A History of the Fight for San Diego’s 30-Foot Coastal Height Limit

By Frank Gormlie

It so happens that despite everything else, San Diego’s coastal 30-foot height limit has been thrust back into the the public’s consciousness and into the minds of Mayor Gloria and the nine city councilmembers who all sit in City Hall.

Just this October, California’s 4th District Court of Appeal ruled that the City of San Diego violated California’s Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, when it put Measure C — the initiative that aimed to eliminate the height limit in the Midway District — before voters on the 2022 ballot because the city did not sufficiently study the environmental impacts of taller buildings. The three-judge panel decision ruled in favor of plaintiff Save Our Access, and directed the trial court to issue a writ of mandate to invalidate the ordinance and restore the 30-foot height limit in the Midway District.

While some environmental activists were popping champagne bottles in celebration of the ruling, local developers, city council members and Mayor Gloria were wringing their hands because they immediately knew this court decision could have devastating implications for the massive redevelopment project called Midway Rising and its plans for 86-foot tall buildings in the Midway District. Ultimately, these folks did more than wring their hands — they made plans.

One month after the city lost this court appeal case, City Council members voted 6 to 2 in closed session to authorize a petition for review of the case to the Supreme Court of California. (Councilmembers Vivian Moreno and Raul Campillo were the ‘no’ votes, while Henry Foster was absent.) These city leaders want the state’s highest court to keep intact the ballot measure — which passed by only 51% — and allow the Midway Rising project to continue its redevelopment of the 1,324-acre Midway District.

It’s in this context then, that we must revisit the origins of the 30 foot height limit — and the 50 plus year fight to preserve it.

Afterall, the 30-foot height limit has been blamed for everything from the housing crisis to the lack of affordability at the coast, to the homeless situation. A lot of myths surround the measure and law, and some treat it as just a passing fancy of the seventies or as just another political initiative to be tossed aside by the changing winds.

They ignore — out of ignorance — that it was a citizen-driven measure and scores of volunteers — repeat, volunteers — gathered signatures for months and months, and in the end, collected 36,000 to place it on the 1972 ballot as Measure D. And it then passed overwhelmingly and decisively with 64% of the vote — it was a landslide. Nearly two-thirds of city voters voted “yes”. And it wasn’t just the coastal communities that voted for it – it was across the board – many neighborhoods went for it with the attitude, ‘they’re our beaches, too’. Ocean Beach and Pacific Beach voted for it by 80%.

The winning vote was immediately contested by the building industry. Essentially, the construction industry felt threatened and claimed the new law was not legal or constitutional as it represented a “taking” by the government without compensation. Placing any limits on their abilities to build whatever they wanted was perceived by large developers as an illegal government intrusion into their god-given rights to make profits off the coast — a coast that belonged to everyone.

So, let’s review the origins of the 30 foot height limit.

Unbridled Development at the Coast Caused Pushback by Residents

It all began back in the late Sixties when beach residents began to rebel against a wave of unbridled development occurring at the coast. One of the first glimmers of grassroots activists was a group of Pacific Beach residents who around 1969 began a petition drive against a large building about to be constructed right on the water’s edge. This initial petition effort was unsuccessful; the building was built and is known today as Capri by the Sea.

Yet that first defeat motivated these new activists into continuing their efforts against large projects on the beaches, the bluffs and bay. They formed a group called Beach Action Group (BAG), which included people like Pacific Beach resident Alex Leondis and his wife, and people like Betty Bish and Mignon Scherer from the OB and Point Loma area.

It was the BAG activists who first came up with the idea of placing a height restriction on new construction along the coast of the city of San Diego on the ballot. Because BAG activists had to go city-wide with their Prop D petition, they formed a new more inclusive group, called VOTE – Voters Organized to Think Environment. Prop D called for a 30 foot height limit in the Coastal Zone – everything west of I-5, excluding parts of downtown San Diego (it was solely a City of San Diego proposition).

Why 30 feet? Why not 40 feet? 20 Feet?

VOTE had a dozen meetings or so back in 1970 and 1971 that included discussions and arguments about what kind of height limit they should work for. Most of the members wanted to keep it fairly simple. They saw I-5 as a division between the east and the coastal zone. Their researchers got busy and identified the height limits across San Diego. They discovered that most – 80% in fact – of San Diego already had a 30 foot height limit. About 4% of the communities had 40 feet. So they went for 30.

They began their petition drive in 1970 for the new measure – called Prop D. Because of city rules and the city’s population size, the petition gatherers needed about 25,000 to 26,000 signatures of voters to place the proposition on the ballot. The public notice of the petition was published in the Daily Transcript May 14, 1971. After months of signature gathering by unpaid volunteers, they obtained 36,000 – more than 10,000 signatures that they needed and a number that forced the City Council to accept the initiative and have it included in an election.

Those active back then recalled how the City Council delayed on acting on it for one year “to think about it”, but finally placed it on the November 7, 1972 ballot. VOTE members felt they only had one member on the Council who was sympathetic to Prop D — Floyd Morrow, one of the then lone Democrats. The general attitude of the Council was ‘you have no business involving yourselves in our business.’

Yet, despite the governing elite’s attitude, the results from the November 1972 election were stunning – a landslide with 64% of the voters saying “yes” to the 30-foot height limit at the coast. As mentioned, it wasn’t just the coastal communities that voted for it but neighborhoods from across the city. It passed in Clairemont, North Park, and Southeast San Diego by big margins. Four out of five voters in the beach communities voted for it.

Prop D was immediately met with legal challenges

Feeling threatened, the building industry appealed the new law, disparaging its legality and constitutionality. Just two months after it passed, in January of 1973,  legal challenges to Prop D ended up in Judge Louis Welch’s San Diego courtroom — and he overruled it. But in November 1973 — a year after San Diego voters passed Prop D — the Appellate Court reversed Welch, ruling that Prop D was indeed constitutional – that the California Constitution does allow citizens to create petitions, as they did in this case, and therefore, the result was legal.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it. The construction industry then took Prop D to the California Supreme Court, which upheld it. Next developers took it to the US Supreme Court – which refused to hear it – this was in February 1976 – which meant that the lower court’s ruling stood. Prop D was finally resolved and it was law.

It took nearly four years. Prop D was overwhelmingly passed by the voters of San Diego in November 1972 – but it wasn’t until February 1976 that the voters’ will was finally enforced.

Meanwhile, during all those years between the vote and the last court, developers were allowed to build. If a developer’s project was already in the process, in the pipeline that is, if the developer had filed for a permit before November 1972 – when Prop D was on the ballot – then those projects were allowed to proceed, but after that date, they were subject to the new height limit.

Prop D represented part of a tidal wave of rebellion by the people of Southern California against unbridled development of the state’s beautiful coastline. This reaction to the blocking of coast views, access and space by builders also included successful petitions across the state to establish the California Coastal Commission.

Ocean Beach too – saw its first activism in the those early years of the seventies, the first beginnings of residents taking planning matters into their own hands, with the forming of several environmental activist groups, like OB Ecology Action, and eventually establishing the OB Planning Board — the first democratically-elected group of resident volunteers in the history of San Diego. It was the first successful community planning group that aimed to take urban planning out of the hands of the elites and the so-called professionals.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. Afterall this is San Diego.

More Exemptions

Over the years, a number of exemptions were allowed or voted in. In November 1998 the SeaWorld Exemption was established. After a huge PR campaign by Anheuser-Busch/SeaWorld, voters narrowly approved a new Proposition D, giving SeaWorld an exemption to the height limit on its city leasehold in Mission Bay Park. This new Proposition D passed with only 50.7 percent of the vote, thanks in large part to opposition led by then-activist Donna Frye which spent under $100.

Another exemption was granted to the historic Mission Brewery in Middletown San Diego. And in November 2000, 67% of voters favored an exemption for the San Ysidro Gateway to the Americas. But these were select sites, not entire neighborhoods. That would come later — almost a quarter of a century down the pike. There was the September 2001 Naval Training Center (NTC) Exemption when San Diego adopted modifications to zoning rules and approved the NTC base reuse plan that allowed for buildings and housing taller than 30 feet. This decision was appealed but the judge ruled for the city — a decision that was upheld with a puzzling ruling that Prop D did not apply to a military base even when the land was handed over to a civilian jurisdiction.

Despite these “wins” for the construction industry, the 30-foot height limit held for another quarter of a century. Developers have found over those years, a myriad of different ways to find loopholes or get around the strict restrictions of building heights — such as manipulating where the 30 feet is measured from, as one example. Yet, during Prop D’s 50th anniversary in 2022, Measure C was placed on the ballot by a city council challenged by the gifts and donations of big-time developers. Which brings us full cycle.

Measure C won only by 9,000 votes in 2022. It was opposed by a small, little group called “Keep the Coast 30” with little or no money, just grit and signs and history on their side. For days after the actual November vote, Mayor Gloria and his Midway Rising buddies were suffering heartburn while the votes were counted and as the measure almost didn’t pass.

Yet, if voters had known about the detrimental effects of huge buildings, some 8 to 10 stories, the noise, pollution, congestion, the traffic, lack of public access, with hardly any parkland to mitigate anything … perhaps those votes would have been different.