The lineage of the Blueprint SD development plan dates back at least to Mayor Pete Wilson’s landmark “growth management” effort in the 1970s.
Admittedly, there were a few zigzags along the way.
Essentially, Wilson’s growth management ethic focused on fairness.
That wasn’t exactly the stated goal of the plan, nor was it to make neighborhoods less segregated, as the recently approved SD master plan for the city under Mayor Todd Gloria sought.
Wilson’s main objective was to ensure that the necessary infrastructure was made available to the residents of the newly developed areas.
This was triggered, among other things, by a crisis in the new community of Mira Mesa, where housing construction exploded beyond the city’s ability to provide adequate schools, fire stations, parks and essential commercial services.
The goal was to ensure that all residents have adequate amenities, something that is still difficult to achieve in many parts of the city. This is one of the underlying goals of Blueprint SD, but in a different way.
The planning document focuses on zoning changes to bring more diverse populations who may not have access to quality schools, parks and even good-paying jobs into so-called “high-resource” neighborhoods that do.
These distant planning documents and the many others of the intervening decades vaguely evolved around equity in one way or another – elaborating a geographical concept of orderly development to provide the necessary housing and facilities.
The development models set out in the Sustainable Development Master Plan aim to encourage greater use of public transport over cars and to combat climate change. These objectives were not part of the previous growth management objectives and subsequent plans, although there are similarities.
The idea was to curb urban sprawl to some extent by clustering communities around transportation corridors—particularly along Interstates 15 and 5—and to create employment hubs nearby. Alas, history shows that things have not always gone as planned.
However, today, routes once used almost exclusively by automobiles are being equipped with bus lanes and, increasingly, trolley lines.
The SD plan is not just about infrastructure. It aims to achieve societal goals – also reflected in local and national housing legislation in recent years – to achieve equity through the same controversial method: increasing housing density.
The theory is that increasing supply everywhere will drive down prices, allowing people of more modest means to live in areas they can’t currently afford. This is supposed to open up more housing options for people of color, who were often excluded from certain neighborhoods — sometimes deliberately — because of single-family zoning.
Before they were outlawed generations ago, discriminatory practices in mortgage lending and housing covenants excluded people of color from white neighborhoods. But other restrictions remained.
“In addition to zoning residential areas, single-family zoning has been a way to exclude low-income people from a community,” planning director Heidi Vonblum told David Garrick of the San Diego Union-Tribune. “It prohibits a type of product — apartments and multifamily housing — that low-income people can afford.”
Rep. David Alvarez, a Democrat from San Diego, introduced a bill that originally aimed to make it easier to build multifamily housing in coastal areas — which tend to be among the wealthiest and most segregated neighborhoods — by bypassing Coastal Commission reviews.
Assembly Bill 2560 “embodies California’s commitment to solving the state’s housing crisis and ensuring equitable access for coastal communities,” according to an Alvarez website. (The bill has since been significantly amended to the point that Alvarez is unsure whether he will continue to support it.)
Similarly, state Senate Bill 9, introduced by Sen. Toni Atkins, a Democrat from San Diego, allows for up to four units to be built on a lot designated for a single-family home, which a Senate website says is “critical to addressing inequality and creating social mobility.”
But there is no guarantee that increasing density alone will be enough to moderate housing prices and deliver all these benefits, leading critics to argue that the real beneficiaries are developers. They also often argue, sometimes correctly, that greater density will overburden existing infrastructure and disrupt the character of the community. Counter-critics sometimes attribute racist or classist underpinnings to this opposition, which is not always accurate.
That said, greater density can increase the tax base for infrastructure projects, whereas single-family development projects typically do not, at least in the long term. Necessary infrastructure projects in San Diego, as in many other cities, are woefully underfunded.
In recent years, the San Diego City Council and state Legislature have been on a bill-passing spree aimed at streamlining the construction process, relaxing zoning and providing incentives for low-income residents to build rent-restricted apartments in exchange for more market-rate units.
Some programs, such as San Diego’s “Complete Communities” bonus program, which has created more affordable housing for low-income residents, are showing some signs of success. But it’s too early to tell whether this densification trend will achieve the desired results or whether the housing market will follow the direction set by elected officials.
The Blueprint SD project can be seen as an attempt at social engineering through housing and land use policy. If so, it must also be seen as an effort to correct the social wrongs caused by zoning and other restrictions.
Other plans and approaches have sought to achieve this goal. For decades, there have been efforts—or at least hopes—to change the San Diego model, which consists of largely white, affluent neighborhoods with considerable amenities north of Interstate 8 and less-amenity neighborhoods to the south, where large concentrations of people of color reside.
The fact that the Sustainable Development Master Plan was proposed to address this persistent imbalance underlines that the progress made over the years has been insufficient.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
