The changes, which are scheduled for a City Council vote on Tuesday, would be the first major amendments to the city’s general plan since the anti-sprawl City of Villages plan was adopted in 2008.
Called Blueprint SD, the amended general plan aims to fight climate change by steering new housing into transit-friendly areas.
But perhaps more significantly, it would seek to reverse decades of racial and ethnic segregation that began with redlining and got reinforced by single-family zoning policies that remain mostly in place today.
If adopted, Blueprint SD would be the first time a San Diego general plan has acknowledged the continuing impacts of redlining — racially discriminatory mortgage lending practices and restrictive housing covenants that kept people of color out of White neighborhoods.
It would also be the first time city officials have blamed local segregation on city zoning policies, initially by reinforcing redlining and then by essentially taking its place after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled redlining unenforceable in 1948.
“In addition to redlining, single-family zoning has been a way to exclude those with lower incomes from a community,” city planning director Heidi Vonblum told The San Diego Union-Tribune last week. “It disallows a product type — apartments and multifamily housing — that people with lower incomes can afford.”
Blueprint SD would aim to start solving that problem and its legacy — the city’s many heavily White neighborhoods north of Interstate 8, and the concentration of people of color in lower-income neighborhoods to the south.
“One of the great and significant challenges, not just for our city but for cities across the country, is that these zoning restrictions have resulted in concentrations of poverty,” Vonblum said. “By acknowledging past harms that have occurred from past decisions and policies, it allows us to provide a framework to do better and reverse those trends.”
A key priority in Blueprint SD is zoning changes in neighborhoods that have quality schools, high-paying jobs and community amenities like parks.
Deemed “high-resource” areas by the state, these mostly White neighborhoods are a crucial place for city officials to start reversing racial and income-based segregation by creating affordable housing, primarily apartments, Vonblum said.
Blueprint SD would loosen restrictions on many properties in these areas that are now zoned almost entirely for single-family homes.
“When we look at how to correct past injustices and provide housing for people of all incomes across the city, we have to look at our zoning,” she said. “In the highest-resource areas, 85 percent of the land is zoned for single-family, which means it’s zoned to disallow housing product types that people with lower incomes can afford.”
Councilmember Kent Lee said it’s crucial that San Diego solve its housing crisis in the right way, by furthering fair housing.
“Planning for growth specifically in high-resource and very high-resource areas is a critical part of what the Blueprint SD framework intends to do,” Lee said when the policy was debated last month by the council’s Land Use and Housing Committee. “It provides us an opportunity to really focus how we see our growth in the decades ahead.”
The city’s initial motivation for Blueprint SD was refreshing its City of Villages plan, a concept devised in 2008 that recast city neighborhoods as a loose connection of autonomous villages, to reflect San Diego’s new focus on climate change.
The city’s first climate action plan was adopted in 2015, seven years after City of Villages.
The connection between climate change and zoning has also become a higher priority in land use planning in recent years.
That’s because officials have realized that lower-income areas are typically more vulnerable to climate change because they have fewer parks, trees and homes with air conditioning.
Because the general plan is the framework used when the city updates its neighborhood growth blueprints called community plans, city officials say it’s important for climate policies to be part of the framework.
But officials also decided to tackle segregation and housing equity, which have become priorities in the world of planning in recent years.
In 2020, planning directors from 20 of the nation’s largest cities — including San Diego — released a joint public statement condemning past zoning decisions and committing their cities to racial equity in the future.
“The undersigned planning directors of United States cities acknowledge the role that city planners have played in contributing to systemic racism and segregation,” the statement says. “We commit to working together toward an equitable future for our communities and invite all U.S. planning directors to sign the statement and join us in this critical endeavor.”
Four years earlier, the American Institute of Certified Planners made a similar move.
“Planners have an unambiguous ethical responsibility to alleviate inequities and to prioritize the needs of communities that are negatively impacted by historic and contemporary discrimination,” it said in language added to its code of ethics in 2016.
In 2020, the city’s once-every-10-years plan for housing production included a detailed description of how redlining worked in San Diego and how it was reinforced by zoning that encouraged segregation.
“These covenants targeted all minorities, but were especially discriminatory against African Americans, Mexican Americans and Asians, so these groups settled in the older communities of Southeastern San Diego and Barrio Logan where such restrictions were absent or were not enforced,” according to the plan.
The city’s first zoning laws were adopted in 1923 when redlining had been around for at least a decade.
“Excluding multifamily apartments, which were typically occupied by lower income residents and people of color who were denied equal access to economic opportunity, from single-family zoned areas reinforced segregation that had resulted from other factors such as covenants,” the document says.
But other potential causes of segregation are also discussed. They include freeway construction, ballot initiatives, public resistance to increased density and White flight — the migration of White people out of areas as they become more racially diverse.
“Land use isn’t the only cause of poverty,” Vonblum said. “There are a lot of societal factors that go into the causes of poverty, not just in our city but across the country.”
In addition to acknowledging other causes, city officials also concede that Blueprint SD won’t solve the problem on its own. Nothing in the new framework is going to help low-income residents of southeastern San Diego afford an expensive home in La Jolla.
Vonblum said making all the elements of Blueprint SD mesh has been a challenge. Other priorities in the plan include preserving the city’s open space areas and its biodiversity.
“We have to make all of the priorities work together,” she said.
The central elements are leveraging existing transit investments by steering housing nearby and helping people drive less.
Vonblum said Blueprint SD will allow San Diego to complete its community plan updates much more quickly — roughly three years per plan, instead of the usual five or six.
That’s because Blueprint SD includes a programmatic environmental impact report that will simplify the environmental analysis of all future community plan updates.
In fact, the environmental review for Blueprint SD is already being used for two community plan updates — one in Hillcrest and one in University City — that the City Council is scheduled to approve July 30.
Business groups, including the Building Industry Association and the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, strongly support Blueprint SD.
But environmental groups have criticized it for relying on buses, trolleys and other transit options that don’t yet exist in deciding where to build, rather than focusing on areas with transit already in place.
The Community Planners Committee, an umbrella organization for the city’s four dozen neighborhood planning groups, has requested 10 changes to Blueprint SD.
They include a commitment to preserve a neighborhood’s unique attributes, a requirement that developers preserve mature trees and a ban on developers building high-impact projects without any public meetings.
The last general plan update before City of Villages was in 1979. That amended the city’s initial general plan, which was approved by city voters in 1967.
City officials said another general update will be necessary in roughly 20 years.
Tuesday’s hearing on Blueprint SD is scheduled for 2 p.m. at City Hall, 202 C St., San Diego.
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