By Laura Henson
As San Diego considers the future of Mid-City through its Community Plan Update, we should ask a fundamental question: What kinds of neighborhoods does a healthy city need?
Mid-City already offers an extraordinary range of housing choices—from apartments, condominiums and duplexes to small cottages, historic neighborhoods and single-family homes. Its underdeveloped commercial corridors also offer significant opportunities for additional housing. The lack of development on the transit corridors is a deficiency that needs to be corrected. All this diversity should be considered an asset, not a planning problem that needs to be corrected.
Cities need apartments. They need condominiums, townhomes, affordable housing, senior housing and homes near transit. But healthy cities also need something increasingly dismissed in today’s housing debate: stable single-family neighborhoods.
Housing is not simply a matter of how many units can be placed on an acre of land. It is also about how people live, and how their housing needs change at different stages of life.
A young adult leaving home may want a small apartment near work, restaurants and transit. A couple may later need more space. Then children arrive. Suddenly a second or third bedroom, a yard, storage, a quiet street and room for grandparents to visit can become far more important.
This is the housing life cycle.
For generations, cities accommodated it. Condominiums and smaller homes provided entry points into the housing market. As careers and families grew, many households moved into single-family neighborhoods. Later in life, some downsized into condominiums, apartments or senior communities, freeing homes for the next generation.
A well-planned city should offer all of these choices.
Yet today’s housing debate too often treats single-family neighborhoods, despite allowances for low-density multi-family and multi-generational development through accessory dwelling units and small-scale housing types, as an inappropriate land use. The assumption seems to be that because more housing is needed, every neighborhood should accommodate substantially more density.
That ignores why these neighborhoods exist and whom they serve.
Consider the young teacher, firefighter, nurse, police officer, engineer, construction worker or small-business owner starting a family. If San Diego wants these workers to put down roots here, it needs neighborhoods where they can imagine raising children, not simply an ever-expanding supply of market-rate apartments.
These neighborhoods are part of a city’s social infrastructure.
A modest house with a backyard is not an extravagant lifestyle. For many families, it provides room for children to play, pets, gardening, family gatherings and the ordinary activities of family life. In a park-deficient community with few realistic opportunities to add new parks, backyards also serve an increasingly important role as private outdoor space for families.
Established neighborhoods provide another kind of value: continuity. Children grow up together, neighbors remain long enough to know one another, and families become invested in their communities.
Protecting them does not mean San Diego should stop building housing. Quite the opposite. Mid-City has tremendous opportunities to add housing along commercial corridors such as El Cajon Boulevard, where vacant parcels, underutilized commercial properties, surface parking lots and one-story buildings can accommodate substantial new housing. Thoughtful infill and adaptive reuse can create more homes and stronger, walkable neighborhoods while supporting businesses and transit.
The choice should not be between building housing and preserving single-family neighborhoods. A sophisticated city can and should do both.
We should also consider what happens when the traditional progression from apartment to starter home disappears. When modest single-family properties are increasingly valued for their redevelopment potential, families seeking their first home may find themselves competing with investors who value the property for what zoning allows them to build.
The starter home then ceases to be a starter home.
Families who might have moved from renting into homeownership will remain renters longer, because modest houses and their land become increasingly expensive and therefore unaffordable.
Cities are ecosystems. They function best when they provide different places for different people at different stages of life.
San Diego should build apartments, affordable housing and more homes along Mid-City’s transit and commercial corridors. But it should also preserve stable neighborhoods where working families can raise children, establish roots and build a life.
Housing choice should mean more choices— not eliminating one of them.
Laura Henson is a resident of Mid-City.
