By Laura Henson / Times of San Diego / Sept. 28, 2026
As California cities embrace increasingly aggressive upzoning, one consequence of these policies receives remarkably little attention: What happens psychologically to people when the future of their own neighborhood becomes permanently uncertain?
That question is particularly relevant as San Diego considers the First Draft Mid-City Communities Plan, which would guide land use and development in Mid-City for the next 30 years.
In San Diego, the argument for allowing substantially more housing in established single-family neighborhoods often comes with a reassurance: Don’t worry. Just because every property can be redeveloped doesn’t mean every property will be redeveloped.
But think about what residents are actually being asked to accept.
Your neighbor’s house may remain a house for another 30 years. Or it may be sold next year and replaced with a large apartment building. The house behind you may remain unchanged — or redevelopment may suddenly take away your privacy, sunlight, parking trees and the physical environment you believed you were buying into.
You don’t know.
And that is precisely the problem.
San Diego’s own Neighborhood Homes for All of Us [ed.:page on city website deleted] program acknowledges this uncertainty. The city says where and when additional homes are constructed will depend upon individual property owners choosing to develop them. In other words, zoning creates the development opportunity today while the actual physical changes may unfold parcel by parcel for decades.
City leaders tend to present that uncertainty as reassurance. Residents experience it very differently.
Psychologists have long understood that uncertainty and lack of control can intensify stress. Research involving redevelopment has also documented the emotional consequences of waiting for unpredictable neighborhood change, including feelings of instability and displacement anxiety. Other research has examined how redevelopment can disrupt people’s attachment to place and neighborhood social cohesion.
That does not mean every zoning change causes a mental health disorder. It means planners should stop pretending that uncertainty has no human or community cost.
A neighborhood is more than buildings on parcels.
It is a network of relationships and expectations. People plant trees expecting to watch them mature. They renovate homes. They know which neighbors check on an elderly resident, whose children play together and who organizes the block party.
Stability encourages investment — not simply financial investment, but social investment.
When government fundamentally changes the development expectations for an established neighborhood, it can change how residents think about that future. Should I remodel my house? Should I plant that tree? Will my backyard remain private? Will the house next door become an investment property? Should I stay here?
Multiply those questions across hundreds or thousands of households and something important happens: uncertainty itself becomes part of neighborhood life.
It can also change residents’ relationship with government.
When people repeatedly voice concerns and are told that redevelopment may never happen, their actual objection has been misunderstood. They are not necessarily saying every parcel will redevelop. They are saying nobody can tell them which ones will.
That distinction matters.
The consequences may ultimately reach City Hall as well. Planning becomes more adversarial. Residents become distrustful. Public meetings become angrier. Planning staff must repeatedly defend policies they did not personally create, while elected officials face communities that increasingly believe decisions are being imposed rather than developed with them. It becomes more difficult to ask the public to increase taxes for transit and housing if the public thinks that money will be used as an excuse to further upzone their neighborhoods.
Those tensions are increasingly visible in San Diego’s planning debates. And that is unhealthy civic life for everyone.
San Diego needs housing. We can accommodate substantial growth along commercial corridors, transit routes and redevelopment areas while creating affordable and market-rate homes, walkable communities, jobs and stronger business districts.
But housing policy should consider more than theoretical unit capacity.
It should also consider stability, predictability, neighborhood attachment, community and social cohesion.
Good planning asks what and why we are building.
Great planning also asks what our decisions are doing to the people who already live there.
The psychological cost of uncertainty — and its consequences—belongs in that conversation.
Laura L. Henson is a resident of Talmadge.
Thank you for writing this Laura, I agree with much of what you have written.
Considering San Diego’s geographic location on the ocean, it’s unconcionable the city’s Planning Department is nothing more than a rezoning delpartment. The lack of affordable housing has been exploited by developers and investors – first pitching granny flats for single-family neighborhoods which quickly morphed into micro-unit apartment complexes with no design standards or infrastructure improvements.
This build whatever you want, anywhere you want is ruining the fabric of my neighborhood and my City Council rep. Elo Rivera could careless.
Additional housing can work and be integrated into a neighborhood but it needs to happen in a thoughful and strategic manner. I’m currently withholding upgrades to my home because I live next door to an elderly neighbor with a large yard, and not sure what could be built next to me, if they need to sell.
Thank you for sharing this. Your last paragraph really gets to the heart of what I was trying to address in this article.
You want to invest in and improve your home, but you are holding back because you don’t know what could eventually be built on the property next door. That is a very real economic and psychological consequence of uncertainty, yet it is rarely considered when these policies are evaluated.
I also agree with your point that additional housing can be successfully integrated into established neighborhoods when it is done thoughtfully and strategically. Good planning should consider scale, design, infrastructure, neighborhood character and the cumulative effects of development, not simply how many additional units can be placed on a parcel.
What troubles me is that homeowners are often portrayed as opposing housing simply because they ask these questions. Wanting some reasonable predictability about the future of the neighborhood where you have invested your savings and built your life is not the same thing as opposing new housing.
Your decision to postpone improvements to your own home because of uncertainty about the property next door is exactly the kind of unintended consequence I hoped this article would bring into the conversation.
Thank you for sharing such a personal and concrete example.
RK – we had the very same experience. We live in an undesignated historic home next to another undesignated historic home. The folks next door were our wonderful neighbors for 41 years. As the City’s screwy policies to radically densify single-family neighborhoods took hold, we worried for years on end that when the 90+ widow passed away, the children (who don’t live in San Diego) would sell to a developer who would max out the yard with multi-story housing. As Ms. Henson stated, it was very stressful, not knowing what would become of our air, light, and view (albeit small).
I’m happy to report that the surviving children specifically chose a realtor who sought out a family that wanted to restore the house and make it home, rather than a realtor who constantly advertises how many ADUs the property will hold. We are beyond grateful, not just for the new neighbors but for the certainty in our future.
Some of the hyperlinks in my article were inadvertently changed or are not working correctly. The text of the article remains unchanged, but I want readers to have access to the research and sources I relied upon.
Here are the correct links:
Neighborhood Homes For All of Us
https://www.sandiego.gov/planning/neighborhood-homes-all-us
Stress and Uncertainty link
https://www.apa.org/topics/stress/uncertainty
Social Cohesion link
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/5/140?utm_source=chatgpt.com
I apologize for the technical problem and am providing the correct links here so readers can review the original sources.
Laura sent these missing links:
Neighborhood Homes For All of Us
https://www.sandiego.gov/planning/neighborhood-homes-all-us
Stress and Uncertainty link
https://www.apa.org/topics/stress/uncertainty
Social Cohesion link
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/5/140?utm_source=chatgpt.com
It’s further erosion of the working/middle class. Why is it ok for the very wealthy upperclass to live on giant lots in North County or behind gates in private communities, conveniently shielded from the states density laws? But everyone else that can’t afford the lobbyists or PAC contributions has to suck it up and “welcome more neighbors?”
Many of San Diego’s housing bonus programs are tied to proximity to transit. As a result, neighborhoods with more transit service can also be exposed to more development incentives and greater density than neighborhoods with less transit, like Rancho Bernardo, Scripps Ranch, Rancho Peñasquitos, and Black Mountain Ranch.
That can create a troubling equity question. Many of our older, working- and middle-class neighborhoods were built around transit corridors and today have some of the City’s strongest transit networks.
So the very communities that historically received better transit access can also find themselves absorbing more of the land-use change and uncertainty associated with transit-oriented housing policies.
I understand why that can feel discriminatory and unfair. Access to transit should be an asset to a community, not automatically mean that the people who live there should be expected to accept more disruption and uncertainty than people wealthy enough to live elsewhere.
That is another dimension of the uncertainty I was trying to address in this article. We need to be willing to ask not only who benefits from these policies, but which communities are repeatedly being asked to absorb their impacts.
Thank you for this thoughtful reply! You make some great points.
I suggest the approaches and agenda for preservation of your neighborhood communities:
1. There needs to be a political policy change at City Hall and Board of Supervisors. Bigger is not Better. We do not want to be an unsustainable desalination Mega Metropolis on the Baja desert. Life is not better in New York city . If you have “little town blues” then it’s up to you to move to New York.
https://youtu.be/EUrUfJW1JGk?si=B95WbsM29aMOHWaj
Frank Sinatra – New York, New York. YOUTUBE.COM
2. Adopt Hoover High School as your neighborhood High School. Advocate and work hard to return it to its premiere status. Follow La Jolla’s lead with La Jolla High. City Heights 92105 does not have a High School to serve its students; advocate for the building of a City Heights 92105 High School – Freda Kahlo HS. Otherwise VOTE No on the new SDUSD Tax increase Bond measure