Initiatives San Diego

A slow-growth initiative intended to limit housing development in San Diego to as few as 4,000 units per year has qualified for the November ballot, according to the city clerk's office. The announcement follows the filing of more than 85,000 signatures in favor of what is called the Quality of Life Initiative. The City Council, which will be asked later this month to place the measure on the Nov.

A slow-growth initiative intended to limit housing development in San Diego to as few as 4,000 units per year has qualified for the November ballot, according to the city clerk's office. The announcement follows the filing of more than 85,000 signatures in favor of what is called the Quality of Life Initiative. The City Council, which will be asked later this month to place the measure on the Nov.

Its appearance hardly inspires high-minded rhetoric or emotions: a six-and-a-half mile stretch of roadway through some of San Diego's poorest neighborhoods, past downtown businesses, old rental housing, junk yards, small offices, churches, liquor stores, taco stands. Yet Martin Luther King Jr. Way has become more than a mere street these days.

Its appearance hardly inspires high-minded rhetoric or emotions: a six-and-a-half mile stretch of roadway through some of San Diego's poorest neighborhoods, past downtown businesses, old rental housing, junk yards, small offices, churches, liquor stores, taco stands. Yet Martin Luther King Jr. Way has become more than a mere street these days.

Housing production--as measured by building permits issued to builders--rose across the state in August, much of the jump due to the threat of slow-growth initiatives in San Diego and Riverside counties. That is the assessment of the California Building Industry Assn., the state trade group for home builders. Permits climbed 13% across the state during the month after a slump in July.

The backers of land-use initiatives in San Diego would have to perform environmental impact analyses before they could attempt to gather signatures to place the measures on the ballot under a new plan forwarded by a longtime Republican political activist. Jan Anton, a commercial real estate broker and former board member of the Centre City Development Corp.

San Francisco's gay community basked Wednesday in its biggest political triumph since the 1970s with enactment of a domestic partners law and the election of two lesbians to the Board of Supervisors and a gay man to the school board. In Oakland, voters elected state Assemblyman Elihu Harris as its new mayor, while Bay Area voters muddied the future of the San Francisco Giants baseball team. And in Riverside, controversial county Coroner Raymond L.

In an attempt to curb runaway growth in North County and simultaneously fend off slow-growth initiatives, two San Diego County supervisors on Friday proposed a one-year ban on any increases in housing density. If approved by the Board of Supervisors, the scheme would prohibit General Plan amendments and zoning reclassifications that increase density in the unincorporated areas of the county, unless the proposals have the support of a local planning group.

Alf Landon, the Kansas governor running as the Republican Party's 1936 presidential candidate, called it a "fraud on the working man. " Silas Strawn, a former president of both the American Bar Assn. and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said it was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempt to "Sovietize the country. " The American Medical Assn. denounced it as a "compulsory socialistic tax. " What was this threat to American prosperity, freedom and democracy they were all decrying?

In environmentally sensitive San Diego, land-use debates are a political constant. Even so, the Nov. 8 ballot is likely to be a mind-numbing blur that induces migraines among Sierra Club members and developers alike, much less average voters.

With Soviets eating American pizza, drinking Pepsi-Cola and generally paying more attention to America, the question arises in the wake of the summit: Are they changing the way they think about Los Angeles? No one has published a scientific survey gauging awareness or knowledge about Los Angeles, but the careful Soviet reader can discover that, in accord with the warming trend of U.S.

On one side of the fight is growth-hating Jerry Silver in his quiet suburban home in Encino. His fingers race across the keyboard of his personal computer, his phone rings with calls from movement collaborators and his wife and colleague, Myrna, is worried that he won't have time for the fish dinner waiting in the oven before driving off to a 7 p.m. meeting. On the other side is development-loving Lynn Wessell in the economically furnished office of the Wessell Co.