If The Gma Had Passed In 1970 … Experts Imagine Spokane Area Under 25 Years Of Growth Management

The year is the same, but Spokane is a far different place.

Subdivisions were never built on the far North Side and fringes of the Valley. There are more apartment complexes downtown.

The students of Mead School District fit comfortably in one high school, and crop dusters still fly over Peone Prairie farms.

Most people have forgotten the Hangman Hills fire because only a house or two burned.

Those are some of the ways Spokane might have been different in 1996 if the Legislature had passed the Growth Management Act in 1970 rather than 1990.

Spokane County is just now implementing the act, which is far more restrictive than any land-use regulations the community has had. On Friday, county commissioners will hold a hearing on proposed boundaries to separate areas where urban development is encouraged from places where it will be prohibited.

It’s tough to predict how the GMA will affect Spokane in the next 20 years, the period for which planning is required.

It’s slightly easier - just slightly - to note the neighborhoods that wouldn’t exist and the many spinoff effects if the GMA had been the law 20 years ago.

Experts say the discussion is filled with assumptions.

It assumes, for instance, that county commissioners in the 1970s followed the spirit of a law written by people with 1990 concerns about urban sprawl, traffic and the environment.

“In 1970, this was still a pretty sleepy burg” that gave little thought to how it ought to develop, said County Commissioner Steve Hasson, who was a residential contractor in the 1970s and a county land-use planner in the 1980s.

The changing map

Twenty years of the GMA probably would have stopped urban development in the Valley from spreading farther east than Pines Road or south of 32nd Avenue, Hasson said.

Bella Vista would not have been the site of the 1990 home show because the upscale subdivision on South Sullivan Road would not exist. Nor would Northwood and Painted Hills, popular subdivisions cut into pine-covered hills overlooking the Valley, or the developments on the northwest flank of Browne Mountain and surrounding the Hangman Golf Course south of Spokane.

“So you don’t have the Hangman (Hills) fire,” which burned 24 houses in 1987, Hasson said.

The Liberty Lake community would have boomed, Hasson said, because it’s one of the few outlying areas with its own sewer system. That’s one requirement for urban growth.

“You probably would have a city out there now,” he said.

There would be few houses north of the Little Spokane River, said Chris Hugo, a city planner for 18 years and Spokane resident all his life. The Gleneden subdivision wouldn’t exist.

There’s disagreement over exactly where all the people who bought houses in those subdivisions would live.

Hugo thinks they would live closer together in Spokane, the Valley and North Side neighborhoods. Lots in developments along Indian Trail Road probably would be smaller than they are today, he said, and there would be fewer vacant lots left in the city and Valley.

“There would have been more rehabilitation of existing neighborhoods” and new townhouses, apartments and houses close to downtown, Hugo said.

“We’d see a different downtown, a stronger retail presence,” Hugo said. “More traditional retailers might have had a reason to stay in the (city) core” because more people would be living closer to those stores.

Some people might even live in apartments above the stores, he said.

The American Dream

Al Hasslebacher, executive officer of the Spokane Home Builders Association and a GMA critic, said Spokane’s apartments would be filled with people priced out of the housing market. He points to Oregon, which adopted growth management in the 1970s, as an example of how strict regulations can affect home prices.

Today, an acre of land near Hillsboro, Ore., costs about $5,000 if it is designated rural, said Pat Ribellia, long-range planner for the Portland suburb. A similar acre designated for urban growth costs as much as $100,000, he said.

Ribellia said land prices skyrocketed in recent years, as industries have moved into Hillsboro, which grew from 46,000 residents in 1995 to 52,000 this year. There are few vacant lots left within the urban growth boundaries, so the supply of houses isn’t keeping pace with the number of newcomers, he said.

Hasslebacher said soaring land prices in Spokane would have driven more people into the county’s small towns over the last 20 years. Or, they would have gone to Idaho, where land-use regulations are not as strict.

“You’d probably see Kootenai County at double or triple its present size,” he said.

Even if Kootenai County did grow the way Hasslebacher predicts, its residents soon would be screaming for tighter regulations, said Bart Haggin, a retired teacher and member of the regional Growth Management Act steering committee.

“That’s what created the Growth Management Act (in Washington), was the rapid growth and the problems associated with it,” he said.

Potential buyers who turned to the real estate section in last Sunday’s Spokesman-Review could choose from a variety of five-acre lots. Those parcels are popular with people who want to keep a horse or two.

Those ads wouldn’t have been there if GMA were a product of the ‘70s. In Spokane County, preliminary plans call for lots no smaller than 10 acres in rural areas.

With the tighter regulations, fewer city folks could afford the move to the city. But more farmers might be eking out a living on Five Mile Prairie, Peone Prairie and Saltese Flats.

Traffic, taxes and cooperation

Traffic at the North Division Y has increased 35 percent since 1976. It’s increased 150 percent at Interstate 90’s Sullivan Road interchange in the Valley.

Under Hasslebacher’s theory that people would have moved from Spokane to escape high housing costs, the streets would be clogged with commuters from other towns.

But proponents say that under the GMA, there would be fewer people living at the far reaches of the county, so the increase in traffic would not have been as great.

There would have been no costly overpass where Highway 395 crosses the Little Spokane River, and no more talk of a $2 billion north Spokane freeway, Haggin said.

Less sprawl means Mead School District wouldn’t have needed a second high school and East Valley School District might not have outgrown the AA league.

But West Valley, Central Valley and Spokane school districts would have far more students, and would be struggling to fit them all in crowded classrooms, said District 81 assistant superintendent Ned Hammond, a GMA steering committee member.

“The concept of growth management is you put services (like sewers and roads) in an area before the population gets there,” Hammond said. “But in a school district … you don’t get money until you have a crisis.”

Twenty years of growth management could leave local governments with leaner budgets, since they can provide services more efficiently in dense neighborhoods than in those spread over large areas, said Hugo. Trails and parks would be in better shape, because denser populations would demand natural space, he said.

The Growth Management Act requires cities and counties to work together, a relationship that’s caused discomfort in Spokane. But government leaders might eventually grow to like the arrangement, Hugo said.

The city and the county “might have consolidated governments.”

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: COMING MONDAY Developers’ last-minute appeals may prevent the County Commission from adopting urban growth boundaries by year’s end. A delay could dramatically affect where the boundaries are drawn.

The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Dan Hansen Staff writer Staff writer Kristina Johnson contributed to this report.