Activists in National City and Southeast San Diego are celebrating a $4.5 million state budget allocation to an initiative aimed at reconnecting communities that were divided by freeways.<\/p>\n
The funding, which was approved by state lawmakers on Sept. 1 and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 18, will support community outreach, planning and technical studies surrounding the proposed redevelopment of the 43rd Street on and off-ramps to Interstate 805.<\/p>\n
The ramps were initially planned to become the start of Highway 252, a project that Caltrans abandoned in the 1980s<\/a> amid community opposition. In 2015, the city of San Diego adopted a new community plan<\/a> that called for the ramps’ redevelopment into housing, parks and commercial space.<\/p>\n Then in March 2024, Caltrans announced the ramps would be a focus area for its nascent Reconnecting Communities: Highways to Boulevards<\/a> program. The program seeks to make amends for the displacement and division that many low-income communities of color experienced with the construction of freeways.<\/p>\n The state initially pledged $50 million for the program. But that funding never materialized<\/a> in the state budget, as California struggled to close a budget deficit<\/a> made wider by the Trump administration’s spending cuts.<\/p>\n Janice Luna Reynoso is executive director of Mundo Gardens, one of the nonprofit organizations Caltrans selected as a program partner. She said a federal grant pledged during the Biden administration has allowed the project to advance while they awaited state funding.<\/p>\n Mundo Gardens has hosted<\/a> dozens of community outreach<\/a>, beautification and cleanup events in the space, which totals roughly 57 acres straddling the border between National City and San Diego’s Southcrest neighborhood.<\/p>\n “We have people honking when we’re standing here, and when we’re painting and we’re doing events, because they’re used to seeing this area blighted,” Luna Reynoso said. “So there’s a little bit of hope that goes a long way.”<\/p>\n Actually redeveloping the land is still years away and would depend on future funding commitments to support construction, Luna Reynoso said. The $4.5 million state budget allocation came after a persistent lobbying campaign from local residents, she added \u2014 a continuation of the activism<\/a> in the 1970s and ’80s that stopped the construction of Highway 252.<\/p>\n “I applaud leaders that are seeing this as change that they can help uplift, even if they might not be there when it happens,” Luna Reynoso said. “That’s a beautiful thing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Activists in National City and Southeast San Diego are celebrating a $4.5 million state budget allocation to an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[74,76,75],"class_list":["post-509012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}