City Hall needs comprehensive planning to avoid past mistakes.
Homes are seen in the College Area next to new construction of a six-story, 310-unit apartment building near San Diego State University on Dec. 16, 2025, in San Diego. When I was a professor at SDSU in the Graduate Program in City Planning, I taught my students that one of the most important goals for planners is to ensure that growth is accompanied by public facilities and infrastructure; otherwise, a city’s quality of life will suffer.
The recently approved College Area Community Plan, when measured against such a principle, fails in catastrophic ways. It significantly increases residential densities in an area with practically no public facilities and without adequate financing mechanisms for future infrastructure. The only, single-minded goal appears to be to increase residential building capacity; lack of infrastructure be damned. This approach is a reversal of a long tradition of planning in San Diego based on accommodating growth where public facilities were available or would become available as growth occurred;This long-standing principle originated with Robert Freilich, a consultant hired in the early 1970s by Mayor Pete Wilson to devise a growth management strategy for San Diego. The result was a “tiered” approach to growth, based on the availability of public facilities and infrastructure. The designated tiers were: “urbanized,” “planned urbanizing” and “future urbanizing.” In the urbanized tier — generally the area south of Interstate 8 — infrastructure and public facilities capacity was, presumably, amply available. Here, infill was encouraged by not levying development impact fees on development. In the planned urbanizing tier, the northern suburban fringe of the city where growth was taking place haphazardly , a “pay-as-you grow” policy was adopted. DIn the future urbanizing area , growth would be phased in the future. To avoid paying fees, developers descended en masse in the urbanized areas with insensitively designed developments, easily overtaking what — it was discovered too late — little infrastructure capacity was there, quickly creating a public facilities deficit calculated to be $1 billion in 1990. Around that time, in reaction to mounting discontent in the city core’s older neighborhoods, the City Council approved fees in the urbanized tier. But it was too little and far too late. The original decision not to impose fees in the urbanized communities has created a fractured city. The newer sections enjoy ample facilities while the older areas, usually poorer and Browner, face a public facilities and infrastructure deficit now calculated at $6.5 billion. This mounting deficit has hampered planning in San Diego ever since.direct growth into compact and vibrant mixed-use villages in urbanized communities. The Villages would enjoy better mass transit, employment and commercial uses, parks and public spaces and narrower streets with wider sidewalks. The plan assumed that financing would be created to pay for the public infrastructure deficit. A consultant was hired to identify possible sources of funding, but at a fateful meeting in Balboa Park that I attended, the City Council, fearful of putting tax increases in front of the voters, refused to even discuss the consultant’s report.“didn’t turn out as planned because of a lack of city resources, among other things.”Now, in a ruinous turnaround, the city has decided that, when updating community plans, adequate infrastructure doesn’t matter anymore. To make things worse, additional planned densities are compounded by “density bonus” programs, such as “complete communities.” Should no development, then, be allowed in the urbanized communities? Of course not. But planning should be a comprehensive process, with infrastructure and public facilities an important factor in deciding land uses and their intensities. Recently, two experienced, longtime planners in a U-T commentary pointed out thatincreasing residential capacity by more than 300% in the College Area, while making no provision for economic development and job creation, would add to the massive pollution spewing traffic jams resulting from most jobs in San Diego being north of I-8.is professor emeritus in the Graduate Program in City Planning at SDSU. He was chair of the City of San Diego Housing Trust Fund Board of Trustees and board member of the City Heights Community Development Corp. He is co-author of the book “Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective” and lives in Berkeley.San Diego’s elected leaders all deserve to be firedOvernight thunderstorms pound San Diego County and more wild weather is on the wayPadres, A.J. Preller agree to multi-year contract extensionAfter second trial, jury convicts San Diego County deputy who seriously injured restrained inmate
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