An urban planning website called Planetizen picked up our Sept. 26 story, “San Diego Wrestles With Military Past as It Looks to Future.”
The story prompted a few comments on San Diego’s image, economy, politics and planning.
Here is one comment about how the city’s boxed-in location between an ocean, desert, mountain range and foreign country led to its development, from Planetizen user Ricardo:
Geography was really the major limitation to developing any substantial “industries which foster diverse economic activity and properity (sic)” (whatever that means). So the city did what it could and made a bargain with the government to become a navy base so the fed would pay for developing the harbor…perhaps a faustian bargain, but it did benefit the city immensely (although the tradeoff was a lot of military control of land use decisions…which has major implications for the city today).
User vtboy99 offers another perspective:
Therefore, the city has always been seen as a haven for the wealthy ruling class from the midwest and south and has really never developed the type of industries which foster diverse economic activity and prosperity, contraty (sic) to what the media reports.
As of late, biotech and R&D have been much lauded by the city’s boosters as a way to promote the diverse economy, however the region has ended up taking a second seat to similar activities taking place in Silicon Valley.
More notably, San Diego has enveloped much of its economic activities in the buying and selling of real estate, which is now turing (sic) out to be the hole in the bubble for the region’s pseudo-economy, as prices rapidly decline before our very eyes.
You can read the rest of the messages here.