Three years ago, Mayor Todd Gloria unveiled his “Build Better San Diego” initiative, with an ambitious goal of eliminating inequities between our city’s wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods. Build Better San Diego intended to replace crumbling infrastructure and improve public services in our older and long-neglected communities south of Interstate 8.
But our mayor’s pledge now rings hollow. In fact, recent and upcoming community plan updates will only reinforce the cruel reality of “two San Diegos,” not the “one city” he promised. If the mayor and his planning department get their way, our lowest-resourced, infrastructure-deficient neighborhoods will be burdened by extraordinary levels of up-zoning and density, with no funding for desperately needed parks, libraries, and fire and police stations.
The most shocking example of “one city, two realities” is the proposed College Area Community Plan Update that will be presented to the City Council’s Land Use and Housing Committee on Nov. 21. The latest draft proposes a 316% increase in housing units (from 8,200 to 34,150) with a projected 262% increase in population (from 20,400 to 73,940). And these increases don’t include the 8,500 students living on SDSU grounds today, or the 13,000 projected to live there in 2050.
These huge density increases might be tolerable in a community that is well-resourced and has outstanding infrastructure, but that’s definitely not true in the College Area. The draft 2026 California Tax Credit Allocation Committee map indicates that 60% of the College Area’s Opportunity Zones are the lowest resource category.
The College Area is also an infrastructure desert. It has no police or fire station, just one small public park (1.6 acres, which is part drainage swale), and its open space consists of a quarter-mile trail over a sewage easement. The only public building in the College Area is the library, but it is grossly lacking in parking for its service area of 53,000 people.
The draft College Area Plan lacks any realistic plan or funding to remedy these glaring deficiencies even as the Community Plan Update proposes more than tripling College Area density. There is no economic development plan for this neighborhood, so we must assume that the majority of new adult residents will commute to regional job centers, which are clustered north of Interstate 8, and are neither efficiently nor directly accessible via transit. The proposed plan will unquestionably create a dystopian reality of a dense, underserved, lower-resource community that the mayor’s program was supposed to eliminate.
The inequity is even more evident when we review other recent community plan updates. University City, Mira Mesa and Clairemont are all much higher opportunity areas with newer infrastructure and more park facilities than the College Area. They have much more green space: University City has 118 acres, Mira Mesa has 89 and Clairemont has 70. But their up-zoning was only 115%, 119% and 59% respectively compared to 316% for the College Area. Each of those communities has three fire stations; the College Area has none. In 2010, San Diego’s Citygate Audit ranked a new College Area fire station as the third priority on its list. Since then, the city has built or renovated 10 other fire stations, but somehow missed the third one on their list.
I believe it is indisputable that the mayor, his planning department and District 9 Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera are purposely ignoring the inequities in the College Area Community Plan Update. They are willfully and shamelessly relegating College Area residents to a future of high-density, low-opportunity and woefully inadequate infrastructure. The unanswered question: Why is this OK for the College Area? This is an alarming precedent for all communities south of I-8.
Givot, a College Area resident, is vice chair of Neighbors For A Better San Diego and a former McHenry County supervisor in the Chicago suburbs.