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| Best Practices: Real Estate |
Defeating the Developers
Jill Duman
12/01/2006
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“Meet with your elected officials, give them respect and then work
from the top down. Deal with their appointees and then go to the civil
servants,” advises Judith Ishkanian, president of Homeowners Defense Fund, a
Santa Barbara County group dedicated to fighting the state of California’s
affordable housing mandates. As president of the two-year-old group, Ishkanian
regularly attends public meetings where authorities discuss land-use policy,
reads planning documents and maintains a visible presence. “You can’t go in like
a pathetic supplicant. They have to know who you are and whom you
represent.”
Just south of Santa Barbara lies the exclusive beachfront
town of Montecito, whose residents include Oprah Winfrey, Michael Douglas and
author Sue Grafton. This tiny hamlet has a long history of political engagement,
says Jack Overall, the vice president of the Montecito Association, a
homeowners’ organization. Overall’s group meets on a regular basis with the
county supervisor whose district includes Montecito and its pool of 10,000
mostly affluent voters. The Montecito Association, founded 57 years ago, makes
it a point to take stands on controversial issues so that elected officials will
know that its members are paying attention. “We have some political influence by
having the ear of one of the five county supervisors,” Overall says. “It doesn’t
mean that he does what we tell him to do all the time—but at least we have
access.”
Homeowner activists—even those who have excelled in private
industry—quickly realize that they can accomplish more in the public arena by
building alliances. “Don’t be a lone ranger,” advises Elizabeth Panetta, who in
2005 helped defeat plans for a large-scale development on farmland near the
picturesque Monterey County village of Spreckels. “It’s good to advocate for
what you want, but there is power in a multitude of voices.” Panetta, a former
labor organizer, discovered homeowners, environmentalists and slow-growth
advocates were willing to unite around downsizing a variety of development plans
for the farmland around Spreckels.
TOP VIEW
Many exurban and rural homeowners feel that unchecked development poses a threat
to their peaceful lifestyle. But even the most well-connected individuals find
that they must join like-minded people of different economic and political
backgrounds to advocate successfully for growth limits. While these efforts
prove time consuming—and often more frustrating than working within the relative
efficiency of the private sector—homeowners who work intelligently and patiently
can, and do, preserve their serene neighborhoods. |
According to Rachel Hooper, a managing
partner with the San Francisco law firm Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger, this
bridge-building strategy is especially vital if homeowners plan to take a
grievance to the ballot box. Hooper has helped draft and defend many of
California’s local growth-control ballot measures. “Hook up with whatever
existing environmental groups are around,” she says, adding that alliances with
factions representing agricultural and labor groups are useful. “They won’t
always agree, but at least you’ll know their point of view.”
Ishkanian
counsels that homeowner activists who band together to pursue long-term policy
goals should become an official tax-exempt organization. “That way, people will
take you seriously—otherwise you’re just a bunch of schleps who got up cranky,”
she says.
Yet, the task of comprehensively monitoring and participating in a
community’s development processes can be more than an individual, or even a
group of like-minded neighbors, can manage. Such was the case with Peter
Neumeier, a Carmel Valley money manager and investment counselor, and his wife,
Gillian Taylor. Neumeier and Taylor had long viewed themselves as environmental
activists and had worked successfully with the Sierra Club and other groups.
Nine years ago, the couple decided to take their activism one step further and
donated $15,000 in seed money to establish LandWatch, a full-time watchdog
organization modeled after 1000 Friends of Oregon and the Green Belt Alliance, a
group that covers nine counties in the San Francisco Bay area. Neumeier has also
contributed heavily to other preservation efforts, including a donation of
$50,000 to supporters of a 2006 Monterey County ballot measure to limit new
subdivisions to five urban-infill areas that were pre-identified. “We thought
this kind of an investment in a grassroots organization was going to pay off in
a big way,” Taylor says—and it has.
LandWatch now boasts an annual
budget of roughly $450,000, more than half of which comes from members; grants
account for the rest. The organization’s budget supports paid staff to attend
public meetings, write policy statements and recruit more concerned residents to
help battle sprawl in Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties.
PITCHING THE BIG TENT
Even with generous donors and expertise, building
antisprawl coalitions today often requires defying—or ignoring—traditional
political divisions and partisan politics. Democrats and Republicans, business
people and tree huggers, must shrug off their differences to unite behind the
work of battling unwanted growth. “Here in Santa Barbara, the whole
growth-management issue is not a progressive, liberal thing at all,” says Jon
Clark, former board president of the South Coast’s Community Environmental
Council. “It really boils down to neighborhood issues—and that’s any
neighborhood.”
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