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More density coming to San Diego’s urban core

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New development blueprints for the neighborhoods surrounding Balboa Park call for dense housing and commercial projects along transportation corridors, but limited changes elsewhere to preserve community character.

Each of the blueprints, which San Diego officials call community plans, also includes enhanced bicycle routes, wider sidewalks for pedestrians and other upgrades to make city streets less dominated by automobiles.

The plans — one each for North Park, Golden Hill and the Uptown area that includes Hillcrest and Mission Hills — lay out development priorities and restrictions for the next 30 years.

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Each tries to seek a balance between helping solve San Diego’s severe shortage of affordable housing, fighting climate change and honoring the desire of community leaders to preserve quality of life.

The plans, which the City Council approved in late 2016 after years of community input and debate, don’t envision radical transformations like some other community plans adopted in recent years for areas like Grantville and San Ysidro.

Instead, they strategically select targeted areas for more intense zoning, loosen height restrictions for buildings in limited areas and soften other regulations to accelerate development of underutilized lots in already dense areas.

Each plan also strives to soften potentially awkward transitions between tall buildings and one-story structures.

“There are urban design features that can help to seamlessly meld new development into the existing fabric without radically changing the character and experience of that community,” said City Councilman Chris Ward, whose district includes all of the affected areas.

The plans also suggest creation of new historical districts to honor and preserve the rich pasts of each neighborhood.

Single-family residential neighborhoods and other low-density areas would see essentially no changes under the new plans, which focus instead on major streets with bus routes and the capacity for additional housing and commercial development.

“We have massaged around the edges where growth can occur within the landscape of the community,” Ward said last week.

These neighborhoods, while vibrant, have struggled to provide adequate jobs and retail amenities for residents partly because downtown and Mission Valley, which excel in those areas, are so close by.

Each plan would abolish special zoning areas called “planned district ordinances” in favor of citywide zoning to make planning and development more efficient and uniform.

Ward praised the city’s decision to simultaneously update the blueprints for all of these neighborhoods because they have so many traits in common.

“We’re the oldest communities in San Diego — we were the original suburbs of New Town, which is now downtown,” he said. “The fundamental skeletons of our communities and how we grew over the last 125 years have a lot of common challenges.”

But Ward said it’s also important for the plans to diverge regarding specific neighborhoods because there are some significant differences.

“The scale of Bankers Hill is not the same as Golden Hill,” he said. “Density and height are block-by-block considerations.”

Each plan also aims to reduce commuting by cars to help San Diego meet the goals of its ambitious climate action plan.

They do that by focusing on transit-oriented development and boosting infrastructure for bicycling and walking.

But none of the three plans meets the city’s goal of getting half of all San Diegans living near transit to commute without a car by 2035.

Commutes by car would drop to 57.1 percent in Uptown, 58 percent in North Park and 68 percent in Golden Hill.

“None of them were even close to the targets,” said Nicole Capretz, executive director of Climate Action Campaign and the primary author of the city’s climate action plan.

Capretz said that’s frustrating when the neighborhoods around Balboa Park are in particularly strong position to become examples of how to fight climate change.

They are much more capable of absorbing density than more suburban areas of the city, such as Tierrasanta and Rancho Bernardo, she said.

“There was some moderate progress made toward increasing density and the opportunity for people to live closer to where they work and provide viable alternatives to driving a car,” she said. “But we are not doing nearly enough in the urban core to hit the ambitious goals of the climate action plan.”

Ward praised Capretz for pushing the city hard on climate goals, but also defended the community plans as important steps forward on greenhouse gas reductions.

He also noted that the city can meet the overall goals of the climate action plan in other ways, such as making all city vehicles zero emissions. And other opportunities may also come along, he said.

“Technology changes things fast,” Ward said.

The new North Park Community Plan, which covers 2,260 acres, focuses much future development in two nodes: 30th Street and El Cajon Boulevard and 30th Street and University Avenue.

The plan also encourages replacement of housing built between the 1960s and 1980s that community leaders say veers from the area’s traditional architecture.

In addition, the plan includes incentives for pedestrian–oriented projects on the blocks between Lincoln Avenue and Howard Avenue, and transit-oriented projects along Park Boulevard and El Cajon Boulevard.

The new Uptown Community Plan, which covers 2,700 acres, lifts height limits for new construction by rescinding 2008’s interim height ordinance.

The cap remains 50 feet in Mission Hills, but is 65 feet in Bankers Hill and could rise to 150 feet there with a special permit. And in Hillcrest, buildings can be 100 feet tall east of state Route 163 and 120 feet tall in the central part of the community west of the freeway.

The plan also calls for closing a notorious gap in the University Avenue bike path to improve safety and encourage more commuting by bicycle.

In addition to Mission Hills and Hillcrest, Uptown includes Bankers Hill, Park West, Middletown and University Heights.

The new Golden Hill Community Plan, which covers 745 acres, reduces density in the eastern and central parts of the community and in much of South Park. Density increases in the western portion of Golden Hill, particularly near downtown and San Diego City College.

Two local nonprofits, Mission Hills Heritage and Save Our Heritage, sued the city on Jan. 4 to block the new Uptown plan based on concerns its potential environmental effects hadn’t been properly studied.

david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick

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