For over seven years, the University Heights community has engaged with the San Diego Unified School District on redeveloping the Brucker site along Normal Street.
This included four large community workshops and over nine task-force meetings to envision, debate, and revise multiple plans, resulting in what we call the AVRP/Community Consensus Plan that was publicly presented by district in November 2023, and which has garnered over 77% support from University Heights residents surveyed.
The district spent hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars working with AVRP Skyport Studios to draft site plans, conduct community workshops, and meet with community leaders and members. After that work concluded, the district then hired LeSar Development Consultants, a highly-regarded and politically well-connected consultant to help guide their next steps.
At a December 2023 workshop, LeSar influenced the trustees to restart the process by “going out to the market” with a Request for Proposal, and not to be afraid of “going big,” and disregarding existing plans and community input in the process. But on April 28 over 200 University Heights residents, and a handful of folks from outside the neighborhood, attended a “listening session” and made their voices very clear. Start from the plan we all thought we agreed on.
There can be no question that we are in a housing crisis — especially affordable housing. The city of San Diego has permitted more than 25,000 new homes so far this year against a backlog of 82,000 needed by 2029, according to the Regional Housing Needs Assessment.
That huge deficit took decades to create, and we can’t fix it immediately. We certainly can’t fix it by putting all of the increased density into a small number of already overburdened communities like University Heights, which already lacks the infrastructure to support the existing massive building that has already happened.
University Heights, which had 5,995 households in 2020 according to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Atlas, has added nearly 1,000 housing units since then, with another 800 units in the pipeline or pending approval (including the Brucker site at 500 units). There are hundreds more units in the works either as ADUs, expansions, or smaller-scale projects that aren’t publicly disclosed yet.
Altogether that will be at least a 35% increase in a decade. And that’s in a neighborhood of just 1.132 square miles, already with a density of 8,950 people per square mile.
It isn’t fair to expect University Heights absorb a disproportionate share of high-density projects that will overwhelm our already deficient infrastructure of parks, library, streets, transit, water, and power. It’s time for all areas of San Diego to step up to meet the critical housing need equitably and fairly.
I hope that we can find common ground about housing situation, and agreement that building affordable housing is a priority. I also hope we can find common ground and agreement that communities like University Heights should not — and cannot — bear the bulk of the burden to address the entire region’s lack of affordable housing development.
Let’s find ways to work together to not only keep our neighborhood the charming, wonderful place it already is, but support a reasonable project that helps more of our neighbors enjoy this awesome place without destroying what makes it so special. That is why an overwhelming majority of University Heights residents have responded with “Yes In Our Backyard – To This Reasonable Project.”
Marc Johnson is president of the University Heights Community Association.
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