on the periphery of the reserve, a clause that itself is open to different interpretations.

With Mayor Hedgecock and Councilman Mike Gotch dissenting, the council voted 6-2 to let Fieldstone and Genstar go forward with their plan.

The small canyons soon will be buried.