The Alternative: Bring Housing and Business Back to El Cajon Boulevard.
By Laura L. Henson
San Diego is once again considering dramatic increases in residential density throughout Mid-City as the primary focus of the Mid-City Communities Plan Update. Before assuming that greater zoning capacity automatically produces better neighborhoods, we should examine our own history.
Because San Diego has tried this before, with decidedly mixed results.
In 1965, the City adopted the Mid-City Development Plan during an era of increasing multifamily development. Over the following decades, portions of Mid-City originally developed with modest single-family homes changed parcel by parcel to make room for apartments and condominiums.
The transformation did not occur in isolation.
Freeway construction divided neighborhoods, while Mission Valley and Fashion Valley emerged as regional shopping destinations. The City’s 1984 Mid-City Community Plan acknowledged that the once-thriving commercial strips of El Cajon Boulevard and University Avenue experienced significant decline, due in large part to newer shopping centers in Mission Valley.
As a result, City Heights experienced two profound changes simultaneously: increased residential intensity and declining commercial vitality.
Density alone did not cause the ensuing problems. Economic and demographic changes, freeway construction, disinvestment and other forces contributed. But City Heights subsequently struggled with concentrated poverty, deteriorating properties, inadequate public facilities and increased crime.
Eventually, the City of San Diego changed course.
The City’s 1984 Mid-City Community Plan also acknowledged that rapid population growth had worsened shortages of public facilities. Schools were crowded, open space was scarce, and parks and recreation facilities were inadequate. Parking had also become a serious concern. City planning documents noted that widespread multifamily development within single-family neighborhoods had exacerbated an already insufficient parking supply.
To address these problems, the 1998 Community Plan significantly reduced residential densities because of inadequate community facilities and overcrowded schools. In other words, San Diego has already experienced major land-use changes extending beyond commercial corridors and into established single-family neighborhoods. Later generations of planners concluded that growth had outpaced the schools, parks, infrastructure and other community facilities necessary to support it. That gap persists.
The lesson isn’t that apartments cause poverty or density causes crime. They don’t.
The lesson is simpler: Upzoning is not planning.
Dramatic land-use changes can have enormous unintended consequences when housing, infrastructure, parking, economic opportunity, public safety and neighborhood stability fall out of balance.
So why would we risk repeating that mistake in the remaining residential neighborhoods of Mid-City?
There is a better alternative.
We must bring housing and business back to El Cajon Boulevard.
The Boulevard possesses something Mission Valley could never replicate: Mid-City’s extraordinary cultural diversity. Little Saigon already demonstrates how culture, food and entrepreneurship can create identity and attract visitors.
We need to expand that concept.
New affordable and market-rate housing can rise along El Cajon Boulevard while successful businesses remain at street level. New restaurants, markets, cafés, shops and other businesses could celebrate the Vietnamese, Mexican, Ethiopian, Somali, Cambodian and other cultures represented throughout Mid-City.
El Cajon Boulevard could become an international Restaurant Row—a dining and cultural destination unlike anything else in San Diego.
More residents would provide customers for local businesses. New and expanding businesses would create jobs and work opportunities closer to where Mid-City residents live. Restaurants and outdoor dining would bring people onto sidewalks into the evening. Better lighting, landscaping, pedestrian crossings, public spaces and thoughtfully planned parking could make the Boulevard safer and more vibrant.
Housing, employment and economic revitalization would reinforce one another.
The City already recognizes this potential. Its Complete Boulevard Planning Study envisions part of El Cajon Boulevard as a vibrant, welcoming place for shopping, eating, neighborhood services and pedestrian activity.
But instead of repeating the mistakes of the past, let’s learn from them.
Build housing on the commercial corridors. Restore commerce. Create jobs. Celebrate our many cultures. Protect stable single-family neighborhoods. And finally create the thriving El Cajon Boulevard that generations of Mid-City residents have been promised for decades.
Bookmarking this in good faith to read in more depth later, but it’s credibility is significantly hurt by the choice to use an AI generated image with typos as the cover.
I hear ya, Marli; we have imposed a policy here of not using AI stuff, but the image was sent in by the author who is not part of that policy.
Thanks for tryin hold the line Frank!
Well, I used AI for a couple of images months ago and got slapped by staff and readers.
Why does this article mentions the 1965 time frame and completely disregards racial covenants and redlining that prevented mid-city and other city residents from moving to Kensington and Talmadge, impacting the development, and lack-of, of these single-family neighborhoods that supposedly now need protecting? It also disregards the impact of property-owners disinvesting in their cities by passing Prop 13 in the late 70’s. This is another “build over there” article from a Talmadge resident.
I’m repeating here my reply to a similar comment you made on my Facebook post on the Mid-City Plan Update:
“The racial covenants were removed after a 1948 Supreme Court ruling. Red-lining and racial covenants were abhorrent, but have absolutely no bearing on how decisions are made now about how our neighborhoods should grow, and especially what the appropriate density and infrastructure needs are for our established, older neighborhoods. The multi-unit ADU‘s and high density apartments being built in — and proposed for — my neighborhood (Talmadge, which is not a “very high” or “high resource neighborhood”) do nothing to atone for past mistakes, if that is even a appropriate issue, which I don’t think it is. For the past 78 years, anyone of any color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc has been free to live anywhere they can afford to live. They are buying and renting in Talmadge, where all are represented and welcome.
“… have absolutely no bearing on how decisions are made now. about how our neighborhoods should grow…” A lovely sentiment, but ahistorical. I know you don’t genuinely believe that the year the Supreme Court made the ruling, the restrictions meaningfully disappeared, to say nothing of the social entrenchment of these perspectives for decades afterwards. Further – the fact that they existed within the restrictions of racial covenants allowed them to become “established, older neighborhoods” now deemed worthy of protecting.
The fact of the covenants doesn’t mean you’re wrong about responsible development, but it does no one any favors to turn a blind eye to the material reality of how history progresses. (dialectical materialism is what I’m getting at here.) Talmadge does not exist in a vacuum created post-1948—let’s just be honest about it.
Back in the 1980s I published a magazine called “The Whole Damn Pie Shop” where we criticized San Diego as one of most segregated cities in the West. Racial covenants on deeds were a reality — although by then not enforced of course. But yes there were all kinds of red-lining that existed and activists like Jim Bliesner uncovered them and went after them. There were reasons some called San Diego “a little Mississippi.” Even so, we didn’t blame people who lived in those neighborhoods because they inherited the restrictions. We can blame people for ignoring them.
Also don’t forget that “dialectical materialism” without sufficient dialectics can lead to authoritarianism (Stalinism) and of course, state capitalism, which is what happened in the USSR and China, North Korea.
Frank, I have never wanted to meet you more. :)
Maybe at the demo against Trump’s shut down of the mid-term balloting? In between volleys of tear gas.
OBRag meet and greet on the front lines?? I’d go! I simply must meet all the people who allow me to argue on this forum with them :)
My research into Mid-City has actually reinforced for me how careful we need to be about drawing simple lines from the 1930s and 1940s to present-day conditions. Redlining, racial covenants, lending practices, freeway construction, demographic change, zoning, and development all interacted over many decades.
I do feel we miss the mark when we focus too heavily on the discrimination of the past without also acknowledging the current reality in Kensington and Talmadge. The City’s own data show that roughly half of Kensington-Talmadge residents are non-white. The community also contains more than 400 deed-restricted affordable homes, placing Kensington-Talmadge among the higher-ranking community planning areas citywide for deed-restricted affordable housing.
We are capable of change and of learning from the mistakes of our shameful past.
Thank you for raising this history. Racially restrictive covenants were a shameful part of Kensington and Talmadge’s history, as they were in many San Diego neighborhoods, and discriminatory housing policies should not be minimized. It is also worth noting that redlined areas of City Heights had restrictive covenants as well.
But history should not be frozen in time. Kensington and Talmadge today are dramatically different from the communities of the covenant era. The City’s own data show that roughly half of Kensington-Talmadge residents are non-white. The community also contains nearly 400 deed-restricted affordable homes, placing Kensington-Talmadge among the higher-ranking community planning areas citywide for deed-restricted affordable housing.
That doesn’t erase past discrimination, but it does demonstrate meaningful change.
There is a specific reason my article begins with 1965. In my view, the land-use decisions beginning in that era produced some of the most lasting negative physical impacts on City Heights. The City’s subsequent planning history supports that concern. The 1965 Mid-City Development Plan encouraged greater growth and dense housing. By the early 1980s, the City was already undertaking a comprehensive rewrite. The resulting 1984 Community Plan described rapid growth, crowded schools and serious deficiencies in parks and public facilities. The City changed course again in 1998, significantly reducing residential densities in response to inadequate community facilities, overcrowded schools and parking concerns. In other words, efforts to address the consequences of the earlier planning approach developed over successive community plans.
That history is directly relevant because San Diego is once again deciding how and where to increase development capacity. Acknowledging past discrimination does not establish that substantially increasing zoning capacity within older single-family neighborhoods is the appropriate remedy.
Nor do I think my argument can fairly be characterized as “build over there.” El Cajon Boulevard is not “over there.” It is our neighborhood commercial corridor. I am advocating for substantial new housing on vacant lots, surface parking lots and underutilized commercial properties along that major transit corridor, where housing can be combined with businesses, services, jobs and walkability. Done thoughtfully, it could also create places where residents of City Heights, Kensington and Talmadge come together. That sounds like good planning to me.
Proposition 13 dramatically changed local-government finance after 1978 and is certainly part of California’s history. But it does not answer the land-use question before us in 2026.
We can acknowledge the injustices of the past while still asking what constitutes sound planning today. The question is not whether we should accommodate more housing, but where and how we build it so that our communities become more affordable, inclusive, walkable and livable for everyone.
The AI Image looks tacky, highly recommend against using AI imagery. It really just looks bad.
But regardless of that, I think celebrating the downzoning which caused stagnation and for residents to be displaced in City Heights is really foolish. When the 15 freeway evictions started, there was essentially nowhere to build the housing for those displaced because of this downzoning. And as San Diego has become wealthier, limited supply in other more high demand areas pushed people to find housing east in City Heights. Causing rents to rise and even more displacement.
The solution to gentrification and displacement is not downzoning but upzoning. This is proven science.
Many of the kids I grew up with in school in in the college area were in City Heights, Rolando, and Talmadge have since moved further east to Spring Valley or El Cajon, or are out of the state entirely.
We need an ambitious and fair Mid-City Plan. the fast that City Heights has only just made up the housing lost from the 1980s clearing for the 15 freeway is proof of that.
This.
Quote from article: “The lesson is simpler: Upzoning is not planning.”
We are now poised to see disastrous changes in the Midway/Sports Arena/Pacific Highway are for exactly the same reasons. The EIR for Midway Rising completely avoided analysis of the increased traffic and transportation impacts that will result from the upzoning above the 30′ height limit as well as omitting the cumulative impacts that the *massive* NAVWAR planned at Rosecrans/I-5/Pacific Highway.
These are areas that currently experience substantial congestion at predictable times of day – Rosecrans east at midday then afternoon as commuters leave Pt. Loma, and especially Rosecrans to Taylor St. as commuters seek to avoid the I-5/I-8 afternoon congestion (including traffic from OB hitting the 3 lanes to single lane merge under I-5, merging into traffic transitioning from I-5 south to I-8 east) but still encounter delays as they work to merge into I-8 east just east of I-5. Anyone driving west on I-8 after has seen the literal bumper to bumper crawl of masses of vehicles from about 2:00 pm on. With the huge increases of residential, business and entertainment traffic in that area, I foresee LA equivalent traffic in that area on both surface streets and the interstate transitions.
So, what will it be like when the commercial properties between Sports Arena Blvd. and Midway Drive (and along Midway Drive) are slated to “upzoning” for residential/commericial uses?