Before we embrace the broad housing density increases encouraged by state Senate Bill 10, we need to pause and ask what our housing goals really are and whether SB 10 will actually achieve those goals.
As outlined by the Planning Department at a public workshop on Thursday, March 2 (residents showed up in the picture above to protest SB 10), the primary goals of San Diego’s housing policies are to create housing that’s affordable for most San Diegans, while reducing automobile usage by creating walkable neighborhoods and increasing mass transit use.
Locating housing anywhere in San Diego might achieve the first goal, provided it can be made affordable. Unfortunately, after acknowledging our current gaping lack of very-low and low income housing, City planners focused the remainder of their public presentation on our supposed need for more moderate income housing, which is effectively market rate.
As for the second goal, obtaining real reductions in automobile use requires us to build new development as close as possible to transit. City planners are focused on getting people from their home to the nearest transit stop, but mass transit can only work if there’s lots to do — working, shopping, dining, medical appointments, etc. — at the destination end of the trip.
For example, if I need to visit my doctor, meet a friend for coffee, mail a package, and get batteries for my TV remote, and I can finish my to-do list within close proximity of my doctor’s office, then it makes sense for me to take the bus or trolley. But if each of those activities is a mile apart, then I’m going to take my car. And that’s the reality for an overwhelming number of San Diegans.
Therefore, the key to getting people out of their cars and onto the bus or trolley is to redevelop our transit and commercial corridors from automobile-focused strip malls into walkable, bikeable neighborhood cores that combine ground floor retail with upper floors of mixed-income housing. We can do that, because our city has more than enough vacant or under-used space in our commercial and multi-family zones to meet our projected housing needs.
What is lacking, however, is any meaningful proposal from our Mayor and Planning Department that would unlock these underutilized commercial corridors for mixed-use development.
Instead — as with Sustainable Development Areas — the City remains obsessed with promoting residential infill development further and further from mass transit, justified by the demonstrably false argument that people will walk up to one-mile from their home to the nearest bus or trolley stop.
Further, randomly adding more housing to automobile-dependent neighborhoods won’t make them more walkable, it will just make them more congested.
We have more than enough available land to build very close to transit.
The Mayor’s insistence on building farther away misses an opportunity to truly change how we plan our communities and is a deliberate violation of the Climate Action Plan, which requires that residents use walking or cycling for 35% of all trips by 2035.
Photo by Karen Austin
– Editor’s note: This opinion piece was written by Geoffrey Hueter, chairman for Neighbors For A Better San Diego.
