What Will San Diego’s Bold Move on Housing Bring: Equity or Just More Gentrification?
By Jim Miller
The San Diego City Council did the right thing last week, just barely. With homelessness at record levels, a crisis of affordability for those looking to buy or rent housing, and an ongoing climate catastrophe, the Democratic majority on the council took a step toward density by the narrowest of margins. As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported:
San Diego took a bold step to jump-start production of high-rise housing and backyard apartments Tuesday by loosening rules that govern where such homes can be built.
The City Council voted 5-4 to soften rules allowing taller apartment buildings and more backyard units when a property is near mass transit. Now, the transit line can now be as far as 1 mile away, instead of the previous half-mile requirement.
“This will result in more homes for moderate-income and low-income San Diegans, which everybody knows we need very badly,” said Councilmember Vivian Moreno, who voted in favor.
Nonetheless, despite glaring evidence that our city has a massive affordable housing problem, there were voices against the move toward more density, which is only a first step in addressing the issue. The same article noted that the former Council President was aghast at the move:
Councilmember Jennifer Campbell, who voted against the change, said it would have a “tremendous” and “terrible” impact because studies show most people won’t walk a full mile to transit.
“What we have probably caused is the opposite effect,” she said. “We will have people resort to their cars, rather than spend the 20 minutes to walk to transit.”
Campbell said the greater density would also change neighborhoods for the worse. “We don’t want to turn San Diego into Los Angeles or Manhattan,” she said.
Campbell was taken to task by Monica Montgomery Steppe who rightfully underlined the classist assumptions embedded in her and the other councilmembers’ arguments against the policy change: “You will walk a mile to transit if you have to,” she said. “For those of us who maybe have never had to, it’s easy to say that folks won’t do that.”
I would also add that Campbell’s evocation of Los Angeles and New York as scary bogeymen is rooted in a long, ignoble tradition of San Diego celebrating its mythological exceptionalism as a place free of the unpleasant strife and distasteful urban flavor of other big cities.
This is precisely the attitude that went with the old bumper sticker proclaiming that, “There is No Life East of I-5.” Of course, this version of San Diego was dependent on the virtual social, political, and economic invisibility of a large part of the city that failed to live up to the “America’s Finest City” mythos that privileged a largely white, more affluent image that boosters sold to interested retirees and moneyed tourists.
Thus, the politics of re-imagining San Diego in a way with space for those without the income and/or generational good luck to land housing in our beach communities or well-heeled suburbs seems to be largely breaking down in a historically familiar pattern pitting those neighborhoods against the city’s urban core despite the Democratic dominance of the council. So, the old days may be long gone, but they are clearly not forgotten.
Up until this point, many of the ideas to redevelop downtown and its surrounding neighborhoods have not done much for working class San Diegans but have instead been focused on reshaping the urban core for more “desirable” residents. Back in 2019 on my old soapbox in the OB Rag, I observed that the plan to renovate Horton Plaza represents a questionable kind of new vision for downtown :
The rhetoric of gentrification is always the same. Boosters describe targeted areas as blighted, homeless-infested urban spaces in need of salvation brought to you by transforming the neighborhood into employment and entertainment zones for affluent, largely white consumers. Making urban places safe and attractive for the privileged is always the end game, and the achievement of this goal is seen as de facto evidence of progress . . . The larger question about this kind of “transformation” that is never asked of boosters is who benefits and who loses. It’s clear that in San Diego, a city without any of the bohemian pretenses of San Francisco, the beneficiaries of the last couple of decades of gentrification and the themeparking of downtown San Diego have been the city’s power elite and the affluent locals and tourists the gentrified downtown serves.
With the elimination of the vast majority of Single Room Occupancy hotels and apartments along with the “single family homes” on the edges of the urban core, the working class, poor, and vulnerable have suffered. As gentrification pushes its way into surrounding neighborhoods and the prices of the largely high-end developments leave out even middle-class folks, the majority of San Diegans have been disinvited to the party.
Now with this new push to welcome in the tech bros, we may very well see San Diego’s already robust gentrification move toward the kind of hyper-gentrification that has ruined San Francisco for everyone but the rich.
So, beware of the glowing stories about the new “vitality” and “innovation” downtown because if it has the desired “multiplier effect,” more and more San Diego neighborhoods will become prohibitively expensive, and we’ll be a place where “Happy Happens” for a lot fewer of us.
Thus, while the City Council’s move to increase density is to be applauded as there will certainly be no increase in affordable housing without it, the next steps must ensure that the sort of density we see is actually equitable and not just more gentrification that only serves a largely white, affluent population. We need the kind of transformation that will make our city livable for working people, young folks, and those who all-too-often have been left out of the San Diego story. So, getting it right is crucial.
Arguing for the status quo, on the other hand, only ensures that San Diego will never be an affordable place to live for most of its residents.