Redevelopment Agency of City and County of San Francisco v. Hayes

• Decision Date: 26 January 1954
• Docket Number: No. 15893,15893
• Citation: 266 P.2d 105,122 Cal.App.2d 777
• Court: California Court of Appeals Court of Appeals
• Parties: REDEVELOPMENT AGENCY OF CITY AND COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO et al. v. HAYES et al.

Page 105

266 P.2d 105

122 Cal.App.2d 777

REDEVELOPMENT AGENCY OF CITY AND COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO et al. v. HAYES et al.

No. 15893.

District Court of Appeal, First District, Division 1, California.

Jan. 26, 1954.

As Amended Jan. 29, 1954.

As Amended on Denial of Petitions for Rehearing Feb. 25, 1954.

Hearing Denied March 25, 1954.

William A. O'Brien, Sp. Sounsel, Redevelopment Agency of City and County of San Francisco, San Francisco, Dion R. Holm, City Atty. of City and County of San Francisco, John Elmer Barricklo, Morley Goldberg, Deputy City Attys., San Francisco, for petitioners.

Rose M. Fanucchi, San Francisco, for respondent.

Jack H. Werchick, San Francisco, for interveners.

Edmund G. Brown, Atty. Gen., Engene B. Jacobs, Deputy Atty Gen., for the State, as amicus curiae in support of some of petitioners' contentions.

BRAY, Justice.

Petition for writ of mandate to compel respondent chairman petitioner Redevelopment Agency of the City and County of San Francisco ¹ to execute certain loan and grant contracts with the United States of America.

Questions Presented.

1. Have intervenors the right to intervene?

2. Constitutionality of the Community Redevelopment Law, Part I, Division 24, sections 33000-33954, Health and Safety Code, ² as applied to (1) slum clearance, (2) blighted area.

Record.

Respondent demurred and in answer to the petition denied none of the facts set forth in the petition, but based his refusal to execute the contracts on the alleged grounds of the unconstitutionality of the act. Two taxpayers in the Diamond Heights Area, Florence Van Hoff and Victor Berg, on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated, filed a complaint in intervention in which they demurred to the sufficiency of the petition on the ground that the proposed proceedings of the Agency are prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and article I, §§ 1, 11, 13, 14, 14 1/2, 21; article III, § 1, and article IV, §§ 24, 31, of the California Constitution. They also answered, denying certain allegations of the petition. Thereupon petitioners demurred to the complaint in intervention both generally and specially and on the ground that intervenors have no right to intervene. Petitioners also moved to strike the whole and all parts of the complaint in intervention on the grounds of intervenors' lack of right and that the complaint is sham, irrelevant and argumentative. At the hearing, intervenors' demurrer to the petition and petitioners' demurrer to, and motion to strike, the complaint were submitted.

Petition.

The petition sets forth that the Agency is a public body corporate and politic created under the act, after a declaration of the board of supervisors of the need for such agency, and the fact that the city had satisfied the 'Community Prerequisites' of the act in that the city's Planning Commission has a master plan which includes all the matters required by the act to be in such plan. The Agency has undertaken a program for the elimination and redevelopment of blighted areas, of which the first two are the ones to be considered here, on being known as Western Addition Project and the other as Diamond Heights Project. The petition then gives the steps taken antecedent to the formulation of the redevelopment plans for both projects. As no attack is made on the regularity of those proceedings, they need not be detailed.

Certain facts are then alleged as to each area. Western Addition is a blighted area which constitutes both a social and economic liability requiring redevelopment in the interest of the health, safety and general welfare of the people of the city and state. It includes approximately 28 blocks and is characterized by buildings used wholly or in part for residential purposes, which because of age, obsolescence, deterioration, uses, are unfit and unsafe for occupancy, and conductive to ill health, infant mortality, juvenile delinquency and crime. There are more than 2,000 substandard dwellings and hundreds of rooms in dilapidated rooming houses and row dwellings. More than 60 per cent of the dwelling units are dilapidated or lack private baths; more than 40 per cent have more than twice as many families than originally planned for; more that 50 per cent have inadequate toilet facilities; many lack installed heating; general use of portable coal oil heaters and storage of inflammable material constitute fire hazard; inadequate fire escape and exits add to the hazard of the inhabitants; extreme overcrowding is three and one-half times more prevalent in the area than in the city as a whole. The correction of these blighted conditions cannot be accomplished without redevelopment of the area as a whole, nor by private enterprise alone and without public participation. All of these conditions and this fact have been found by resolution and ordinance of the board of supervisors.

Diamond Heights is a blighted area constituting a social and economic liability requiring redevelopment in the interest of health, safety and general welfare. It includes approximately 325 acres. Much of the area was subdivided in 1863 and 1864; only 15 per cent of the area is occupied or used; 4 per cent is in improved boundary streets; 5 per cent playgrounds; less than 6 per cent interior streets and dwellings. Such unuse and lack of development is due to lots of irregular form and shape having been laid out withoiut regard to the contours and other physical characteristics of the ground such as cliffs, steep gradings and outcroppings of rock; more than 500 parcles are in separate ownership which makes it impossible to effectively assemble the land by private means without public assistance and exercise of the power of eminent domain; there is wasteful street design, unsuited and unadapted to the topography of the area; mapped streets of usable grade are connected with mapped streets of unusable grade, so steep as to render impossible the construction of usable streets; one-third of said streets are too steep to be usable; 66 acres of such mapped streets remain unpaved and undeveloped, there being only 1.4 acres of paved streets. The major portion of the area is unserved by utilities of any kind; existing public open spaces would be inadequate to serve the area if built up. Approximately 85 per cent of the area is vacant and undeveloped; 115 acres are in private ownership, of which only 17.8 acres are improved with houses, the remainder of the private ownership improvements consisting of truck yards, deteriorated sheds and two quarries. As a result of said faulty planning there is an economic dislocation and disuse of the area; a subdivision of lots into irregular form and shape and inadequate size for proper use and development; a layout of lots in disregard of the contours and other physical characteristics of the ground and surrounding conditions; nonexistence of adequate streets and utilities in the area. The area is characterized by the growing or total lack of proper utilization resulting in stagnant and unproductive condition of land potentially useful and available for contributing to the public health, safety and general welfare. The blighted condition is aggravated by the shortage of useful land in the city for residential development to alleviate the acute housing shortage and tends to render the lands unmarketable and thereby to force and abnormal pattern of residential growth.

Redevelopment is necessary to facilitate the redevelopment of congested, deteriorated areas in other sections of the city, particularly in Western Addition. Correction cannot be accomplished without redevelopment of the areas as a whole. This cannot be done by private enterprise alone without public participation and assistance. All of the above has been found by the board of supervisors by resolution and ordinance. Intervenors admit the factual characteristics of the area but deny the conclusions and point out that for a long time past 210 acres have been and still are in public ownership.

The redevelopment of both projects requires (1) acquisition of lands by purchase or eminent domain, (2) demolition and clearance, (3) vacation and abandonment of certain street areas and dedication of other areas for street widenings and other improvements and the consolidation of certain blocks into continuous land areas, (4) rough grading and installation of necessary site improvements and utilities, (5) replatting and zoning in conformity with the city's master plan, (6) disposition of said lands as improved by sale under suitable safeguards, restrictions, covenants and conditions as set forth in certain ordinances. Such redevelopment will eliminate the blight conditions alleged by providing: clearance, elimination and prevention of slum and blighted areas; a proper, well-planned, economic utilization of said areas; adequate open spaces; utilities; streets designed to carry fast through traffic while closing off traffic on other streets, thereby contributing to the safety of the inhabitants of the areas; school, shopping and other community facilities; improved lands near the center of the city of the construction of needed dwelling units; a substantial increase in the number of safe and sanitary dwelling units to ease the acute housing shortage.

Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, P. L. 171, 81st Congress, 42 U.S.C.A. § 1451 et seq., authorizes certain financial assistance to petitioners to aid in this redevelopment. Pursuant to applications filed by the Agency with the Housing and Home Finance Administrator, the Administrator has advanced to the Agency $517,160.82, in addition to which the city has provided $78,962 to the Agency. On June 4, 1953, the Agency adopted a resolution directing respondent, as its chairman, to execute on behalf of the Agency a contract with the United States of America for a loan of $16,022,000 and a capital grant of $6,012,000 to aid in financing Western Addition...