By Kate Callen
After decades of City Hall neglect, Encanto residents are savoring their stunning victory over predatory development at the January 28 City Council hearing. And it looks like they’re just getting started.
At a jubilant February 2 gathering, leaders of Neighbors for Encanto said they are ready to double down in the battles ahead. And they are confident neighborhoods across the city will stand with them.
“This isn’t just Encanto’s fight,” Lisa Becerra told the crowd at the Encanto Recreation Center. “We’re hearing from people all over San Diego who are already pissed off and already fighting this.”
City Hall has 60 days to follow through on the surprise motion from District 4 Councilmember Henry Foster that passed unanimously. When the City takes up the issue again, said Becerra, “we want to fill the Council room and the overflow room, and we want the public comments to go on all day long.”
As expected, Foster’s motion called for the repeal of “Footnote 7,” a mysterious 2019 zoning change to boost density by reducing minimum lot sizes in Southeast San Diego – but only in Southeast San Diego.
“It was skullduggery,” said third-generation Encanto resident Lucy Price. “Footnote 7 was created because politicians sat down with developers and slipped it into the code. We’ve been asking ever since, ‘Who did this? How did it happen?’”
Removing Footnote 7 was just the first part of Foster’s motion. The second part was the shocker. It asked the Development Services Department to create a plan for removing Todd Gloria’s beloved “Bonus ADU Program.”
The motion asked that San Diego’s ADU program be made “consistent with state-mandated ADU regulations for single-family zoned parcels.” This would be a huge setback for Gloria, who has burnished his YIMBY political credentials by making San Diego a national model of ADU saturation.
(For a reminder of how horrific bonus ADUs can be, revisit the Rag’s “worst ADU in San Diego” hall of shame.)
The Mayor immediately sought to block Foster’s motion with help from City Attorney Heather Ferbert, who objected that the Bonus ADU Program shouldn’t have been discussed because it wasn’t on the agenda.
Gloria can spend the next two months finagling some way to upend the vote. But he can never erase it. Long-simmering fury over massive ADUs has finally boiled over. Councilmembers who once obeyed him now appear to be more afraid of their angry constituents than of their lame duck mayor.
Danna Givot of Neighbors For a Better San Diego called the Council’s decision “unprecedented.”
Givot outlined possible options going forward, including that “we would expect the Mayor to let the City Council do its job, which is to legislate.” But if Gloria directs the Planning Department to deny the Council’s request, Council President Joe LaCava could put the bonus ADU program on a future agenda.
Even if the Mayor succeeds in thwarting the vote, Givot said, “the door is now open for a public conversation about the Bonus ADU Program to take place.”
It is supremely ironic that the conversation would be driven by a racially diverse community that has not benefited from density policies purported to address racial inequity. But those policies have produced almost none of the affordable housing that Encanto residents desperately need.
And Gloria’s “For All of Us” 2020 campaign pledge to invest more in underserved communities has done nothing for Encanto. “If the City has allocated resources to us,” said Rob Campbell, “we haven’t seen them, and we don’t know where they’ve gone.”
Asked how the Southeast community was emboldened to defy City Hall, Evelyn Smith, Chair of the Emerald Hills Neighborhood Council, said, “It all comes down to unity.”
“We’ve all seen developers and realtors preying on our older neighbors who don’t know the value of their own land,” Smith said. “Our elected officials weren’t listening to us. So we started speaking up together. And now they’re listening.”
Becca Batista, an organizer of Neighbors for Encanto, said the community would like Gloria to pay a visit.
“We’re happy with California’s ADU program,” she said. “We don’t like San Diego changing those rules.”
“Encanto feels under siege. We don’t have real infrastructure. Eighty percent of our community doesn’t have sidewalks. We have flooding. We have high fire risk. The mayor hasn’t been here in a while. We invite him to come and talk with us.”
