(A) The Planning Commission and the City Council have caused to be prepared, approved and adopted a general community plan for the city in conformity with the requirements of the California Community Redevelopment Law.
(B) The Planning Commission and other city agencies have also made extensive investigations and comprehensive surveys, which disclose that blighted areas exist within the city and which constitute either social or economic liabilities, or both, requiring redevelopment in the interest of the health, safety, and general welfare of the people of the city in particular, and the people of the state generally. The blighted areas are characterized by one or more of the following conditions:
(1) The existence of buildings and struc-tures, either used or intended to be used for living, commercial, industrial or other purposes, or any combination of such uses, which by reason of age, obsolescence, deterioration, dilapidation, mixed character or shifting of uses to which they are put, or any combination of such factors and characteristics, are unsuitable for occupation for existing residential, commercial, industrial or other purposes.
(2) In such blighted areas, economic dis-location, deterioration or disuse exist as a result of faulty planning.
(3) In some areas, depreciated values, impaired investments and economic maladjustments exist to such an extent that capacity to pay taxes is reduced and tax receipts are inadequate in relation to the cost of public services rendered.
(4) The existence of blighted areas charac-terized by any or all of such conditions, separately or collectively, constitutes a serious and growing menace which is injurious and inimical to the public health, safety and welfare of the people of the city in particular, and to the people of the state generally.
(C) Such areas present difficulties and handicaps which are beyond remedy and control solely by regulatory processes in the exercise of the police power. They contribute substantially and increasingly to the problems of and necessitate excessive and disproportionate expenditures for the preservation of the public health and safety and the maintaining of adequate police, fire and accident protection, and other public services and facilities. The benefits which will result from the remedying of these conditions and the redevelopment of these areas of blight will accrue to all the inhabitants and property owners in the city.
(D) Such conditions of blight tend to cause further obsolescence, deterioration and disuse because of the lack of incentive to the individual landowner and his inability to improve, modernize or rehabilitate his own particular property while the condition of the neighboring properties remains unchanged. As a consequence the process of deterioration of a blighted area frequently cannot be halted or corrected except by redeveloping the entire area, or substantial portions thereof. In most instances, the lands are held in divided and widely scattered ownerships. In many such instances, it is so difficult and costly that it is uneconomic and, as a practical matter, impossible for individual owners, independently or collectively, to undertake to remedy such conditions because of lack of the legal power necessary for, and the excessive costs involved in, the private acquisition of the real property of the area.
('86 Code, § 2.25.010) (Ord. 3364, passed - - )