The Vintage & Handmade Market 
Against
Village: a settlement, larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town Pillage: to plunder ruthlessly.
Powerful development industry forces are trying to turn the city of San Diego into Los Angeles! It’s being done under the guise of a general plan update called the City of Villages.
The public is being told this is “smart growth” and will help reduce traffic. However, the Environmental Impact Report prepared by city planners states the opposite. The plan calls for 17,000-37,000 new condos and apartments, densely built to 110 units per acre. These would result in 180,000 to 240,000 added daily auto trips, which is roughly the present traffic load on I-8. Even if the region was able to fund and build a massive new public transportation system, the so-called Transit First project, and even after counting walking as a trip, more than 90 percent of trips would still be by auto in 2020.
If this isn’t bad enough, air pollution would increase by 14 to 29 tons a day! Garbage weighing 20,000 to 44,000 tons per year would be added by the City of Villages, and we don’t know where we would put it.
An unspecified number of people would be involuntarily relocated by this “innovative redevelopment”—with taxpayers picking up the costs. The upzoning would make developers rich while adding to the urban miseries of city residents. In 30 years of living in San Diego, I’ve never seen a more obvious example of “they get the gold, we get the shaft.” Since one of Mayor Murphy’s top 10 goals is reducing traffic, and he has pledged to oppose floodplain development, I don’t see how he can support the plan. Some 12,000 more homes are planned for Mission Valley alone—most of them in the floodplain area!
No other city in the county is proposing such density increases. Imperial Beach, Coronado, National City, Del Mar, Santee, La Mesa and Lemon Grove have had nearly stable populations over the past decade. One way they have accomplished this is by not allowing density increases like those proposed in the City of Villages plan. It may be reasonable to build new development with mixed-use homes and businesses—and to locate this close to mass transit. But this cannot be used as an excuse to carry out this City of Village Sardines Plan. San Diego’s air pollution already exceeds Clean Air Act standards. That and our overburdened roads should be clear signals to decision makers that the City of Villages plan is highly irresponsible.
Yet the traffic story gets worse. What kind of planners would count traffic from residential units but not stores and offices? Our city planners! The traffic models were fed figures on the extra homes but not the businesses needed to serve them. So we don’t even know the total impacts on traffic.
The City of Villages is hardly compact growth. The 17,000 to 37,000 densely built condos and apartments would stretch from San Ysidro to Rancho Bernardo. This would foster sprawl rather than prevent it.
The city brags about the citizen input received. One citizen on the advisory committee represents an architectural firm that worked on the Chevron-Levi-Cushman Plan to subdivide the golf course in Mission Valley—before the plan was stopped in 1993. These firms no doubt see big money if the City of Villages plan is adopted. A conflict of interest?
The potential for windfall profits is obvious, since commercial landowners would benefit from huge increases in property values as densities are increased up to 110 units per acre. Yet taxpayers would be expected to pay for the transit part of the plan through extension of the TransNet sales tax, along with many new taxes. Taxpayers would reap the “benefits” of increased traffic and pollution. This is like a smoker blowing smoke into a closed room full of people and presenting a bill for the cigarettes to the second-hand smokers.
The transit improvements proposed would be a small band-aid on the cancer of traffic and air pollution. And a minor detail: the new transportation system is not funded. Unless two-thirds of voters reauthorize the TransNet tax and approve other taxes being proposed, even this little band-aid will not be applied.
The momentum is strong because the people promoting City of Villages have a vested interest in it: bankers, developers, landowners and the transit authority, which hopes to gain taxpayer funding of their plan.
The hype of City of Villages states that it is “anti-sprawl.” However, the draft environmental impact report states “for all trips, the transit use and walking was estimated to comprise 6 percent citywide. It appears that traffic model results show that the use of personal vehicles, although with increased occupancy, still remain the predominate preferred mode of transportation for any scenario in the year 2020.” It is therefore not surprising that the EIR shows every freeway would have more daily traffic as a result of City of Villages—contrary to the misleading statements about traffic relief being made by city staff.
Growth-causing circular logic has a prominent role in the City of Villages. The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) allocates growth to the region’s cities based on vacant land and zoning policies. So when the city of San Diego affirmed that more density was planned with the Villages strategy, SANDAG allocated more growth to the city! In contrast, cities that said they were built-out received little or no allocation of growth. We could follow the lead of our neighboring “no growth” cities and declare ourselves “built out.” We would all breathe easier and spend less time in traffic as a result.
Why would the City leaders even consider a plan that would add to current burdens of traffic, smog, taxes, park and school crowding? They appear to be following the lure of “smart growth” in hopes that building more homes in the city will lead to fewer homes in rural areas. Yet with no mechanism to link the two, the likely scenario is more development nearby with continued growth afar.
They also tout the promise of affordable housing. Yet increased density does not automatically lower the cost of buying or renting a home. Just look at New York, LA and San Francisco with their ultra-high densities and ultra-high costs.
