Neighbors in Encanto Upset With Developers’ Plans to Build and Feel Betrayed by City’s Sleight of Hand Move

Neighbors upset. They seemed to be finding out about a developer’s plans in their neighborhood — but the City of San Diego wasn’t helping them.

Sound familiar?

It’s a story that’s resounding across San Diego communities these days – and this time it’s in Emerald Hills and the Chollas area. And this time, it involves a low-income community that is mainly African-American and Latino.

Two tall radio towers sit on the highest point of Emerald Hills which is a huge empty green lot behind wire fencing. Yet, it’s private land and two years ago, the city announced that a housing project would be constructed there.

Neighbors had wanted a  park there, something akin to Kate Sessions in Pacific Beach with maybe a youth or senior center. But now these neighbors are finding out about a developer’s plans to build more than 120 units on the empty lot. Yet, the zoning map showed that only about 70 houses would be allowed on the parcel.

A KPBS reporter spoke with a neighbor named Martha Abraham who was upset. She said, “We would say, like, it’s not zoned for this many houses, and we would be told by the developer, it is zoned for that many houses.” In addition, the local community planning group tried to get an explanation for the discrepancy.

Martha said:

“When we go to our council member for support, we’re being told, ‘Oh, we support housing.’ They weren’t helping us, so we had to just try to help ourselves.”

But that was time-consuming. She added:

“I was putting my own business and projects to the side to work on this. Because what happens is that you get into a little rabbit hole. You find one thing, and then it leads you into another, and it leads you into another.”

“I feel like there was a magic bullet, and we just hadn’t found it yet. There was something going on that no one was telling us about.”

And when the city announced another development in Encanto with twice as many houses as zoning seemed to allow, another neighbor named Rob Campbell found Martha’s “magic bullet.”

Campbell’s big beef is not the building of homes, but the number of homes. He told KPBS:

“We’re identified as an environmental justice-affected community. And so we don’t see how paving over what green space we have will increase our air quality or will decrease the heat island effect that we suffer from.”

The planning group wanted to appeal the development, and had to do some fundraising because the city began charging planning groups a $1,000 appeal fee in 2022. They did their homework and went downtown but the city postponed the meeting.

Campbell said, “They [the city] had discovered some new information,” Campbell said. He began to study the city’s rebuttal — and that’s when he found the magic bullet, listed as “Footnote 7.”

KPBS Reported:

He pulled up the city’s zoning code. And in the R-S-1-2 column – the zone that applies to the radio towers lot in Emerald Hills and the newer development in Encanto – was a little number seven he’d never noticed. He scrolled down several pages to get to the footnotes.

Footnote 7, passed in 2019, reduced minimum lot size from 20,000 square feet to 5,000 square feet – only in the Encanto and Southeast areas. “That was the first time I knew that we were different. But I didn’t know why,” he said.

Near the end of October, the Chollas Valley Community Planning Group had a meeting and a 100 neighbors packed the school community room with more outside. Chair Andrea Hetheru presented what Abraham, Campbell and others had learned in their research. As she presented a slide with the table in it, she said:

“We usually skip over them without a second thought. We never expect a footnote to be shocking. And that is the entire point. There is city code in the form of a footnote that is shocking.”

“With this footnote, the city is essentially saying, 20,000 means 20,000 to everyone in the city except you folks in Southeast. For you folks in Southeast, 20,000 means 5,000. A dollar means a quarter, because we said so.”

Hetheru explained that this footnote was part of the resistance that local governments used to curtail civil rights. The audience applauded when Hetheru told how Campbell had found the footnote. Many wanted to speak. Neighbor Russell Steppe said:

“I understand we have the need for housing, but disrespect is disrespect, and the law is the law. Will we ever stand up and let the law do what it’s supposed to? Is the Constitution going to be true for all of us?”

Representatives of the development company for the radio towers property, D.R. Horton, were there. Dan Boyd, a vice president informed the crowd that they planned to move forward and then just spurted out a word salad:

“We think what we’re going to do is just move the project forward. I think what you’re all going to do is try to get to the comfort level with everything here that we heard this evening.”

Henry Foster III, the newly-elected city councilmember for the district was there, and suggested the community members wait to hear more from the city. KPBS described a “rumble moved through the audience,” and people called out, “Footnote 7! Talk about Footnote 7! Footnote 7!”  Foster had been the district’s chief of staff when the footnote became law. He said he shared their concerns about transparency and discrimination, but argues that some good came from the footnote: “It did spur housing.”

KPBS reported:

Monica Montgomery Steppe, the district’s council member who passed the footnote, did not answer questions about it. In an email statement, she said:

“As an elected official, I’ve always advocated for the balance of community input, the urgency of localized planning needs, and opportunities for first-time home buyers to build generational wealth. My decisions are guided by my longstanding commitment to transparency and enhancing residents’ quality of life. While I firmly believe we must consider tailored solutions for communities facing historically unique challenges, I support community voices and input from city staff to ensure an outcome that reflects our shared goals to achieve equity in land use and housing.”

The city planning director at the time, Mike Hansen, said he doesn’t know why the footnote was included in the 2019 code update. “I didn’t give direction for it to be included and didn’t work on it personally,” he wrote in an email. “As the City works on a fix, there could be an opportunity to review single-family zones more comprehensively so they reflect the values of the community today.”

Heidi Vonblum is the planning director now. She said she wouldn’t recommend the footnote if it came before her now. “Applying exceptions to generally applicable zoning regulations in specific communities, – in this case, in a community that is identified as a low resource area – is problematic and something that needs to definitely be evaluated,” she said. She said she asked the state for permission to reconsider the footnote. State law prohibits making housing zones less dense unless they make it more dense somewhere else. If the state agrees, Vonblum said the city council could reconsider the footnote in mid-2025.

Still Campbell feels betrayed by the footnote and the seeming sleight of hand move by the city. He said, “On the surface, I read a headline, and I just have to read inside because the headline can be very misleading.”