By John McNab
We rarely talk context of why the public coast is disappearing and high rises are sprouting up everywhere. The below is a perspective on going from freeing animals to caging humans – San Diego’s shift in priorities
A black-and-white movie on TV in the early 60’s was about a boy who went to the zoo with his grandfather. Upon seeing the animals in cages, he broke down. Likely because he loved to spend time under the warm sun playing in the canyons with the lizard and birds. Seeing the zoo animals poorly treated broke his heart.
Upon getting home, he was still in tears. It was recommended he did something. So he started protesting at the zoo. The editor at the local paper thought the story was cute and ran a piece on the boy and his protest. It struck a nerve and suddenly citizens were up in arms. So the embarrassed zoo changed. The last scene, in Technicolor, was the front of the San Diego zoo.
Yet what could be a sequel to the story?
A mother had many errands to run so she dropped off her son with his grandfather. The son, full of energy, got on the grandfather’s nerves. “Why don’t you go outside and play?” The boy answered in tears, “there’s nowhere outside to play”.
Just then, the grandfather had a epiphany. The little boy had grown up to be a developer and had made billions of dollars building high rise housing. Prime public land that could have allowed children wide open spaces to play were taken for luxury towers.
As a youth, he had freed the animals.
Then he forgot and ended up sentencing the people of this fair city to live in tiny little boxes jam-and-crammed on high. Prime public places to roam and feel free were sacrificed.
This is San Diego’s tale.
The current issue is the Midway Rising and NAVWAR projects. If they are allowed to go forward a jungle of high rises will destroy coastal access, deliver LA style traffic and eliminate the opportunity to create on our public land a sorely needed bay to bay coastal park.
Will we prevent this civic disaster and instead create an iconic park?
If so, it is time for action. To start, attend the Peninsula Community Planning Board hearing on NAVWAR 6 pm this Thursday at the Point Loma Hervey Library community room – 701 Voltaire st.
John McNab is the president of Save Our Access
Thank you, John McNab, for caring so much and for leading us in efforts to save San Diego. It’s hard not to get discouraged but if you can keep going, we can, too.
John, the premise that density destroys public spaces couldn’t be further from fact. I encourage you to look at the Trust for Public Land’s excellent website (parkserve.tpl.org/mapping/) and search different cities for what % of the population are within a 10 minute walk of a public park. Some highlights sorted by population density: New York 99%, San Francisco 100%, Boston 100%, (we’ll skip down a few) San Diego 82%, Poway 62%, La Mesa 57%, Santee 52%, Spring Valley 48%. The ability to preserve public spaces is so much easier when population density is high. Large tracts of single family homes (low density housing) consumes more land and makes public spaces difficult to preserve.
“LA style traffic” occurs when transportation by car is the only option for getting anywhere. The opposite of “LA style traffic” is to create opportunities for any other form of transit (walking, biking, public transit). It may shock you, but New York City has two metro lines that service their sorry excuse for a beach (west coast, best coast is something I know we can agree on). These two lines have the capacity to move around 20,000+ people per hour to and from Coney Island beach and because of the robust network of transit these lines basically service the entire population. The equivalent freeway would be about 10 lanes.
I agree with the goal of democratizing the coast and ensuring that everyone retains access to the best places in California and San Diego. But I hope that you can see that that goal is achieved by advocating for dense development that enables more people to 1. live closer to the places they want to go (like the beach) and 2. to enable public transit to these places to actually be cost effective for the city to invest in to provide alternatives to (currently the only option for the vast majority of trips) driving.