By Kate Callen
The City of San Diego had a one-time-only opportunity to compensate Southeastern San Diego for decades of neglect and broken promises. It has thrown that away to hand an iconic community parcel over to a national developer with a checkered history.
On July 7, by an 8-1 vote, the City Council denied an appeal to stop D.R. Horton, which is facing class action lawsuits across eight states, from building 123 homes on a 31-acre hilltop plateau in Emerald Hills.
The future owners of those homes will have exclusive access to a beloved natural asset: a stunning panoramic 360-view of the San Diego-Tijuana coastal region. People in the surrounding communities, who have long treasured the vista from the Radio Towers Hill, will be shut out.
And their dream of building a landmark destination like the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles that would bolster the local economy has now collapsed.
Communities across the city have endured similar heartaches when iconic properties, like the Little Red Bungalow in Mission Hills, are razed by out-of-town developers.
But the Emerald Hills loss is uniquely tragic. It happened because in 2019, someone inside City Hall targeted Southeastern communities by slipping the infamous “Footnote 7” into the municipal code.
The mysterious footnote, as Rob Campbell reported in a November 17 Rag post, “shrinks minimum lot size from 20,000 sq ft to 5,000 sq ft but only in historically redlined Black and Latino neighborhoods like Emerald Hills and Encanto.” Without Footnote 7, the Horton development could not be built.
The City Council unanimously repealed the footnote in 2025, but the damage was done. As with the reformed Bonus ADU program, developers rushed their projects into the pipeline before the crackdown. Horton was one of them.
Monica Montgomery Steppe was the District 4 Councilmember who passed Footnote 7. Her parents own a construction company, and her mother works in real estate. Now a County Supervisor, she urged the Council to approve the Horton project: “I want others to have access to the same opportunity that I had in life, a chance to grow up in a home that I knew would always be there for me to dwell in.”
The community’s response to the “we need housing” argument was: Why here? Why must this cherished parcel be taken away from Southeastern neighborhoods?
“This is not about housing,” said Marry Young of the Chollas Valley Community Planning Group. “We are asking for a space to honor our community’s legacy.”
The fury in Southeastern is like a smoldering brushfire that will not go out anytime soon. Looking down the road, it may affect the political futures of two councilmembers in two very different ways.
Henry Foster III, who was Montgomery Steppe’s chief of staff when she passed Footnote 7, succeeded her in the D4 seat and is now running for re-election. He was already facing a tough fight against challenger Martha Abraham when he voted with seven colleagues for the Horton project.
When Foster and Abraham face off in debate before the November election, guess what topic will be front and center?
District 7 Councilmember Raul Campillo once again was the lone “No” vote on an issue that has inflamed public sentiment. He based his opposition on the illegality of Footnote 7’s targeting of minority neighborhoods. He has called projects enabled by the loophole “fruit of the poisoned tree,” a phrase that has become a rallying cry.
“Supporting housing does not require the Council to approve every and any project on every and any site,” he said. “How can a city grant property rights while simultaneously violating state and federal law?”
Campillo is looking like an early favorite for mayor in 2028. In recent weeks, community activists who have been ride-or-die supporters of upstart Richard Bailey are looking at Campillo in a new light, and they like what they see.
The appeal was conducted by the City Council acting as quasi judicial hearing officer. I wrote the Council and testified at the appeal hearing asking that each Council member declare that they were unbiased and had taken the additional Judicial oath. Only Council President Joe LaCava declared that he personally was unbiased. He did not include his staff assistant employees.
No Councilperson took the additional judicial oath!
The entire Appeal hearing process needs to be reformed. It now costs $2, 380 dollars to appeal . The “progressive” working man advocate Democrats all voted to raise the already outrageous $1,000 fee to $2,380 . I guess they feel that this high fee will keep the peasants away from City Hall