When San Diego pitched its latest bond measure it specifically allocated funds to build housing on unused district lands. Exactly what a district-built project could look like still isn’t clear, but the concept of housing on district-owned land wasn’t entirely new.
The district already had one housing project on the books, a 264-unit complex in Scripps Ranch. But that complex was built by a private developer who leased the land via a joint occupancy agreement, a strategy the district touts as allowing it to keep the land while generating revenue.
Last night, the district’s board members gave the green light to a proposal to begin negotiations on its second such joint occupancy agreement this time at the former location of Central Elementary in City Heights. District officials had previously indicated they’d like to develop housing at the site, and the approval is only the first step in the process.
The proposal could potentially bring 270 units of affordable housing to the location along with housing for seniors, amenities like a bike path and a small courtyard and new facilities for TRACE, a San Diego Unified school that provides support for students with special needs. District officials project it would net about $108 million in revenue from the proposed 99-year lease.
The developer, Affirmed Housing, has experience with these sorts of joint ventures. It’s currently working on a 99-unit complex in Rancho Bernardo on land owned by the Metropolitan Transit System. The project was the most expensive of five affordable housing projects profiled by reporter Lisa Halverstadt, carrying a cost of nearly $911,000 per unit. Luckily for San Diego Unified, the district wouldn’t be on the hook for those costs.
Fear and Loathing in EdTech
This week, I attended a couple of days of the ASU+GSV Summit that took place at downtown’s Grand Hyatt. It’s a conference thrown by Arizona State University in partnership with GSV Ventures, a venture capital fund that specializes in investing in EdTech companies. The summit’s website proudly quotes Forbes, which described it as “the Davos of EdTech.”
That was an apt description.
This wasn’t so much a gathering of educators workshopping solutions to the problems education faces, as it was a gathering of companies workshopping how best to sell educators on their tech’s ability to solve the problems of the future. Exactly where the line between hawking tech that helps students and hawking tech that simply extracts dollars from the education sector lies is something I don’t pretend to know.
Walking through the sprawling conference, I was swallowed by panels and displays featuring companies whose names seemed plucked from a linguistic uncanny valley. There was Learnosity and Learneo, Edmentum and Udacity, Schoolytics and Quizizz. Thunkable.
The big story of the conference was AI. That’s not a big surprise, AI has been on the top of every tech investor’s mind. What was surprising, at least to me, was how talk of AI permeated everything at ASU+GSV.
There were panels about feminism and AI, math curriculum and AI, the future of human relationships in the age of AI and the rise of AI tutors. During a panel about neurodiverse students and EdTech not explicitly about AI, one speaker said, “We would be remiss if we didn’t speak about AI.”
That evening at dinner, GSV’s founder and CEO, Michael Moe lauded what he viewed as the inevitable, transformational potential of AI.
“AI is like air because it’s invisible, it’s ubiquitous and you’re going to need it to live,” Moe said. “We think AI’s going to be incredible in the classroom and every teacher’s going to have an AI teacher’s assistant and every student is going to be able to have a great digital tutor in their pocket.”
I can’t help but regard the onset of the “age of AI” with deep distrust and distress. Much of my disdain for it boils down to romantic principles about what it means to be human and what it means for humans to create something. Songwriter Nick Cave summed up my worries well in this response to a song someone had asked ChatGPT to write in his style.
Those feelings are undoubtedly influenced by the fact that my job is one people seem to think could be on the chopping block. That may one day be the case, but I don’t really think so.
I’m also deeply unsure that AI can provide the kinds of benefits its moneyed proponents are convinced it can. There have long been flashy new educational breakthroughs touted, but as we’ve seen with virtual instruction those often fall flat. What does seem to help kids is the hard, human-centered work teachers at schools like Edison Elementary have long been doing.
None of this is to say the state of education is all sunshine and rainbows. It’s not, and never has been. Evolution is good, and for better or worse, technology and AI will be part of education going forward. I’m sure there will be some benefits, and anyway, trying to stand in front of that change isn’t as simple as smashing some 18th-century printing presses. Then again, that didn’t really work out either.
What We’re Writing
The number of San Diego students attending virtual schools has shot up in recent years, even as those schools perform significantly worse than in-person counterparts. Related: South Bay Union’s board voted unanimously to close its virtual academy on Thursday. The school saw dwindling enrollment that fell far short of the district’s projections and had been identified as a school in need of Comprehensive School Improvement because of low academic performance.
San Diego Unified should be concentrating on giving students an education where they can get a decent job and afford to pay their own rent. This plan to build subsidized housing on land that is set aside for education is smoke and mirrors designed to get uniformed voters to approve more bond money that will end up being wasted just like the money the district is already receiving and squandering.
How does partnering with a developer to build housing on school sites serve San Diego Unified School District’s Mission Statement: “All San Diego students will graduate with the skills, motivation, curiosity and resilience to succeed in their choice of college and career in order to lead and participate in the society of tomorrow”?
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I think the best way to improve the garbage public schools in this city is to lease some school land to poor people and drug addicts. This gives the students access to role models.
Following the well-worn path of other local governments like the port district, the Metropolitan Transit System and the City of San Diego, the San Diego Unified School District is foregoing it’s original educational mission to get into the real estate development business.
One more major local agency working with for-profit developers to convert property it owns into new apartment blocks. Land that was bought to hold schools, transit centers and city facilities are now going to hold more poorly designed new apartment blocks, often derided as little more than “blocky buildings with balconies” typically designed to be cheap to build and generate maximum rental profits.
If this keeps up, the whole county will end up with a YIMBY’s dream, nothing buy mile after mile of bland market rate apartment and condo housing as far as the eye can see. Hardly anything that could qualify as America’s finest city.
When that happens, we may find that the YIMBY promise that just building more housing will bring down home prices was just a mirage. But by then, it will be too late to save San Diego.