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I’ve had several people ask me about the city’s Historical Resources Board and staff review of whether the Pechanga Arena is historically significant. So I was glad the Union-Tribune explained it well. In short, Midway Rising, which plans to redevelop all the nearly 50 acres under and around the arena, has to study the historic impact of their plans just like they must evaluate the environmental impact.
They did that study and the resulting report indicates the city will decide the arena is historically significant and, if they do, it doesn’t mean it can’t be demolished. It just means they’ll have to “mitigate” what’s lost. “Hey kids, who wants to go look at the monument to the old arena that used to be here!”
My beef: The report glosses over the deeper history of the land, which I wrote about two years ago. The arena itself is something of a monument to the city’s 20-year effort to eradicate the first of two racially integrated neighborhoods in the northern part of San Diego. The federal government built the Frontier Housing Complex and Linda Vista to handle a small part of the massive demand for housing before the United States entered World War II.
Homelessness was everywhere and San Diegans had been resisting the construction of new housing. I know, how strange, right?
The housing at Linda Vista was preserved. You can still see the rec center (Skateworld), churches and many of the original homes. Point Lomans, however, hated Frontier from the beginning and the city evicted the last tenants of those homes in 1962 and city leaders had no plans for the land. They looked for something exciting to put there like an amusement park. Disney wasn’t interested so they did an arena.
The city officially remembers Frontier as a blighted group of “temporary” homes. But the people who lived there remember it as a real neighborhood.
It is certainly a choice for the city to insist that the arena be remembered and its loss be “mitigated” and not the Frontier neighborhood, with its three schools, rec center and many churches and its bold willingness to let Black and Brown people live there.
The city’s report follows true to the city’s long disdain for this neighborhood. “The International Sports Arena was the most important catalyst in the Midway neighborhood’s transformation from WWII housing into a lively entertainment and commercial hub.”
It wasn’t just “WWII housing.” Frontier’s housing lasted much longer and if families had been allowed to buy it, like in Linda Vista, it would still be there. However, in April 1962, the city sent final eviction notices to 256 families still living in Frontier and, 50 years later, when the school district sold the old Barnard Elementary built for Frontier kids, we lost everything associated with the once lively and diverse neighborhood.
The city has never mitigated that loss.
The Hysterical Resources Board needs to simply be abolished. The City’s municipal code also needs to be revised as it typically requires “a site-specific survey for the purposes of obtaining a construction permit or development permit for development proposed for any parcel containing a structure that is 45 or more years old” (§143.0212). Next year, houses built in 1980 will likely be subject to “review” which is expensive, time-consuming and highly arbitrary. The whole process deters development and densification. The historical thing has now become, along with CEQA (AKA Consultants Employment Quantity Act), yet another vehicle for NIMBY’s to carry out their agenda and halt development.