‘My beautiful, peaceful neighborhood in Kensington is facing a crushing increase in density’

By Caitlin Rother / Substack / Sep 22, 2026

Until I found a flyer on my doorstep about a community meeting last night, I was not aware that the city of San Diego was updating the 1998 community plan for my neighborhood of Kensington-Talmadge and several others that are nearby but have completely unrelated interests and socio-economic demographics. Because I covered City Hall for many years when I was still a working investigative reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune, I took my notebook to the meeting.

After we listened to two city planners present the highlights of the community plan update, Neil Winner, chairman of the Kensington-Talmadge Community Planning Group (KTCPG), summed up his group’s very measured response like this: the plan update “is not compatible” with the historic nature or the infrastructure and fire safety needs of our community. He said the KTCPG submitted an alternative plan to the city, but was told that it did not comply, without any discussion or the ability to challenge or resolve that conclusion.

Here’s my view: First, don’t hold back. What the city is proposing is a nightmarish crush of increased density, to fill our cute, historic neighborhood of well-maintained single-family homes in South Kensington with garrish apartment complexes looming six to eight stories, and three to five times the number of people living in that space as they are today. The plan allowing these new complexes, which would all be squished into the few square blocks surrounding my house, is envisioned to triple the community’s overall population and yet developers will not be required to provide any additional parking spaces because they will be built just blocks from a couple of bus routes, some of which are now slated for reduction or elimination.

Just take a minute to process that ridiculous lapse of common sense and logic.

What I heard last night is that we are so far into this process that there have already been 118 (or 180, there were a lot of numbers flying around) meetings during which the city planners have already listened to a lot of concerns already, and the public comment period ends in just ten days (on October 2) so we’re almost out of time. To me, that means that the city has either done a poor job of educating and informing its residents or we have too few reporters to cover these issues. Both are probably true. I was told last night that the Union-Tribune did publish a story, but it only just came out, and even though I’m a digital subscriber, I never saw it until someone texted it to me last night.

The KTCPG says it has been quietly working on this issue with the city for two years during which time members said many of their expressed concerns and the alternative plan they submitted have been blatantly ignored. That’s the real plan update.

What we want is a plan that respects our “historic nature and our historic district,” one community group member said, noting that a proposed historic district designation for Kensington-Talmadge has already been submitted to the state. I downloaded a copy and it’s quite extensive. My question is, if this plan update passes, will that historic designation nullify it? Or vice versa? Does one supercede the other?

One community fire-safety group leader raised the question last night whether we even have enough water or pressure to put out fires in this area as it is, noting that 76 homes burned in a fire in Normal Heights in 1985. The other one noted that the streets marked for growth are those that are already flagged as fire evacuation routes, so they would be even more clogged if a fire should break out—just as they were during the most recent wildfire, before any of these complexes had been built. To illustrate the possible consequences, the group put up slides from the Palisades fire of 2025, which burned down 6,738 structures across 37 square miles, and the Paradise fire of 2018, when most of the town, which was built in a forested area but had only one primary way out, went up in flames and left motorists trying to flee stranded.

“In Kensington, we take wildfire seriously, because it’s a real risk,” one fire safety leader said, adding that we need to increase infrastructure and fire safety measures along with any planned population growth, and given that we are surrounded by canyons, a detailed wildfire evacuation analysis should be done before this plan is approved.

What I also heard and saw with my own eyes was that the two young city planners who put this “draft” plan together are feeling attacked and defensive by this whole process. I wouldn’t say they’ve gone numb to new ideas or criticisms, because one of them was diligently taking notes on a laptop, but they gave the indication that they are just doing their jobs, and have already done so much work on this “draft” that there isn’t really time or hope left to ask for substantive changes. And although we were all encouraged to “use our voice” to comment on this plan update, my sense of the room (and talking to neighbors afterward) was that we were left feeling like it won’t do much good, because of the planners’ repeated references to onerous state requirements and laws.

So, here’s an idea: why don’t we repeal whatever state law eliminated the requirement for developers of these new high-density apartment complexes—and also the ADUs that are already clogging up my street with renters’ cars—to provide parking spaces? How about a ballot initiative? If that legislation is SB 79, which is the new state law that set these high-density goals within a half-mile of transit stops, then so be it.

Why now? We heard that the schedule for this plan update was tied to a grant that will soon run out, and that the plan itself was driven by the existence of nearby bus routes on busy commercial streets such as El Cajon Boulevard, which, as I said, are already planned for reduction by MTS. Other cited instigators were the affordable housing crisis and the worsening of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, which should make us all get rid of our cars and take the bus or our bicycle, so we wouldn’t really need those parking spaces.

But as was mentioned last night, many of the new apartment complexes that are already shooting up along freeways and busy thoroughfares are too expensive for low-income people who need affordable housing, so they are not actually solving anything.

“We don’t have a housing shortage, we have a shortage of affordable housing,” one KTCPG member pointed out.

And as one city planner noted, developers are learning the hard way that they can’t rent apartment buildings that provide no parking. (That’s because it’s an incredibly dumb idea to build them that way in the first place.)

I saw a lot of distraught people at the meeting last night, many of them older women who live alone in their homes, their faces fraught with panic, frustration, hopelessness, helplessness, and anger. I saw my own feelings displayed on their faces, as my neighbors and I were left feeling that we in South Kensington, where these density changes would occur, don’t really matter. That our needs are not as important as the residents of the more expensive homes north of Adams Avenue, which will be unaffected by this plan update. And why is that?

What I heard last night in response to residents’ and community planning group members’ concerns were a lot of excuses. The one that galled us the most was, (and I’m paraphrasing), yes, we are proposing six- to eight-story buildings in your neighborhood, but “the state doesn’t require developers to provide parking and that trumps our previous city requirements, so there is nothing we can do about it.” We also heard a lot of what sounded like, “we will consider considering that idea,” whatever it was.

For the record, the three other areas covered by this “Mid-City” plan are known as City Heights, Normal Heights, and Eastern Area. Somehow, during the last city council redistricting process, we were lumped in with these communities in what are now proving to be the horrifying and inequitable consequences of this mismatch. I covered redistricting as a reporter for the Union-Tribune more than twenty years ago, when we were grouped with areas that were more similar, and our council member was a better listener to constituent concerns.

I say these other areas are unrelated, because from what I read in the newspaper, their residents believe they have been long neglected and left to deteriorate, so they welcome these new developments. So, why can’t the density-affected area start at El Cajon Boulevard and head south, encompassing the communities that actually want new development?

Of all four areas, Kensington-Talmadge is the only one that has a historic nature (and/or has a historic district application pending). We have a completely different make-up, and that is, we are comprised primarily of older single-family homes, with only a few small apartment complexes here and there. My house was built in 1936 and has Craftsman features such as built-in bookcases, arches and curved ceilings, and that’s the reason I bought it. In fact, I sunk my savings into paying off the mortgage and to maintain it so that I could afford to live here, retire here, and die here. The last thing I wanted when I did that, was to be surrounded by six- or eight-story noisy and crowded apartment complexes that are not required to provide parking.

As Stella Stehly so aptly stated, “Where do you put all of these cars?”

I suggested during public comment last night that we should all attend the city council meeting when they are scheduled to vote on this plan update, because I know from experience that the council tends to listen when the chamber is full of warm bodies opposing and objecting during public comment to whatever measure is before them. That meeting is scheduled for June 2027. We also may want to attend the prior May 2027 meeting where the planning commission will vote on it. The city planner disagreed, saying that any concerns should be expressed now, before the plan gets too far along in the process, but I say do both. Go to these meetings and also be sure to send comments to tinyurl.com/Comments26 before Oct. 2, 2026.

Or none of us will recognize our beautiful, peaceful community anymore.

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