![\"Member](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/SUT-L-SDUSD-Meeting-8.jpg\")
Member Sharon Whitehurst-Payne, left, and President Cody Petterson during a San Diego Unified School Board meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025 in San Diego. (Ana Ramirez \/ The San Diego Union-Tribune)<\/p>\nAt a marathon Wednesday night meeting that at times turned chaotic, a divided San Diego Unified school board delayed a vote on most of its affordable housing plans until next month, rather than move ahead on proposals to build nearly 1,500 homes on district land.<\/p>\n
Dozens of people crowded a room where the board had been set to consider development plans for five sites around the city, in what would have been a major step forward in the district\u2019s strategy of investing in new housing to shore up its workforce and enrollment and bring in needed revenue to fund schools.<\/p>\n
That planned vote would have let the district move to the next stage, including interviewing the development teams selected for each project.<\/p>\n
Instead, trustee Richard Barrera moved to have most of the developers return next month for a special public workshop and deliver roughly 10-minute presentations to the board before it votes. The developers whose plans were deemed not viable would not return.<\/p>\n
Later in the discussion, Barrera said the board wanted to be impressed by the proposals coming before them, prompting Petterson to ask if he were saying he wanted to start from scratch.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet me just clarify here,\u201d said his colleague Cody Petterson. \u201cAre you saying they should change their proposals?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI want proposals that meet our goals, period, so let\u2019s see \u2014 let\u2019s see what you come back with,\u201d said Barrera.<\/p>\n
\u201cWait, hold on \u2014 is this actually what we\u2019re going to say?\u201d said Petterson. \u201cThat we\u2019re now going to completely resubmit new proposals, that these \u2014 this is so wild. I\u2019m completely stunned. I\u2019m sorry to say it. I don\u2019t know where we are right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
On a split 3-2 vote, the board chose to go Barrera\u2019s route.<\/p>\n
Member Sharon Whitehurst-Payne, left, and President Cody Petterson during a San Diego Unified School Board meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025 in San Diego. (Ana Ramirez \/ The San Diego Union-Tribune)<\/p>\n
Hazan had asked if they could share feedback to get to consensus around their priorities, so that January could see bidders give information or their best and final offer.<\/p>\n
Petterson said they had all been under pressure to change the process at \u201cthe one-yard line\u201d but have clear parameters around what they\u2019re seeking to achieve.<\/p>\n
The district did move forward with development plans for one site that had drawn only one developer application \u2014 the Instructional Media Center in Linda Vista.<\/p>\n
The next steps for that project would include interviews and vetting to ensure it\u2019s feasible and meets district guidelines, based on an outline of the process described by chief of staff Enrique Ruacho ahead of Wednesday\u2019s vote.<\/p>\n
Some public commenters had raised concerns about that project\u2019s impact on the neighborhood, namely around traffic, parking and emergency evacuation routes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are one way in and one way out,\u201d said Callie Greer, a Birdland homeowner. \u201cWe are built in a canyon.\u201d<\/p>\n
But on Wednesday night, most of the community members who spoke about the proposals were there to comment on the site set to be developed in University Heights, in the building where the board meeting took place \u2014 the Eugene Brucker Education Center.<\/p>\n
Some commenters pushed for more preservation and warned against overwhelming the surrounding area.<\/p>\n
Marc Johnson, who served on the evaluation committee and co-chairs the Community Coalition of University Heights, said that the plan recommended for the site, from Affirmed Housing, wasn\u2019t perfect.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is built here can\u2019t overburden the University Heights community,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have to address the existing infrastructure, and we have to find a solution that has the scale and size and mass that\u2019s compatible with this site, and compatible with the neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other community members made the opposite argument about scale, pushing for more homes than were outlined in the recommended proposal.<\/p>\n
That proposal would build more than 900 rent-restricted units, most of them studios and one-bedrooms. District staff recommended it over three competing ones, including one that would have built substantially more units, but for tenants with higher incomes.<\/p>\n
\u201cHeight is not a problem,\u201d said Wesley Morgan, an uptown resident and the treasurer of YIMBY Democrats of San Diego. \u201cHeight is how you unlock parks, plazas, public space and green corridors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Much of the public comment across the projects came from members of the development teams, with some arguing that their proposal would be the best one for a given site.<\/p>\n
In response, trustee Sabrina Bazzo asked for next month\u2019s presentations to focus on what issues the evaluation committee might have been confused about or missed in its report.<\/p>\n
In March, the board had approved guiding principles saying their goal was the highest number of affordable units, not necessarily the highest percentage of affordable units \u2014 but none of the staff-recommended proposals were those with the highest number.<\/p>\n
Hazan said it was \u201cconfounding\u201d that the highest-scoring proposal for the Revere Center site was not the one with the most units.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe top priority that we identified for all of our projects is the maximum number of affordable units, and it looked like that may have been missed in this recommendation,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Near the end of the meeting, board members also elected new officers for next year. Barrera will serve as president; Bazzo will serve as vice president.<\/p>\n
The five sites where the district wants to build housing are:<\/p>\n
Eugene Brucker Education Center, 4100 Normal St., San Diego
\nRevere Center, 6735 Gifford Way, San Diego
\nFremont\/Ballard Center, 2375 Congress St., San Diego
\nInstructional Media Center, 2441 Cardinal Lane, San Diego
\nCommercial Street, 2101 Commercial St., San Diego<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At a marathon Wednesday night meeting that at times turned chaotic, a divided San Diego Unified school board…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[15,181,23,100,74,76,75,1696],"class_list":{"0":"post-91286","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-education","9":"tag-latest-headlines","10":"tag-local-news","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-san-diego","13":"tag-san-diego-headlines","14":"tag-san-diego-news","15":"tag-top-stories-sdut"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91286","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=91286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}