We share the same objective: avoiding overly dense development in the Ranch. You wrote about this in your September 3rd Densification Editorial about the 28 acres at the corner of Via de la Valle and Calzada del Bosque.
We also agree that there is a real risk that “RSFA Board will be strong-armed by developers who are using County amendments and Sacramento’s housing incentives to bypass Covenant restrictions,” as you put it.
However, to avoid advocating for actions that will only make the situation worse, you must look at the actual facts in much more detail than you did. When you do that, you will find that Silvergate Rancho Santa Fe is not the source of the risk of excessive densification. It is our best defense against it.
Using your metaphor, it is essential that you know the real facts and realize who your friends are before you “circle the wagons”.
The Actual Restrictions in the Covenant
The Protective Covenant text is available to Members at the RSF Association website and the maps referenced in it, from 1922 to 1928, can be downloaded from the San Diego County Recorder’s online system. I did that and read every word of the Covenant. Fortunately, the paragraphs in the Covenant text are numbered, so it is easy for everyone to check that the following comments are correct.
The allowed uses for land are in Article IV, Zoning. Paragraphs 72 and 86 define types of dwellings. Classes of Use are set in paragraphs 92, 93, 95. The allowed uses for the 28 acres in question are in paragraph 99, Section 5. Residence Districts of Class C. This is the zoning for the property. Anyone can confirm this, with the landowner’s consent, from the RSF Association’s Building Department.
In the above paragraphs, word for word, the following uses are allowed: “apartment house, hotel, private school, fraternity dwelling, club, dormitory, boarding house or lodging house, flat or multiple dwelling”. A “multiple dwelling” is “a building designed or used for a flat, apartment, tenement, hotel, dormitory or any dwelling other than a single-family dwelling.” Paragraph 99 also allows two-family dwellings and/or single-family dwellings on the property.
This leaves no room for doubt that the buildings proposed for Silvergate RSF are allowed in the Covenant. To be effective in our common quest of protecting against too much density, you need to know this, rather than think that the property is “equestrian land” and only “boarding house” is allowed, “probably for lodging horse trainers and grooms” and that some kind of “loose interpretation” would be needed, as your editorial suggests.
Knowing the allowed density is even more important for our common goal. Paragraphs 126 and 128 say that buildings may not cover more than 50 percent of the area of the lot. Yes, you read it right. Half of the 28 acres may be covered by buildings. They can be two stories high according to paragraph 121. Parking lots will be in addition to the buildings. This seems like too much to me, but that is what the Covenant allows. You just need to read the paragraphs listed above to see it. For comparison, the allowed density, in paragraph 127, for residence districts of Class A, which is almost all of the Covenant area outside the Village, is 20%.
The proposed Silvergate RSF plan has a density of 23%, less than half of what is allowed in the Covenant for that property. In addition, there won’t be any large parking lots since most parking will be underground.
How Much Does the Covenant Matter?
The Rancho Santa Fe Protective Covenant is an agreement between all landowners in the area. It sets up, in paragraph 4, the RSF Association and Art Jury to enforce the agreement. The Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws, referenced in the Covenant and filed with the Secretary of State, commit the Association to following the restrictions and rules of the Covenant.
The Covenant is an agreement that binds both the Association and its landowner Members. For example, the Association must allow construction of single family homes in Residence District of Class A and cannot allow multiple dwellings there. The Members must pay their dues and get approval for plans of new construction. The Association is also bound to allowing multiple dwellings covering up to 50% of the lots in Residence Districts of Class C, as shown in the text above. Therefore, according to the Covenant text, the Board has no discretionary power to deny a project, as long as the buildings conform to the zoning and detailed Covenant requirements.
It is not just the building site owner who has the right to expect the approval by the Association. The Covenant defines the duties of the Association towards all of the landowners. In other words, the Covenant contains a promise to each of the 1,700 Association members that buildings described in paragraph 99 up to the density described in paragraph 128 will be allowed in Residence Districts of Class C, including on the 28 acres discussed in the editorial
The expectation that the Association Board may “step in” to stop the project is erroneously based on the previous experience 15 years ago, when an entirely different approach was proposed. It requiried splitting of the property into smaller parcels for individual homes. That experience does not apply when no lot-splitting is needed and the use conforms with the Covenant rules. You would not expect that a homeowners’ association can tell a building site owner that they cannot build a conforming home just because the neighbors would like the lot to remain vacant.
Understanding correctly the binding nature of the Covenant rules and how decisions are made is essential when deciding how we can best protect against excessive densification. Otherwise we may do more harm than good to our common objective.
What about the Art Jury?
The Art Jury is set up as a separate entity in paragraph 4 of the Covenant. Its role is to make sure that all of the myriad restrictions and rules for buildings will be followed in their construction. The Covenant text has lots of details about setbacks, courtyards, constructions style, colors etc. The Art Jury gets help from the Building Department to check proposed plans. In practice, the Jury often requests small modifications to plans in order to approve a positive recommendation to the Board. The Art Jury’s role extends to supervising that the approved design will actually be implemented in the field.
The roles of the Art Jury and the Board in the approval process of multiple dwelling residential structures are defined in the Bylaws. Art Jury gives written advise to the Board. Even if the Art Jury advises disapproval, the Board can still approve a project by a vote of five of the seven directors.
The Risk in Trying to Avoid Any Increase in Density
If the only objective is to avoid any increase in density, we could hope that AmeriCare cannot build the project. However, we need to be careful of what we hope for.
It would not be realistic to expect that the AmeriCare would continue to keep millions of dollars tied up and pay property taxes and Covenant assessments if they would not be able to build and operate a senior living community on the property. Most likely they would sell the land. This is where the risk will be greatest.
Given the Covenant rules for minimum lot sizes, a buyer could build about ten separate homes or create hundreds of homes in a two-story, multiple dwelling condominium or rental complex covering half of the 28 acres with plenty of space for parking. Clearly the second alternative has much higher profit potential.
However, it could get a lot worse. As pointed out in the editorial, a developer could use County and State incentives, and possibly add some low-income housing, to override the Covenant and even to relax the County restrictions. Possibilities include increasing the density, reducing setbacks and increasing the height limit to allow three stories. Depending on size of the units, more than 600 condominiums could be built with a potential for well over a thousand new residents.
MDUs are examples of how Covenant restrictions are overridden. The State law applies if the local Covenant rules are in conflict with it. That is also why it would not work to inoculate the Covenant against such development by passing an amendment to the Bylaws, as suggested in your editorial.
The best alternative to avoid excessive densification is therefore obviously to support the approval of Silvergate RSF at the density level it has been proposed.
About Silvergate Rancho Santa Fe
Since approving Silvergate RSF will be essential to avoiding a density catastrophe, we need to look at how it would affect the community. Your editorial makes comments on three aspects of this, the need for senior living, the traffic impact and creating a precedent. In addition, we should also consider its effect on the character of the area.
The Need for Senior Living Services
The editorial correctly states that the majority of RSF residents are retired. In fact, more than 500 of them will turn 80 years old in the next five years. What the writer fails to recognize, when mocking the statement that “you cannot retire in the Ranch”, is that the word “retire” is here just a polite way to say “grow old”. It is not easy to talk about the loneliness of a dwindling circle of friends, decreasing ability to care of one self and the need for support in handling basic bodily functions. That is why a senior living community with access to support services is needed here. Otherwise, the only alternative is to move away just when we will be most vulnerable.
The editorial suggests that MDU laws, the ones that flout the Covenant restrictions, offer a solution. How exactly would that work? Should we summon our grown children, uproot them from wherever they live and ask them to move into our home so we can live in a granny flat in the backyard? Or shall we try to sell our house with the proviso that we’ll stay on living in the MDU?
Traffic Increase
It is not hard to understand the traffic caused by Silvergate RSF. There will be about 300 people including staff. Assuming everyone goes somewhere every day alone in a car, which is probably overestimating, we’d have 300 trips per day. According to public SANDAG 2022 public traffic count data, the combined daily number of cars on Via de la Valle and Via de Santa Fe is about 28,000. Thus, the traffic increase would be about 1%. Yes, that’s right. Only one hundredth of the current traffic would be added. Almost all of the Silvergate traffic will be outside peak hours. Therefore, the impact would be even smaller.
In the light of this estimate, the editorial’s suggestion that this miniscule increase, somehow causes the need for expanding the entire road is absurd. However, the detailed traffic study, required by the County for the project, may cause small improvements, for example, dedicated turn lanes at the adjacent intersections. These would increase safety and may improve the traffic flow enough to make up for the entire effect of Silvergate RSF traffic.
Creating a Precedent
The final argument in the editorial falls victim to the same lack of understanding the Covenant rules and decision mechanisms and the nature of this project that hampers the rest of the article. The proposed project does not need a subdivision nor is there any special allowance for additional densification. This is simply applying existing zoning, where AmeriCare voluntarily agrees to use less than half of the allowed density. That is a precedent I would like to see repeated.
However, anything like the precedent cannot happen again. There are no suitable properties with the same zoning classification. You can confirm this yourself. While the Building department needs the owner’s permission to release information about a specific property, the zoning for the original Covenant area can be checked by anyone from the public sources I listed above. All the Use Districts are specified in Article VI of the Covenant text and the maps can be downloaded from the County.
Effect on the Character of the Area
The editorial talks a lot about the value of open space in Texas and Wyoming, but says nothing about the value to Covenant residents of the 28 acres in their current condition or about how that affects the character of the area. It would be hard to argue that leaving things as they are would be better than the proposed, mostly single-story buildings with 60 to 80-foot setbacks, surrounded by beautifully landscaped grounds.
If you would like to see what Silvergate RSF will look like, click on this link to see maps and additional renderings.
It Requires a Lot of Hard Work to Get the Facts Right
You should not feel bad for the errors and the wrong conclusion in the Editorial. We know that you want what is best for all Covenant residents, just like we do. And we agree on our common goal regarding densification.
It requires an enormous amount of research and diligence to find all the facts. We have a group that has spent hundreds of hours to understand the project, to study the Covenant text and to research information about various concerns raised about Silvergate RSF. We believe that everybody is entitled to forming their own opinion based on the truth.
Unfortunately, that belief is not shared by a neighbor of the site, who collected the 130 signatures you mentioned. Many of the people on the list were misled about the project. Being truthful has resulted in over 170 Association members expressing their support for Silvergate RSF by signing a letter or talking to the Board or Art Jury. Separately, over 150 Covenant residents have signed up for the AmeriCare wait list to move to Silvergate RSF when it will be ready.
We have established a web site, RSFfriendsofRetirement.com, to share our research results related to Silvergate RSF. We will continue to update it as we learn more.
Pertti Visuri is a Covenant member and disclosed that he has a position on the waitlist for the proposed Silvergate RSF development.