Photograph by Adam Behar

Sprouts Plaza in the quiet bedroom community of South University City, which could be redeveloped into mixed-use apartment buildings.

Community planning group considerations are supposed to be boring. Infrastructure, environmental impact reports, traffic studies, zoning…important stuff, but also dull enough to make most people zone out. But not this year. This year, University City and Hillcrest are updating their community plans, plans that will serve as a road map for developers in the coming years. The question those plans seek to answer: what should the community look and feel like from now until 2050? Arriving at that answer has been anything but boring.

Photograph by Matthew Lickona

On one side, you have the city planning department, the mayor and city council, and the building industry, along with other special interests; their mantra is build, build, build. They want to urbanize and densify University City and Hillcrest via high-rise apartment buildings and tons more people, essentially turning them into downtowns. On the other side, you have community planning groups, community activists, and homeowners, who say some density is okay, but don’t want their communities to become unrecognizable. They don’t want high rises to engulf single-family homes; they don’t want congested roads to ruin their quality of life. They don’t want their communities to be turned into downtowns, because they aren’t downtowns — not yet, anyway.

But density appears to be destiny. Because on July 30, it seems a fait accompli that the city council will vote to approve development-friendly community plan updates for both University City and Hillcrest. If approved, University City, whose plan hasn’t been updated since 1987, would see its current population of 65,400 nearly double to well over 129,566 residents. The plan would pave the way for development of over 30,000 housing units, including high-rise apartment buildings and commercial space. It will add 72,000 jobs to the area, 162,000 jobs in total, by 2050. The Hillcrest Focused Plan Amendment to the Uptown Community Plan would increase the population of Uptown from around 40,000 to more than 100,000 by 2050. The plan was first updated in 2016; the amended plan would add 17,000 new housing units, many in luxury apartment towers.

The city contends San Diego needs more housing and especially more affordable housing. And higher density, it argues, is a strategy for reducing emissions so that the city can comply with its own Climate Plan. The idea is to reshape these communities by building residential and commercial properties near trolley stations and bus routes, and allowing for more bike lanes. The city’s vision is that, though the communities will become bigger, they will become more intimate. Everything will be close by. If it makes the roads more congested, that’s okay, because residents won’t be driving as much. Instead, they will be walking or biking or taking public transportation.

One of the PR messages that the mayor, city council, and planning department like to repeat is that there’s a difference between housing capacity, which is a theoretical number, and housing production, which is how much real estate is actually developed. And while that may be true, developers are anxiously monitoring the University and Hillcrest plan updates and “chomping at the bit,” as Bonnie Kutch, founder of UC Neighbors for Responsible Growth, aka UC Peeps, told me. Help Save UC is another organization opposing the University density plan.

The city pursued a partnership with community groups, but it soon became acrimonious, with many community leaders and activists feeling their input was essentially ignored and that the plans were, as mayoral candidate Larry Turner put it, “shoved down their throats.” Kutch said the development recommended in the UC plan was “extreme and excessive” and that “the city has been disingenuous, if not deceitful, in how it has sold the program.” Many members felt cut out of the process and actively ignored, she said. It was the mayor’s way or the highway. “You realize you’re being sold” — and not even sold, because selling assumes there are two parties, a seller and a buyer. They felt they weren’t being sold as much as they were being told. And being told flies in the face of the city’s general plan, which says that community planning groups are valued partners.

Andrew Wiese is an SDSU history professor and member of the board of the University City Community Planning Group. For almost the past six years, he’s chaired the board’s subcommittee on updating the plan. He told me that, like a new marriage, the partnership started okay. But the honeymoon did not last long. “I think we started as partners and ended more as spectators. They took less and less of our input as we went on.” He said the city planners were more “responsive to other stakeholders who supported goals that were more in their ideological wheelhouse.” Or, as Kutch put it: “The UC plan update was designed and managed by those who stand to profit from the plan, rather than the plan being designed and managed by those who live here and know our community best.” Even the even-keeled Wiese, who tends to avoid hyperbole, doesn’t disagree: “Fundamentally, the plans have been driven by profit maximization for the biggest property owners, who are going to profit richly by the process.” And that’s coming from a guy who considers himself pro-development.

Bonnie Kutch ran a PR agency; most of her clients were developers. She described a city planning department that engaged in performative listening, one that was intent on “pushing ahead with their program.” Lu Rheling, a board member of Uptown Planners, said the city’s “version of partnership is, ‘We’ll listen really hard when you tell us what you like. Then we will pretty much tell you again what we plan to do.’ And except for a few cosmetic changes, it’s 99 percent what they said in the first place.”

Many participants felt that good-faith disagreement was regarded by the city as conflict and treated with disrespect. Rehling supported her observation with an anecdote about District 3 Councilman Stephen Whitburn, whose district includes Hillcrest and Uptown. When Whitburn was invited to a meeting in Mission Hills, his staff responded that he didn’t want to attend because it might be a hostile audience. “Well, excuse me if you’re not willing to listen to people who disagree with your views,” said Rehling. “It’s not like anyone threatened him or used curse words. These are very polite people. I mean, they’ll get passionate, they’ll express strong feelings. But you’re a politician, right? Kind of goes with the territory.” (Whitburn declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Bonnie Kutch, founder of UC Neighbors for Responsible Growth, AKA UC Peeps, at Sprouts Plaza in University City.

Photograph by Adam Behar

But Jon Anderson of Vibrant Uptown, which splintered off from Uptown Planners, said that volunteers were interrupted and heckled at the Uptown Planners meetings: “It was really disheartening to see the vitriol and the unbecoming and rude conduct.” Eventually, by a vote of the city council — which, it seemed, had grown tired of the Uptown Planners’ disagreement with and resistance to what it was selling — replaced Uptown with a younger, hipper group of community members who like their bikes and believe density is the road to affordable housing. Michael Donovan, who chairs the election committee for Vibrant Uptown, said he was “one of the instigators of that process. So, I am very supportive of it, obviously.”

The new group, the Uptown Community Planning Group, will have a different structure than Uptown Planners, which will give renters and businesses more influence. That’s as it should be, said Donovan, given that the majority of residents are renters. But Larry Turner decried “this move by the mayor to disband a group elected by the people and put in his own chosen group of people who supported him.” Coleen Cusack, an attorney and homeless advocate who’s opposing Whitburn in November, said, “It was ugly. I think the city was rather transparent in its frustration with one group and its ouster of that group and replacement with a favorite few. It’s a really dangerous and reckless plan that hands to developers the options, diminishes city control and oversight, and doesn’t even provide a process for the public amenities that the public can point to and say, ‘Well, at least we got better roads and sidewalks.’”

Jon Anderson said, “I think it’s understandable that people were upset” at being replaced after electing members from the community. But he insisted the group needed “fresh energy. The community is changing. This plan helps us adapt to those changes that are coming, rather than just ignore them and try to freeze this place in amber.”

He said younger people who were part of the bicycling and pro-housing community “stopped going to Uptown Planners because they didn’t listen to us.” He noted that with the new group, “the community is still going to elect people to the board. It’s going to be a democratically elected board.” Cusack said, “Yes, there will be elections, but businesses will have a 50 percent say, and those business owners may or may not live in the city.”

After the fake listening came the silent treatment. Rehling reports that in Hillcrest, they literally “didn’t get answers when we asked questions or made requests. We never got an explanation of, ‘Well, here’s why we’re not doing that.’ Instead, they just didn’t address it.” Same story in University City: Nancy Graham, the planning director at the time, “pretty much stonewalled us,” said Kutch. Wiese says the process was “just a disappointment. It was an opportunity to do better.”

He suggested that there was the illusion of cooperation and compromise. City planners had initially accepted “some of the most progressive steps” that the University Planning Group had asked for, only to walk them back midway through the process, usually to appease developers.

However, the city and its allies “don’t agree it could have been much better,” acknowledged Wiese. Vibrant San Diego’s Michael Donovan said surveys were administered, and “the city did a really good job of reaching out to the community. I think their outreach efforts were as successful as they’re going to be.” (Kutch alleges that the initial survey was sent not to University City residents — certainly not those living in South UC — but to UCSD students who, behind the scenes, were urged by the city to call for the highest density possible.)

Donovan applauded the city for doing “a wonderful job on this plan. I think it puts density where we can absorb it. I think it goes a long way towards fixing some of the mobility issues, completing the bike lanes. And it pretty much leaves a lot of the single-family residents alone.” Councilman Kent Lee, whose district 1 includes University City, argued that 95% of the density is planned for North UC, and largely doesn’t touch the single-family homes in South UC.

The city’s master plan states that parks are a fundamental part of livable communities, yet they are missing from both community plans. According to Kutch, the city claimed it didn’t have the space or budget to create new parks. Instead, they’re trying to position promenades as the new parks.

But even more worrisome for both community groups is the issue of adequate police and fire prevention coverage. Not only is University City surrounded by canyons, but there’s a plan to turn the main throughfare in South UC, Governor Drive, from four lanes into two lanes, one going East and one West. “If we have to evacuate for a wildfire, it’s a disaster in the making,” said Kutch.

Councilman Lee said he shares her concern and has requested that a traffic study be administered. He said the bike lane that will be created on Governor Drive would be wide enough to serve as an emergency lane. There are similar concerns in Hillcrest, with planned developments and congestion along Robinson and Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Avenue, not to mention the scenario of a backed-up 163.

Donovan conceded that “163 will be more congested,” but said that people will adjust. “As more people are living and working in the community, there’s less need to drive. It doesn’t eliminate driving by any stretch of the imagination, but it may start to reduce it.”

I asked him if there’s a possibility that rather than lowering prices and making housing more affordable, that density will make Hillcrest more gentrified, and he was surprisingly candid. “Gentrification. There’ll be some of that,” he agreed. Legacy housing stock will be cheaper, he hopes. “If you go in with the expectation that you’re going to get $500 rent in one of these brand-new buildings,” you’re going to be disappointed. “The market rate units, it just costs more to build them.”

Many of the community leaders and activists I spoke to identified as progressives, and felt they were being falsely portrayed as regressive – as selfish NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) – by a mostly younger demographic that included bicyclists, members of the LGBTQ community, and UCSD students, who, according to Kutch, were recruited and mobilized by Circulate San Diego, an organization, she said, that portrays itself as progressive but mainly advances the interests of its developer donors.

Lu Rheling, board member of Uptown Planners, in Hillcrest.

Photograph by Adam Behar

Said Hillcrest’s Rehling, “NIMBY to me is a slur and is used as a slur. I think it’s fatuous and highly misleading.” The irony, she noted, is that anti-NIMBYs think they’re holier than thou — she calls them virtue signalers — but what they’re really advocating for are 20-story, high-end apartment towers with a few token affordable housing units. They may not realize it, but they are advocating for gentrification, and their allies are the building industry and Chamber of Commerce.

Donovan, no spring chicken himself, sees the generational divide and is able to identify with both cohorts: “Generally, in the younger demographics, density is extremely positive because they recognize how hard it is to find a place to live in Hillcrest. Among the older, more settled demographic, it’s scary. It’s a lot of change to the core of Hillcrest. It’s becoming part of Downtown for all intents and purposes. And so that generates a lot of fear and anxiety. And then, of course, there’s the all-consuming fear of parking.” However, he said, “The hope is that as the new buildings go up, and people move in, it frees up some of the older housing stock, which is then available at a more affordable price.”

Vibrant San Diego’s Anderson is a student of economics; he put it like this: “You’re creating competition. So, if you talk to landlords, they will tell you the worst thing that can happen to them is more units getting built, because that’s more units of housing that they have to compete with to be able to rent at the price that they want to rent at.

“By bringing more supply to the market in a place that has been historically undersupplied for decades, you’re going to help control and potentially decrease rents.”

He cites Austin, TX as a case study, where, he said, they’ve overbuilt the city, “and now prices are dropping fast.” (It’s true that rents in Austin have decreased a modest amount, 12 percent, but “it’s getting less affordable for working-class people in Austin,” according to Austin PBS. “Their rents are often staying the same or even going up.” Middle-income residents, however, are seeing some relief.)

But this sort of supply-side economics is “a sort of disproven theory,” said Rehling. “There’s a lot of evidence against it. But it’s entrenched with people,” because it’s so simple — or perhaps simplistic. Andy Wiese, of the University City Planning Group, said, “It’s easy to say Econ 101, that supply gives us lower prices, but a city is not a whiteboard. A real estate market, a global real estate market, is not Econ 101. It’s Econ 799 plus some. There are so many factors influencing price.”

UCSD economist Richard T. Carson agreed. “As an economist, I feel that it’s almost embarrassing that SANDAG and the city planners and city council have bought into this old-school, supply and demand mantra. They’ve been out of the loop for 40 years. It’s more complex than that. San Diego is not a closed city; it’s competing with Phoenix and Seattle and Austin and other cities” for the high earners who come to San Diego and replace lower earners who have left the city or passed away. And that, he said, is keeping rent high — because the high earners bid up the apartment rents or housing prices. (HousingWorks Austin notes that nationwide, 89 percent of new apartments built in the last couple of years are high end.)

Carson’s argument is that San Diego’s success in positioning itself as an ideal destination for new economy and healthcare workers and in attracting top-tier talent has a downside — namely, that it drives the high rent and home prices we’re seeing. And creating density does nothing to change that.

Local economist Kelly Cunningham had this to say: “Multi-unit housing is somewhat more affordable, but still relatively unaffordable because new units tend to be high-end and expensive. More housing of any type, however, is necessary to address affordability.”

By way of reply, a city spokesperson told me: “Approximately 108,000 additional homes are required to meet San Diego’s housing needs by 2029 due to decades of limiting the production of homes. Providing opportunities for homes as part of community plan updates and the production of homes has the potential to slow rental and homeownership prices, as well as freeing up more affordable homes without resulting in displacement.”

That’s the city’s position, its rationale for density. But Carson insists “there’s no real serious academic work that would show that. I’m just concerned that they’re chasing an animal here — lower housing costs — that they don’t have a good grasp on.”

Critics point to an affordable housing complex in North University City at 4249 Nobel Drive that housed 100 people, including Section 8 and racially diverse residents. It was advancing two things the city purports to care about: affordability and equity. Now, the developers want to turn it into three high-rise towers, a couple of them 40 stories tall, which would displace the lower- and middle-income residents. Out of the 1100 units, only eleven will be reserved for lower-income tenants.

Andy Wiese pointed out that “there’s a lot of people who are going to be displaced. The people who are paying the lowest rents in University City today are likely to see their homes demolished and replaced with luxury towers.”

Vibrant’s Anderson is counting on inclusionary zoning, a local ordinance which states that developers have to allocate 10 percent of ten-floor and higher developments to lower-income renters. He’s okay with tearing down what’s called “naturally affordable housing,” because the new apartment towers will have “a few stories for low-income earners so that they don’t get totally displaced.”

But critics say that 10 percent isn’t nearly enough to make a dent in the affordable housing need and, moreover, there are loopholes that developers can exploit — for example, by opting into the city’s Complete Communities program, as the 4249 Nobel Drive developer did, which allows them to build fewer affordable housing units, or paying a fee in lieu of building those units.

Uptown’s Coleen Cusack told me, “There’s a very real risk that none of these luxury units will be affordable. And if the affordable housing is just a mere trickle, it won’t address our housing needs — and that’s assuming that they are occupied and not vacant.”

Councilman Kent Lee readily admits that building by itself won’t create a reduction in housing prices and rent. “I don’t think tomorrow, even if we built another 10,000 units, we’d magically see the cost of housing go down. I think we’ve seen some subsets in communities where there has been success in new housing, that it has maybe stunted the growth in terms of the cost of housing there, but it doesn’t just magically reverse itself.”

The idea that San Diego needs 108,000 more homes by 2029 is also debatable, as that number, said UCSD economist Carson, is based on 2013 projections, which have proven to be vastly overstated. SANDAG’s current population forecast for 2050 — around 3.35 million people — isn’t much bigger than the County’s current population. By 2050, the region is expected to grow by only 100,000 to 150,000 people.

“Forecasting this massive population, knowing full well that the birth rate was falling and couldn’t keep up with the replacement rate,” is “beyond embarrassing,” Carson told me. And as far as the University and Hillcrest plans are concerned, “The city planners are intentionally ignoring the implications of the smaller population.”

Data shows that San Diego built more housing last year than it did in any of the past 17 years. Still, Councilman Kent Lee was quoted in a city press release saying that “San Diego needs to triple its current housing production to meet its annual need.” Lori Holt Pfeiler, CEO of the local Building Industry Association, told the U-T that the region needs to catch up after years of underbuilding. SANDAG estimates around 20,000 new housing units are needed each year to meet the pent-up demand.

Carson disagrees. “You’ve already made up for that loss,” he said. In fact, the data suggests to him that “we really don’t even need much new housing at all.”

Geoff Hueter, of Neighbors for a Better San Diego, has spent years studying the city’s housing needs. When the city started the current Regional Housing Needs Allocation cycle in 2021, he explained, it reported that it had the zoned capacity to build about 175,000 new homes. “When the most recent round of community plan updates is completed, this will increase to over 300,000, against the city’s stated need of 108,000. In other words, our zoned capacity is over three times our need,” he said.

What about the development capacity from unzoned units? That would include Bonus Density units, extra units that a developer can build if it agrees to also build some affordable housing units; and the unlimited number of Bonus ADUs, or Accessory Dwelling Units, which applies to half the properties in the city, in addition to other factors. Hueter said the “unzoned” capacity is estimated at 21 times what San Diego needs to meet its housing needs.

If the city’s capacity for housing units seems more than ample, the right mix of housing is another question. “Right now, most of the housing is getting built at the high end of the market and is trying to cater to people who have higher earning potential and/or fairly wealthy retirees.” His point, which is shared by many community leaders I spoke with, is that San Diego is destined to become a city of rental apartments.

“We’re not giving people the opportunity for starter homes,” he said. University City real estate agent Nancy Beck told me that she has “never seen so many pregnant people and people with little kids. Almost every sale that I’ve had pretty much is young families moving into the area.” And what do they want? Single-family homes.

Susan Baldwin, a retired regional planner with SANDAG and now a housing advocate, expressed her disappointment at seeing the mayor, city council, and planning department “taking actions that are not helpful and are actually detrimental to addressing the housing needs of our lower income residents. So much more could be done.”

Still, While Wiese is largely disappointed with the University Planning Group’s partnership with city planners, he credits them with making some concessions. One example is the incentive for developers to build low- or middle-income housing units in University City rather than off-siting them to neighboring Clairemont. Councilman Lee concurred:

“On the housing affordability front, I think the UC plan update has one of the most stringent affordable housing components of any of the city’s plan updates.” Regarding the Hillcrest update, a city spokesperson said, “Based on feedback from the community, a new policy was added to encourage the city to work with development applicants to provide affordable housing on-site.”

There’s also a requirement in the University plan update that commercial and residential developers allocate 5% of a given property for public space and use. But Lee said the developer of the UC Sprouts Plaza on Governor Drive opposed that measure, and Wiese is worried that requirement could be eliminated from the plan when the city council votes next week.

On the environmental front, Wiese credits the city with permanently setting aside about 166 acres as an open space under the Mira Mar flight path. But he’s disappointed that the city planners didn’t push for a canyon edge protective regulation that Wiese said “would have been good both for the wildlife on the one side and also for human beings on the other side, because of wildfire coming out of canyons.” Wiese claims city planners backed off of that because “one or two property owners thought it was going to restrict just how much they could profit.”

The Program Environmental Impact Report was very convoluted, according to Bonnie Kutch, who observed that rather than produce individual reports for both communities, the city threw in University City with Hillcrest, “which has never been done before.” A city spokesperson told me that combining them into one EIR was appropriate to ensure they aligned with Blueprint SD, the updated general plan.

The process was, again, a source of controversy. “The city forged ahead without even putting out a revised EIR, and put it in front of the Planning Commission and the Land Use and Housing Committee,” said Kutch.

The revised Program Environmental Impact Report, at 2100 pages plus appendices, was released July 11, including 1500 public comments; a city council hearing was scheduled for July 23, at which the final EIR would be certified.

Tom Mullaney of Uptown United said, “There is no reason that three major projects should be rushed, when those projects have no urgent need, but rather are long-range projects intended to be applied over 20 years or more. Once more, the public is left with an impression that the mayor wants to rush through another major project, without the needed reviews.”

If approved next week, the Hillcrest Focus Plan would go into effect later this summer, according to a city spokesperson. The updated University Community Plan would go into effect later this summer, except for the part that comes within the coastal zone, which must first be reviewed and certified by the Coastal Commission. Meanwhile, the city planning department is working on updating the College Area Community Plan, Clairemont Community Plan, and Mid-City Communities Plan.