Why Ocean Beach Needs to Turn Out at City Hall on Tuesday, Feb. 24

OB’s Historical District Needs to Be Protected

As it stands now, on Tuesday, the 24th of February in the afternoon, the San Diego City Council will get to decide on a good deal of the future of Ocean Beach.

There is an animal out there ready to devour our sedate coastal village and it’s called “Preservation and Progress Package A.” It’s a set of policy proposals affecting how the city preserves and designates historical properties — or neighborhoods. These “reforms” specifically call out the historic district that Ocean Beach enjoys, called the “Ocean Beach Cottage Emerging Historical District”.

Why? What’s going on?

OBceans aware of the neighborhood know there’s many small cottages scattered throughout the blocks that make up Ocean Beach, but may not be aware that these old cottages add besides the obvious an historic character to the community — plus add certain protections.

The original application for an Ocean Beach historical district designation was filed with the state Department of Parks and Recreation on June 2, 1999, by the now-late OB Planning Board member Priscilla McCoy.

The district is termed “emerging” because there never has been a complete survey of all the buildings that potentially qualify to be historic. Usually a full historic district designation protects surrounding buildings, even ones not considered historic, in order to preserve community character.

And lately, the city has been arguing that OB’s historical designation applies only to the 72 cottages, built between 1887 and 1931. And nothing else. Yet, several local OB historians estimate the total number of potentially historic cottages at more than 300.

“We’ve had this … incomplete historic district because there hasn’t been an exhaustive survey of all the homes and which ones qualify,” said Kevin Hastings, vice-chair of the OB Planning Board. “What the issue is here is the city’s responsibility to complete those surveys.”

Why does all this matter?

Package A of the proposed policies on “reforming” the city’s historical designation and preservation procedures will be in front of the full Council on Tuesday, Feb. 24.

And if passed as is — Package A would be an existential threat to OB’s character by eliminating any effectiveness of the Historical District as a protection against over-development.

So, if passed, this Package A would limit the status of Ocean Beach’s “emerging” historical district to the 72 beach cottages already designated historic. More importantly, it would potentially open the rest of Ocean Beach to the city’s “Complete Communities” development rules. The program would qualify other projects — including those adjacent to the protected historic cottages — for denser housing, and some could exceed the city’s 30-foot coastal height limit.

“If Package A passes, then OB as we know it will be replaced by an overbuilt, overcrowded beach community,”  resident Lynne Miller said recently at an OB Planning Board meeting. “The infrastructure will have to be replaced to accommodate more people, more cars, more water use and expanded sewer use.”

Any new policy or program that allows dense over-development that exceeds the 30-foot coastal height limit needs to be stopped in its tracks.

Ocean Beach needs to show up at this City Council hearing.

Here are some details on the hearing.

Item 332:
Preservation and Progress Package A. This item will be considered in the afternoon session which is scheduled to begin at 2:00 p.m.

The city agenda

The session will begin at 2:00 p.m., but there are items before it, and sometimes things don’t start exactly at the time they’ve scheduled it. They’re saying right now that it is scheduled to begin at 2:00.

For more background see this report from a recent OB Planning Board meeting and then SOHO’s Action Alert.