A San Diego Planning Commission vote last week isn’t sitting well with Ocean Beach leaders, who just two days before had voted overwhelmingly to recommend that the commission reject a code amendment that could allow some of the community’s oldest homes to be demolished for construction of multi-unit apartment projects.
The city-sponsored amendment to the Municipal Code would enable San Diego’s Complete Communities program to be applicable to homes a century old or more if they are not registered in the Ocean Beach Cottage Emerging District, which includes 72 properties built between 1887 and 1931 and listed in San Diego’s historical resources database.
The Ocean Beach Planning Board voted 10-1 on Nov. 4 to oppose the amendment. But the Planning Commission voted 7-0 on Nov. 6 to approve it along with a new policy that would give the City Council authority to overrule the city’s Historical Resources Board when the board designates a property as historic. Under the current system, the council’s discretion to overturn such decisions is limited to when there has been a procedural error — not disagreements about historic value.
The Planning Commission’s vote sends the proposal to a Dec. 11 hearing before the council’s Land Use & Housing Committee. If approved there, it would go to the full council in late January or early February.
OB Planning Board Chairwoman Andrea Schlageter tied the city’s presentation of the new language to a Planning Commission decision in August 2024 to block a proposed 20-unit apartment project that would replace a vacant one-story commercial building on the corner of Ebers Street and Point Loma Avenue.
Investment firm Takeoff Capital and partner KD Development intended to redevelop the property into a 16,126-square-foot, three-story apartment complex. Initially the plan called for eight units, but the number was bumped to 20 through a density bonus allotted by the Complete Communities development initiative, which provides incentives allowing housing projects denser than the zoning of a property would otherwise allow near high-frequency transit. The city bills the program as a way to “create a variety of housing options for everyone, with an emphasis on low- and moderate-income levels.”
Three units in the proposed apartment complex were intended to be affordable for lower-income residents.
The San Diego Development Services Department approved a coastal development permit for the project in May 2024, but nearby resident Patty Lewis filed an appeal, arguing that language in the Complete Communities regulations prevented use of a density bonus in designated historical districts.
A city staff report responding to Lewis’ appeal argued that OB’s emerging historical district is noncontiguous and applies on a case-by-case basis for buildings for which historical designation has been sought. Because the building at the project site at 4705 Point Loma Ave., built in 1947, was not listed among those of historical significance within the district, staff contended the density bonus could apply.
At the time, the commission determined the site was part of the historic district, though the specific building was not listed as historic — otherwise known as a contributing resource — and that the apartment plan could not move forward without significant changes either to the project or the Municipal Code.
The amendment the Planning Commission approved Nov. 6 specifies that Complete Communities density incentives apply to the OB Cottage Emerging District “if the property is not a contributing resource to the district. The proposed amendments will not impact other historical districts.”
Only cottages built between 1887 and 1931 that are voluntarily submitted by their owners can be designated as contributing resources after review. Because OB’s cottages are not centrally located but dispersed throughout the community, the district is not a contiguous geographic location and is therefore considered “emerging.”
“So they’re doing this specifically to Ocean Beach,” Schlageter said. “They’re bringing [developers] back in specifically in response to our appeal.”
Andrea Schlageter, chairwoman of the Ocean Beach Planning Board, was part of a 10-1 vote objecting to a proposed San Diego Municipal Code amendment affecting the Ocean Beach Cottage Emerging District. (Eduardo Contreras / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
But city officials characterized the change as amending the Municipal Code to simply clarify what was already allowed.
Kelly Stanco, a city planning official spearheading the preservation reforms, agreed that the cottages designated historic in Ocean Beach’s district aren’t eligible for the Complete Communities incentive. But she said the roughly 3,000 other properties in the neighborhood are eligible.
“This is not changing the rules, this is just clarifying what the rules have always been,” Planning Commissioner Daniel Reeves said.
Commissioner Matthew Boomhower said the city shouldn’t be limiting development on sites that don’t have contributing resources just because some historic cottages might be nearby.
“I don’t think I should be stymied because of scattered historical properties,” he said.
But attorney Craig Klein, who argued before the Planning Commission last year in favor of the appeal of the Ocean Beach apartment project, said “By restricting it to individual volunteered properties, it’ll end up with the destruction of the entire neighborhood. Under the city’s construction of how this thing should be set up in the new language, you have your historical cottage here and you have your five-story, no-parking, 35-unit ADUs right next door. And then maybe two doors down, there’s another historical cottage. Can’t touch that one, but build another 40-unit ADU next to it.”
OB Planning Board member Chris Chalupsky argued that Ocean Beach is “not in an emerging historical district, we are in a historical district. Just look around. I think the majority of what you’re seeing here falls within a historical district. You don’t have to read the history books. All you have to do is use your eyes.”
The city has not conducted a full survey in OB, but several local historians estimate the total number of potentially historic cottages at more than 300.
Ocean Beach Historical Society board member Pat James described how he worked with the late Priscilla McCoy, the driving force in the creation of the OB Cottage Emerging District, while she catalogued hundreds of cottages in the 1980s and ’90s.
“She went around and identified every cottage that she thought would fit the criteria that she had worked out with the [San Diego] Historical Resources Board,” James said. “So I’m having a hard time believing that they don’t have that information. … I’m hoping we can find more documentation in our archives.”
Yet with the city pressing forward to exempt cottages not formally designated with historic status, Ocean Beach leaders raised fears that development under Complete Communities would outpace and nullify attempts to establish a more defined historical district in OB.
“Every project that comes here is tearing down an old dilapidated cottage, some intentionally dilapidated, and putting up a maximum 30-foot box,” said Planning Board member Kevin Hastings. “I worry that the more that happens, the more it dilutes any possibility of [having] a historic boundary.”
Board member Virginia Wilson argued that “Ocean Beach is already a complete community. If you look at what [Complete Communities] are, it would be affordable housing, walkability and so on. We have that already. …We don’t need someone coming in and anything they build, anything they try to improve, they’re just going to wreck something first. Tear things down and disrupt the balance that we have and had for over 100 years.”
As the sole dissenter in the board’s vote, member Tyler Martin, a real estate developer, handed out a flier showing 14 cottages the Planning Board supported for redevelopment in the past 12 years.
“What the [city] is trying to do here is give you an opportunity to be proactive and say these are the ones that we want,” Martin said. “But you’re reactive and you’re claiming that something is a cottage that’s not a cottage. … What the city is saying is consistent. We’ve always only regulated contributing resources, and it’s always been voluntary.”
Schlageter rebuffed any implication that the board was a party to the demolition of historic cottages, saying none of the cottages cited were contributing resources approved by the Historical Resources Board.
Meanwhile, a recent lawsuit alleges improper application of Complete Communities criteria for density within a 1-mile radius of major transit stops (also known as sustainable development areas, or SDAs).
Superior Court Judge Joel Wohlfeil issued a temporary restraining order in October stopping work on an eight-story, 180-unit apartment project in San Diego’s Golden Hill area because its Complete Communities incentives were based on a proposed transit line that is currently unfunded. The judge scheduled a hearing for Wednesday, Nov. 26, on the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction — a less-temporary block on construction.
Wohlfeil expressed doubts that an unfunded future transit route should allow a developer to build as many units as an existing route or a funded future route.
The issue could affect many other projects across the city that rely on density bonuses related to transit — especially where bus and trolley routes are proposed but not funded.
Klein contends the entire basis for Complete Communities in Ocean Beach is a San Diego Association of Governments study for 2035 that proffered a dedicated bus line on Cable Street.
“It’s never going to be done,” he said. “It’s not funded. Judge Wohlfeil ruled in the Golden Hill case that anything like that is too speculative to be allowed. That’s why they got the stop-work order. … It’s quite likely the whole thing is going to get thrown out because the transit aspect is illusory and isn’t going to happen.”
But Wohlfeil noted that his issuing of the restraining order doesn’t mean his mind is made up.
“The court emphasizes that its findings and orders herein are without prejudice to a different outcome at the Nov. 26 [injunction] hearing,” he wrote.
— San Diego Union-Tribune staff writer David Garrick contributed to this report.