Who’s Paying for the Plan Hillcrest Giveaway to Developers?

By Mat Wahlstrom

Documents uncovered (as a result of prevailing in a lawsuit filed in 2021 in a California Public Records Act request) indicate the City of San Diego secretly partnered with major property owners to implement their chosen code changes and upzone (read: increase land values) not only for nine blocks in the historic Hillcrest core, but almost the entirety of Hillcrest and Medical Complex — and to use public funds to subsidize their efforts.

The result is the city’s current Plan Hillcrest project, which mandates these two neighborhoods absorb 80% of all new development in the six neighborhoods of Uptown.

Approved in November 2016 over public outcry and objections by Uptown Planners, the official community planning group, the current Uptown plan left unresolved the status of the area around the Hillcrest sign.

This included a proposed historic district for the Hillcrest core and the planned build-out for approximately 10,000 more units for all of Uptown — with Hillcrest accounting for almost two-thirds of this total. [See chart with city-provided numbers below.]

So instead the city punted.

They approved a delay presented by a group of major Hillcrest property owners, who organized under the name Gateway, to keep this core out and instead for the city to call for a specific plan to be drawn up for public input at a later date.

Gateway’s foremost goals were to eliminate height restrictions of any kind, to create an entirely new zone classification that would allow for 218 dwelling units per acre, and allowances for floor area ratios of 5.7 — that is, living units of only 200 square feet.

This was the last the general public or the board of Uptown Planners was informed about decisions regarding any specific plan for this area until November 2019, when Plan Hillcrest was first mentioned; and not until March 2020 were outsiders made aware that it would now apply to 400 acres instead of 11 acres. (For comparison, the entire Uptown planning area covers 2,700 acres.)

What exactly happened in the years between is still a mystery. What we know so far is the following:

In June 2017, Planning Director Jeff Murphy sent a letter [see attached — original is a link in an email inside this link] to The Atlantis Group, lead lobbyist for Gateway at the time, offering a “public/private partnership” with these property owners to accomplish an accompanying list of “goals.” (Although both a draft MOU with edits and a final MOU were dated April 2017.)

These goals adopt Gateway’s vision for development now being proposed under Plan Hillcrest. But in exchange, they assigned to the property owners the obligation to pay for providing consultants to the city and for the public outreach.

Yet in January 2019, Councilmember Chris Ward asked for $1M to “fund the outreach and development of the Gateway Specific Plan” in his FY2020 list of budget priorities, as “funding for this effort has not been provided.” Requests for information at the time about the origins of this ask and the results if any still remain unanswered; and a full release of records for the final cost is still pending.

Also in 2019, the city successfully applied for a “Local Early Action Planning” or LEAP grant under SB 2 of $1.5M to help fund Plan Hillcrest, as well as offset the city’s costs for current community plan updates, etc. However, Hillcrest is the only one of the six projects that earmarks money to reopen a plan rather than pay for a plan update.

Under the terms of this grant, the city is legally obligated to increase entitlements for development of approximately 14,000 units (page 11) in Uptown, 11,000 of them in the 400 acres in Plan Hillcrest.

Until the 2020 census figures are available, as of 2010, there were 23,000 existing housing units in all of Uptown.

Two weeks ago, another CPRA lawsuit was filed against the city, as it continues to refuse to identify who is paying the third-party contractors co-hosting the Plan Hillcrest public meetings, producing the presentation materials, leading the public outreach — and helping write the plan.

The need for the public to know the answers to these questions is increasingly critical.

Today, April 11, at midnight is the deadline for participation in the Plan Hillcrest ‘maptionnaire’ survey. This survey allows anyone anywhere in the world — including readers of the OB Rag — to make black box decisions on height and mobility, as the choices are presented without reference to any ‘build-out’ numbers or allowed densities that would entail.

I encourage everyone to at look at the survey to verify this for themselves. And if anyone is so inclined as to participate, there is at least the option to write in your own alternatives — even ‘none of the above.’

Until the city finally shows its cards, we need to stop playing their game.