The lineage of the Blueprint SD development plan goes back at least as far as the landmark “growth management” effort launched by Mayor Pete Wilson in the 1970s.
Granted, there were some zig-zags along the way.
In essence, Wilson’s growth management ethos was about equity.
That wasn’t exactly the stated purpose of that plan, nor was it to make neighborhoods less segregated, as the recently approved Blueprint SD for the city under Mayor Todd Gloria aspires to do.
Wilson’s basic aim was to try to make sure there would be necessary infrastructure for people in newly developed areas.
Among other things, this was triggered by a crisis in the then-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 make sure all residents have adequate facilities — still elusive in many parts of the city. That’s an underlying objective of Blueprint SD, though in a different way.
The planning document focuses on zoning changes to get more diverse populations that may not have access to quality schools, parks and even high-paying jobs into so-called “high-resource” neighborhoods that do.
Those distant planning documents and the many others in the intervening decades have loosely evolved around equity in one way or another — mapping out a geographic concept of orderly development to provide needed housing and facilities.
Development patterns laid out in Blueprint SD seek to encourage more reliance on transit than automobiles and help combat climate change. Those weren’t part of the earlier growth-management goals and subsequent plans, though there were similarities.
The idea was to curb urban sprawl to a degree by clustering communities around transportation corridors — namely along Interstates 15 and 5 — and create nearby job centers. Alas, history shows things didn’t always work out as planned.
Nevertheless, nowadays routes such as those that once were used almost exclusively for automobiles feature bus lanes and, increasingly, trolley lines.
Blueprint SD is about a lot more than infrastructure, of course. The plan advances societal goals – also found in local and state housing legislation in recent years – of achieving equity through the use of the same controversial method: increasing housing density.
The theory is that increasing supply everywhere will lower prices, allowing people of more modest means to live in areas they currently cannot afford. That’s supposed to open up more housing opportunities for people of color, who were often kept out of certain neighborhoods — sometimes by design — as a result of single-family-home zoning.
Before they were ruled illegal generations ago, the discriminatory practices of redlining through mortgage lending and housing covenants excluded people of color from White neighborhoods. But other restrictions remained.
“In addition to redlining, single-family zoning has been a way to exclude those with lower incomes from a community,” city planning director Heidi Vonblum told David Garrick of The San Diego Union-Tribune. “It disallows a product type — apartments and multi-family housing — that people with lower incomes can afford.”
Assemblymember David Alvarez, D-San Diego, has a bill that originally sought to make it easier to build multi-family housing in coastal areas — which tend to be among the wealthiest and most segregated neighborhoods — by sidestepping Coastal Commission reviews.
Assembly Bill 2560 “embodies California’s commitment to address the state’s housing crisis and ensure equitable access to coastal communities,” according to an Alvarez website. (The bill has since been significantly amended to the point that Alvarez is not certain he’ll continue to it.)
Similarly, state Senate Bill 9 by Sen. Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, allows up to four units to be built on a single-family-home lot, which a Senate website contends is “crucial to combatting inequity and creating social mobility.”
But there’s no guarantee increasing density by itself will moderate home prices much and result in all those good things, leading critics to contend the people who really benefit are developers. They often further maintain, sometimes legitimately, that more density will overload existing infrastructure and upend community character. Counter-critics occasionally ascribe racist or classist underpinnings to such opposition, which isn’t always fair.
That said, more density can increase the tax base for infrastructure projects, while single-family-home developments generally do not, at least in the long run. Needed infrastructure projects in San Diego, like many other cities, are woefully underfunded.
The San Diego City Council and the state Legislature in recent years have been on something of a binge of ing laws aimed at streamlining the building process, relaxing zoning and providing incentives to build rent-restricted apartments for lower-income residents in return for more market-rate units.
There are some signs of success through such programs as San Diego’s “Complete Communities” bonus process, which has created more affordable units for lower-income residents. But it’s too soon to tell whether this densification trend will achieve the intended results or whether the housing market will follow the direction set by elected officials.
Blueprint SD might be viewed as an attempt at social engineering through housing and land use policy. If so, it also should be considered an effort to right past social wrongs wrought by zoning and other restrictions.
Other plans and approaches have sought to do that. For decades, there have been efforts — or at least hopes — to change San Diego’s pattern of heavily White, wealthier neighborhoods with considerable amenities north of Interstate 8 and neighborhoods with lesser facilities to the south, where large concentrations of people of color reside.
That Blueprint SD was proposed to address the continuing imbalance underscores progress over the years has been wanting.
