Development and the Virtual Reality of Land Use – the Plan Hillcrest, as an Example

The ‘interpretive marker‘ on the sidewalk for the Michels-Carey House in North Park. Photo by Christine Hernandez.

By Mat Wahlstrom

Labor Day is the only holiday on our calendar dedicated to celebrate the worker; yet it is those on the lower wage end that most likely had to work yesterday. For these people, it was turned into just another Monday, likely without extra pay to compensate, with maybe a “thank you for your service” at the checkout.

While this disconnect between official recognition versus actually getting a paid day off is still clear, it’s important to examine how the imperatives of capital similarly warp our understanding where the idea of something is proposed as a substitute for the thing itself. When in place of public benefits, we are asked to use our imagination and accept empty gestures instead.

This can be seen most plainly in the deliberations on land use for recreation and historic preservation, which are supposed to be protected under the California Environmental Quality Act.

A new fifty-year Parks Master Plan was recently approved by the San Diego city council over the objections of a broad coalition of advocates. As noted here, chief among the concerns with this new plan is a system of ‘points’ for things such as signage and benches to make up for deficits in actual park and open space.

Development impact fees (DIFs) are not allowed to be used to make up for existing deficits. And unlike other cities, there’s no DIF assessed on commercial development for parks. Yet we’re being pushed to allow DIFs allocated for park space diverted to mobility projects instead — as if a bike path were fungible with a playground.

Current city standards already allow developments to waive 100% of the DIFs by satisfying park standards on their own sites. Add in this new plan’s introduction of fees and the removal of language protecting parks from commercialization and privatization, and it’s hard not to see how national standards are being gutted to allow for private enrichment from adding density across the board.

‘interpretive marker‘ on the sidewalk

(Consider the ‘parklets’ that were first carved out from the public right of way and justified to address park space deficits, only to have COVID privatize them for business, which are now being made permanent.)

Likewise, historical resources are another factor of the quality of life in our neighborhoods that we are being asked to make do without.

Currently the city’s Plan Hillcrest scheme is underway. It takes pains to give emphasis to historic preservation, notably with a Hillcrest LGBTQ+ Historic Context Statement. But dig a little deeper, and what’s being proposed is the replacement of existing structures with public art and interpretive walks — plaques attached to the outside of high rises describing what they replaced.

The model for this form of ‘preservation’ is the Michels-Carey House in North Park. The same day that the developer learned the state had accepted the nomination of this property for historic designation, they demolished it after city offices had closed for a holiday weekend. But, they were able to escape penalties by working to install an ‘interpretive marker‘ on the sidewalk outside the garage of the high-end apartment complex built over it.

And in every neighborhood, it appears that not a month goes by without some structure with valid historic preservation criteria being lost to a wrecking ball rather than repurposed for community benefit.

Understanding what is being done to recreation and historic preservation makes it easier to recognize other virtualizations put in service to density:

• Eliminating parking requirements that make units more affordable to construct, but the savings not passed on to buyers/renters and the burdens of cost of added density on infrastructure shifted to the public.
• Upzoning without conditions that inflates land values, that creates profit without improvement, pricing out both existing and new affordable housing.
• Incompatible projects that devalue nearby structures already on the ground, putting pressure on owners to either raise rents or convert to vacation rentals or cash out by selling to developers.
• Allowing the payment of in-lieu fees for alleged affordable housing elsewhere rather than enforce providing actual units on-site actual projects.
• City planning based on “transit priority corridors” that may be proposed by outside agencies in the next fourteen years, as the Blueprint San Diego scam calls for.
• Designing around bicycling projections as viable mass transit.
• Co-opting of the language of social justice — sloganeering such as “housing at all levels” and “all housing matters” — to protect the equity derived from a market gamed toward luxury real estate production.

But we cannot live in a virtual reality. So we need to recognize and challenge land use decisions based on arguments that require us to consent to fantasy.

We have no ‘reset’ button. We cannot survive governance by conjecture.

[Postscript: Today is the deadline for public comments on the Hillcrest LGBTQ+ Historic Context Statement Survey. Here’s the link for those who are interested in participating.]