Parks for None of Us

Geoffrey Hueter is Chair of Neighbors For A Better San Diego and a resident of Talmadge.

The San Diego City Council voted on July 7 to greenlight a housing development on a prime hilltop location (Radio Towers) in the Chollas Valley community of southeastern San Diego that had long been designated by the city as a potential park site for a community that has historically lacked city investment in parks and other public infrastructure.

While we appreciate that the project will produce for-sale housing and is being built on privately owned land, this is not an ordinary site. It has views of the ocean, harbor, and downtown that rival any location in San Diego, including Soledad Mountain. To put it in perspective, the arguments that were made by the Council to support the project could also be made to declare the city park atop Mt. Soledad as surplus land and convert it into housing. San Diegans would be rightly outraged by such a proposal and should be equally outraged by the lost opportunity to create a unique public resource at the Radio Towers site, which would have been a benefit not just to the Chollas Valley community, but to all of San Diego.

This is also a colossal failure of San Diego’s Parks Master Plan (adopted in 2021), which was intended to address park deficiencies in long-underserved communities, including those in southeastern San Diego. The Parks Master Plan changed the developer fee structure from a set of funds dedicated to each San Diego community to a single citywide park fund, with reduced fees overall. The plan was promoted with the argument that pooling citywide park fees would allow the city to make meaningful purchases of land for parks, especially older, park-deficient communities such as Chollas Valley, that would benefit not just the neighborhoods around those parks, but also residents of other communities. The Radio Towers site provided a unique opportunity to prove this approach, yet the perpetually cash-strapped city made no attempt to acquire even part of the land and develop it into a park that they would then have to budget to maintain.

Approval of the project was vigorously supported by the same councilmembers who had previously advocated for park equity during passage of the Parks Master Plan, especially those representing the traditionally underserved communities of District 9 (Sean Elo-Rivera), District 8 (Vivian Moreno), and District 4 (former Councilmember Monica Montgomery Steppe, who made a cameo appearance at the hearing to support the project and chastise her constituents for asking the City Council to deliver on its park promises).

The bottom line is that the only priority that really matters to the Council (with the exception of Raul Campillo, who voted against the project) is feeding the building industry. The cynical genius of the Parks Master Plan is that allowing funds collected in one community to be spent in another community misleads residents into thinking that parks are being created somewhere. The Council’s decision reveals the opposite, that “parks for all of us” (the Orwellian slogan given the Parks Master Plan by Mayor Todd Gloria’s public relations shop) really means “parks for none of us.”