Growth for its own sake is the philosophy of a cancer cell.

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. — Kenneth Boulding

The headline was among graffiti scrawled on a men’s room wall in an Encinitas restaurant. It’s a variation on a line written by Edward Abbey in The Journey Home.

The Boulding quote means economic growth increasing by a successive percentage.

If exponential economic growth meant lifting more and more people out of poverty and a more equitable distribution of wealth, it would be a good thing. It has often meant that in what are called developing economies. In recent decades in the US, however, it has meant the opposite.

The downside of economic growth is that it’s nearly always environmentally destructive. Eventually, the damage outweighs the benefits. If we’re more well off as we destroy the planet that sustains us, where’s the good?

Among the threats humanity has caused and faces:

Global Warming/Climate Change: July 2019 was the hottest month measured on Earth since records began in 1880, the latest in a long line of peaks that scientists say backs up predictions for man-made climate change. — Associated Press

The effects of global warming and climate change are broad, deep and dire.

Scientists don’t want you to take this as a death sentence. There is still hope to curb climate change before it becomes life-threatening; it simply needs a massive amount of financial support and attention. — National Public Radio

Water Crisis: A quarter of the human population [~1.9 billion people] is facing the growing and dire risk of running out of water, according to World Resources Institute data. — New York Times

There is and has always been a fixed amount of fresh water on the planet. The only way to make more is to desalinate sea water.

Desertification: A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times as fast as it is forming. — New York Times citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group of scientists convened by the United Nations

Shrinking/shifting arable land: Climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself, with the possibility that food crises could develop on several continents at once. — Attribution as immediately above

Species Extinction: The UN already reported earlier this year that one million species are threatened by human activity. — CNN

Life on Earth is in peril. The biodiversity crisis could potentially have permanent effects if swift action is not taken. — Vox

Sea Level Rise: It has two components. The volume of ocean water is increasing as northern and southern ice caps melt. Global warming is raising sea water temperature. The warmer the water, the more it expands. Sea water is simply taking up more space, forcing land area to shrink.

Plastic Pollution: One of the reasons global warming and climate change have taken so long to alarm most people is because they’re slow. They don’t seem like an emergency because they’re not readily apparent. On the other hand, plastic pollution is visible everywhere. Besides having been recently found in snow and rain, it’s abundantly visible in the oceans, on beaches, in inland waters and on the land. It has even overwhelmed the peak of Mount Everest.

The seven problems given above are consequences. The cause is too many people. Our population has grown beyond Earth’s carrying capacity.

The solution is not 10 or 12 billion people driving electric cars. The solution is fewer people — about half the current 7.7 billion world population. We got away with our destructive behavior until there were too many of us. We have overloaded the planet. We’re killing it and its ability to sustain life — and not only human life. We’re heading for a Mad Max scenario: Too many people competing for too few resources.

The fertility rate (the number of births per woman) is shrinking below or to the replacement level in many countries. In 1964 worldwide, it was 5.0. By 2017, it had dropped to 2.4. That still means population growth overall. For population to gradually shrink, the global fertility rate has to fall below 2.0.

Check this: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Driven by economics and fear of the future, some people are choosing to have fewer or no children. But openly encouraging population reduction provokes instant condemnation. Almost nobody talks about it.

Hummingbird chicks so small they fit in a teaspoon know not to poop in their own nests. They raise their tiny butts above the rim and shoot poop projectiles into the air. We humans soil the only nest we have. The more of us there are, the faster we destroy our planet. The only way to save our species and millions of others is to reduce our numbers.

Problems caused by a shrinking population — more older people and fewer younger people — are solvable. Problems caused by limitless population growth are not. They threaten the existence of life on Earth.

— Doug Fiske

Providing Affordable Housing Requires Filling the Gap

First, there’s what housing actually costs. Second, there’s what the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) says people can afford to pay. At least in coastal California counties, the second figure is much lower than the first. For a city to provide affordable housing requires filling the gap between the two figures.

The state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) uses HUD’s figures. HUD says housing costs 30 percent of total income. The latest figures available at post time were for 2018. See the full details here:

http://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-funding/income-limits/state-and-federal-income-limits/docs/inc2k18.pdf

To simplify things a bit, HUD and HCD use a four-person household and the county’s median income as benchmarks. The figures for other income categories are percentages of the median. The city of Encinitas has designated only the Very Low and Low Income categories in its affordable housing plans, so I’ve included only those in the chart below.

San Diego County 4-Person Area Median Income: $81,800

# People	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Median	57250	65450	73600	81800	88350	94900	101450	108000
VeryLo	34100	38950	43800	48650	52550	56450	60350	64250
Low	54500	62300	70100	77850	84100	90350	96550	102800

The term “affordable housing” is tossed around without definition. To make it meaningful, it has to be expressed in dollars. Going with the 30-percent-of-income allowance for housing, here’s what a four-person household can afford to pay per month in San Diego County:

Very Low Income: $1,216

Low Income: $1,946

Say a four-person household needs a two-bedroom, two-bath unit. That’s tight but let’s not get extravagant. At post time, Zillow showed 20 rentals with those specifics in Encinitas. Of those, 13 were under $3,000. The range was $2,145 to $2,900. The average was $2,561.

Using that average and the HUD/HCD figures for affordability in San Diego County, here are the gaps the city would have to fill per rental unit:

Very Low Income: $1,345

Low Income: $615

None of this is exact and not everybody is in a four-person household. But putting affordability in dollar terms using the accepted benchmarks gives some idea of what the city of Encinitas is up against. Incidentally, the wait list for HUD Section 8 housing funding in San Diego County varies a bit from city to city, but it’s about 10 years long. Effectively, there’s no new Section 8 funding.

In her April 24, 2019 commentary in the Union-Tribune, Mayor Blakespear wrote: “Our housing plan accommodates zoning for 1,504 housing units designed to be affordable for lower-income people, spread across 15 different sites throughout the city.” That’s not correct. (The income figures the mayor gives are also wrong.) A maximum of 15 percent of the units the upzoning permits would be “affordable for lower-income people.” If that actually happens, which is doubtful, there would be 226 affordable units.

What can the city do to fill the gap between what housing costs and what HUD/HCD say Very Low and Low Income people can afford to pay? The city has to provide some form of subsidy. One way is to build the housing on city-owned land. That takes a substantial cost out of the calculation. The deal the city struck with Habitat for Humanity to build housing on city-owned land on the corner of Urania Avenue and Leucadia Boulevard did that. City-owned site L7 on Quail Gardens Drive could have done that, but the majority of then-City Council members struck the L7 site from consideration.

A way the city now fills the gap: It owns 16 condos at Pacific Pines on El Camino Real. They’re a mix of one and two bedroom units with one or two baths. The rent range is $962 to $1,406 per month. The highest rent is $1,155 below the $2,561 average given above.

Facing the problem of having to fill the dollar gap for 1,504 units, what did the city do? It gifted developers at least 1,278 market-rate units for the sake of maybe getting 226 affordable units. The city shifted the subsidy from itself to the buyers of the market-rate units. The developers won’t pay the subsidy; they’ll pass it on to the market-rate buyers.

The city also forced the suspension of voter-approved Proposition A. Rather than abiding by Prop A as several residents demonstrated could be done while still satisfying HCD’s mandate, the City Council compromised the law, gifted developers and broke faith with the residents they were elected to serve. 

— Doug Fiske

VOSD Refuses to Correct Its Faulty Reporting on Encinitas Housing Issues 

For background, scroll down to my Dec. 27, 2018 post. It’s taken me months to compose and post this followup because I didn’t want to agree with the conclusion the evidence leads to.

That conclusion: Voice of San Diego (VOSD) persistently misrepresented the facts in stories about Proposition A, density bonus and the Housing Element Update (HEU) in Encinitas. When called out on their faulty reporting, Editor-in-Chief Scott Lewis and Associate Editor Jesse Marx refused to make amends.

The bulleted points give the sequence of events:

• On Nov. 14, 2018, VOSD published a Marx story about Encinitas housing that was laced with inaccuracies. It continued the erroneous slant that started with a March 9, 2016 VOSD story by Maya Srikrishnan.

• On Nov. 21, I posted to Marx, saying VOSD had consistently gotten Encinitas housing issues wrong. I suggested he should start over and get it right. In another post to him on Nov. 30, I said essentially the same thing. He replied and asked what he had gotten wrong. I responded that to get the story right, Marx would have to scrap almost everything VOSD had published on Encinitas housing, go back before Prop A, follow the city’s abortive efforts at an HEU, and bring the story up to present day. I included contact information for four Encinitas residents who know more about the issues than I do.

• On Dec. 4, Marx replied with a misinterpretation of a point I made about Prop A in my Nov. 30 post. I replied to correct him and again suggested he contact a resident I named who is thoroughly versed on the issues. Marx called that resident, but if he got any information he didn’t publish it. On Dec. 5 and 6, I posted lengthy comments to Marx on Encinitas housing issues and VOSD’s reporting on them. I waited for a reply or a corrective story. Neither happened, so I posted my Dec. 27 critique. I emailed the URL to Marx, Editor-in-Chief Lewis and three other VOSD staffers.

• On Jan. 3, 2019, Lewis replied, saying the criticisms in my Dec. 27 post were unsubstantiated. This despite my having included six quotes from VOSD reporting that contained inaccuracies. I replied at length to Lewis, suggesting reporting steps VOSD could follow to get the story right. I also provided contact information for six knowledgeable Encinitas residents. I referred Lewis to my email exchange with Marx for further specifics.

• On Jan. 4, Lewis replied, saying I should explain how VOSD was wrong. He said he had not seen my email exchange with Marx. On Jan. 5, I replied that he was asking me to do his job. I referred him to emails other Encinitas residents had posted to VOSD regarding its faulty reporting and to the critical comments below previous VOSD stories on Encinitas housing. If Lewis had looked in VOSD’s archive, he would have found those comments and an April 20, 2016 commentary written by three Encinitas residents “to supply missing background information, correct factual errors and provide a more precise context for some of the assertions made in the VOSD article.” The residents had met with Srikrishnan before her March 9, 2016 story, had tried to familiarize her with the facts and were disappointed in the results.

• On Jan. 5, Lewis again asked me to explain how VOSD got their Encinitas housing stories wrong. This despite the specifics I had given in my blog post, in my emails to him, previously to Marx, and those I had referred Lewis to in the VOSD archive. Lewis showed himself to be like a man who, when told his fly is open, demands more proof before checking for himself. Nevertheless, he wrote “as a gesture to diffuse this tension I’ll spend some time looking into this.”

• I waited a month. On Feb. 5, I posted to Lewis and asked what he had found. He replied that he found nothing incorrect in what VOSD wrote. It’s impossible to read VOSD’s reporting on Encinitas housing issues since March 9, 2016, the three residents’ April 20, 2016 commentary, comments below the stories in VOSD’s archive, my Dec. 27 blog post and my emails to Marx, and still find VOSD’s reporting faultless. Either Lewis didn’t look, he’s blind to his publication’s faults, or VOSD intentionally misrepresented the facts about Encinitas housing issues. For good measure, I referred Lewis to the Encinitas Undercover blog, which has called out VOSD three times for bad reporting on Encinitas issues.

All this is water under the bridge now. Yet, as late as Feb. 20, 2019, Marx wrote: “Encinitas is one of 47 municipalities . . . that has failed to submit a plan to the state identifying sites for housing production of all income levels.” The city had submitted the HEU to the state on Dec. 21, 2018.

Until VOSD’s refusal to correct their faulty reporting on Encinitas housing issues, I had given them the benefit of the doubt. They had done what appeared to be accurate reporting on too many other subjects to conclude they were intentionally falsifying their Encinitas reporting. A few other locals accused VOSD of being pro-development and pro-BIA (Building Industry Association of San Diego County).

According to their website, VOSD is “funded by individual members, major charitable gifts, foundations and community partnerships.” I find no institutional connection with the BIA on the site. I don’t know if VOSD’s board members or individual supporters are linked to the BIA.

On Feb 14, 2019, the BIA hosted a breakfast meeting at the La Jolla Marriott hotel. Here are the details:

“Community Relations: It Can Make or Break Project Approval
Learn the Builder’s Strategy & How You Can Help
Today, the NIMBYs have a very loud voice and are halting projects around the county. Learn from a panel of experts to see what builders/developers are doing to get projects approved and how our industry must help.”

There were four speakers on the “panel of experts.” One was VOSD Staff Writer Lisa Halverstadt.

Credibility for any news outlet depends on objective, accurate reporting. If an outlet’s faulty reporting on one issue goes uncorrected, its coverage of every other issue becomes questionable.

For well-informed, accurate reporting on Encinitas housing issues, see Barbara Henry’s stories in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

— Doug Fiske

How a Developer Got to Build a Three-Story Hotel on the Leucadia Bluff

The California Coastal Commission first approved the project that’s become known as the Encinitas Beach Hotel in December 1992. Subsequent amendments, renewals, etc. were based on the first approval and did not change the height and grading specifications.

Quotes from the 1992 staff report:

• Page 3: “Said plans shall have received design review approval from the City of Encinitas and verify that no structure shall exceed 2 stories or 30 feet in height as measured from the lower of natural or finished grade.”

• Page 10: “. . . construction of an approximately 138,460 sq. ft., two-story plus basement level, 30-ft. high, 130-unit resort hotel complex on a 4.3 acre blufftop site in the City of Encinitas.”

This Orwellian paragraph appears on page 11:

• “Although the proposed buildings are to be constructed as two-stories with a basement level, portions will appear to be 3 stories. Most of the proposed north facing buildings will have a 3-story appearance, rising vertically for all three floors, giving the appearance of a solid wall of buildings along the north facing portion of the site.”

According to the CCC, a building can appear to be three stories but actually be only two. As the developer’s rendering above clearly shows, the north-facing wing of the building is three stories. The first story starts at the level above the basement and rises to three stories from the finished grade. About two-thirds of the building doesn’t only appear to be three stories, it is three stories.

Asked about this discrepancy, Katie Innes, a senior planner in the city’s Development Services Department, replied, “The Encinitas Beach Resort is required to meet the City’s height requirement of 30 feet and two stories. The subterranean levels of the building do not count toward the two story height limitation.”

Advised that “subterranean” means underground and that the developer’s rendering clearly shows three stories above ground, Innes replied, “When more than 50% of the perimeter of a building level is buried (<4 ft. exposed), it is considered a basement level. There are portions of the lowest visible level shown on the rendering that are located behind the building that are buried (more than 50%), which qualifies that level as a basement.”

When notified of the inconsistencies between the height specifics in the CCC’s approval and the building shown in the developer’s rendering, Eric Stevens, a coastal program analyst in the CCC’s South Coast District office, replied in part as follows:

“This response email was written in coordination with the Commission’s legal and enforcement divisions.” . . .

“The project was approved prior to certification of the City’s Local Coastal Plan and the standard of review was the Coastal Act.” . . .

“I understand that you have some concerns about how the City calculates and/or defines basements, and whether the proposed project is consistent with City requirements. Please understand that Commission staff has not and is not reviewing the project for conformance to the City’s requirements, but rather to the project as approved by the Commission.”

The CCC’s approval specified a height limit of two stories and 30 feet from the lower of natural or finished grade. The approval came before the city’s Local Coastal Plan was certified. Therefore, the standard of review should indeed be the Coastal Act and the CCC’s specifics, not the city’s convoluted definition of what’s above and below ground. The city’s specifics are irrelevant.

The CCC staff and its legal and enforcement divisions ignored the approved 1992 height limits, deferred to an irrelevant, convoluted city definition and improperly approved a three-story hotel on the bluff in Leucadia.

— Doug Fiske