By Margot Sheehan / San Diego Reader Archives / Republished June 6, 2026
The Frontier Homes Housing Project — 3500 “temporary” dwellings constructed in the first nine months of 1944. One of the largest developments of its kind ever built in the USA — Designed to last for two years and enduring (parts of it, at least) for 20. Was there ever such a project, so grand, so ghastly, and so successfully erased from civic memory?
Don’t look for Frontier in the Journal of San Diego History or in any of those big picture books that Neil Morgan used to crank out. The only people who really remember the project are the people who lived there. Old timers who didn’t live there, even folks who drove past Frontier every day, will give you all kinds of cockeyed answers when you ask about it. “Oh, yeah, you mean those military barracks.” “Frontier? That was Navy housing.” Someone might even offer that 1950s misconception that Lait and Mortimer provide in USA Confidential: “a low-income housing project for Mexicans and Negroes.”
No. Frontier was a war-workers’ project, built mainly to house Convair employees and their families. And while this may be the first time you’ve ever heard of the project, you probably know the site fairly well. It’s that strip mall hell and industrial shantytown intersected by Midway and Rosecrans and Sports Arena Boulevard. Land of nudie shows and junk-food shops. A region so bleak and sprawling that it invites motorists to wonder, as they whiz past on I-5 or 8, “Is this place just naturally ugly, or did someone plan it this way?”
Yes. The area started out as an unattractive locale, and development made it even uglier. At one time, say, 100 years ago, it was a dusty, dry river bottom with little vegetation and a high water table of seawater. Its most prominent feature was a long levee that the government had built to tame the springtime flooding of the meandering San Diego River. Sometimes the dike held, sometimes it didn’t.
For the balance of this article, please go here.
