Little Italy, Downtown San Diego. Photo: David Barboza.
I recently had the opportunity to attend the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference in San Diego and I wanted to share some reflections from that trip. Both the region and the conference were interesting sources of inspiration about housing policy, and there are lessons for Los Angeles to be found here. One of the main ones is: Smash the stereotypes about places and people in order to make progress.
Don’t get me wrong: It can be easy to stereotype a place and miss the reality. I certainly made this mistake with San Diego the first time I visited as an adult, many years ago. The San Diego metropolitan area, the portion north of the border, is a diverse region of 3.3 million people, small only in comparison to the giant region we live in: If this region were its own state, it would be larger than several existing US states. I know its reputation of being a sprawl dominated by cars, yet my experience was that this is not true across the board.
I stayed in Downtown San Diego, in Little Italy, a portion of which is pictured above. Downtown San Diego seems to be sprouting mixed-use towers left and right, and many of its streets are extremely vibrant, interesting places to walk around. If you get tired of walking, the trolley system has you covered. It’s all at-grade Downtown, which probably made more sense in 1981 than it does now. The San Diego Trolley system was a pioneering revivalist light rail system when it debuted and predates Los Angeles’ current light rail system. I suspect LA’s system owes its existence to some degree to a desire not to be outdone by San Diego. San Diego’s system was also inaugurated prior to the Americans with Disabilities Act and unfortunately doesn’t have level boarding platforms. You can push a button to deploy a ramp into the rail cars though. Many people will likely say San Diego has a car culture and therefore can’t do good urbanism, but that conclusion isn’t warranted. Allowing more housing in smart locations and coordinating land use with public transit are choices that can be made even in a place with a long history of car-oriented planning. Now was I talking about San Diego or Los Angeles?!
Downtown San Diego is also an important precedent for integrating a baseball stadium into an urban area. Los Angeles’ approach here is well known: bulldozing a vibrant neighborhood for a public housing plan that fell through (thanks to Article 34 of the CA Constitution), and then going to Plan B: a beloved baseball stadium surrounded by an unfortunate lake of parking. LA would be much better off if Dodger Stadium built a few pay parking structures and turned those vast parking fields into a vibrant mixed-use district with lots of housing. Walking out of a game into a parking lot has about the same amount of appeal as grinding down the 405 at rush hour. We can do better. Just look south.
San Diego also deserves recognition for some of its recent land-use reforms, including a strong local density bonus program and the elimination of some of its minimum parking requirements. The “Home Run For Homes” report, published by Circulate San Diego in April 2022, details this progress.
Many of the conference sessions touched on housing policy, and in particular, some of the issues that are unique to this region that is shaped in large part by the proximity to and the border with México. I took a bus tour of that border, focused on transportation planning issues. Many folks from San Diego have chosen to move to Tijuana, a metro area of 2.2 million people, in search of cheaper housing, but that spillover demand is spiking housing prices south of the border. These people then have to commute back across the border. Due to the small number of crossing points, cars back up in long queues at places like San Ysidro and Otay Mesa, which creates localized air quality problems for communities in adjacent neighborhoods. I read a local newspaper article about how US efforts to heighten the border wall led to an increase in injuries and deaths as people try to climb over. All this talk about the border got me thinking about inclusion and exclusion, which in this case are symbolized in a very literal way. Who belongs, and who doesn’t? Who has the power to decide, and why? I knew I had to cross that border to properly ponder those questions, and truly take in the lessons of this fascinating place.
Downtown Tijuana. Photo: David Barboza.
To cross the border without a car, you can actually ride the Blue Line Trolley to San Ysidro, just steps from the crossing. You walk up this hill, see the imposing vertical metallic poles that make up this part of The Wall, and walk through a one-way revolving metal gate. The State Department actually says you should reconsider this kind of trip, due to crime, but sometimes there are overriding considerations. I hadn’t been back to the country since college, for a lot of reasons that are beyond the scope of this post, but after 16 years, I was finally back, and that called for a celebratory torta!
I took a long walk through the city, through the bustling streets of Downtown, down the monumental boulevard, Paseo de los Héroes, with its towering traffic circle statues, including one of Abraham Lincoln holding broken chains in a fist like a 19th Century Incredible Hulk. Into the Centro Cultural Tijuana, an excellent and free art museum featuring tons of Mexican and Latin American visual art, and distinguished on the exterior by its giant beige IMAX orb. I had dinner in a Sanborns, which is like a cross between a small department store and a restaurant, and I crossed back over the border on foot, passing by a broad river of cars, street vendors, and people begging for spare change. You get welcomed back to America by being asked to take off your mask for a picture that doubtless goes into some vast Homeland Security database. Lack of trust, you know?
The thought I would leave you with is that the fear America has about México, has roots in conquest and racism, which then turns into inaccurate yet widely accepted stereotypes. When we’re back home advocating for housing, and we see the pushback, we can interrogate those fears in a similar way. Why will this apartment building supposedly “ruin” or “change the character” of the neighborhood? Is that because of our stereotypes about who will live there? Where do those stereotypes come from, and how can we deconstruct them and see the humanity in other people? I would suggest it starts with getting to know other cultures, stepping into the unknown, and stepping outside of our comfort zones.
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