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.”
The article is beyond believable if you reference the Encanto Community Plan 2015. In section 7 diagram 7.2 the possibility of the land being purchased and used as a park is addressed and the housing as a default if not.
The reference to Monica Montgomery Steppe is also not what her statement to the City Council was even close to as presented. The reference the Supervisor made was to the objection to lot sizes and racism in images related to her and 20,000 sq ft lot sizes.
This keeps happening with articles related to the potential park next to an existing park which could be upgraded adding the features some Emerald Hills people would like.
When will this issue get the newspapers to actually do some Real digging showing a little effort to be honest about the story.
I can’t stand Elo Rivera. He was the one that started the trash fee and parking fee. Why doesn’t he ask his friends at SDGE to pay their fair share. Oh wait that would make him an honest politician for the people not for greed and corporations.
Worst mayor and cit7 council ever
Fix your message boards. It seems you censor everything negative about the mayor in the city. You might as well just delete these message boards because they’re worthless if people can’t have their opinion.
We don’t need another park, we need affordable housing that people can actually afford. Currently, the lowest rental prices in so called affordable housing are anywhere between $2,800.00-$7,500.00 a month for renting a shoebox sized apartment with no closets or any standard appliances that renters need. I called every single apartment complex that claim they have affordable units for rent. None of them have any vacancies and none of them have any waiting lists that are open. I visited Mariposa Apartments in Carlsbad where the San Diego Housing Commission did a huge press release saying they had as grand opening of this new affordable apartment complex. That was an outright lie. The complex is old and all filled with long term residents and no vacancies. I called every single affordable complex in this county and none of them have any vacancies, waiting lists are non existent or closed, and no vacancies in the near future. You need to make over $120,000.00 a year income, need a 760 fico score even though apartment complexes don’t report your on time payments, and make at least three times the rent for income. The majority rent is now well over $3,000.00 per month and many times it is a heck of a lot more. Air and b which once was an alternative to renting an apartment from corporate landlords, is now out of this world sky high prices. Rich people renting out their homes only to the filthy rich. I saw one listing on there for an insane amount of money to just rent a room. They wanted $8,000.00 a month for a linen closet sized apartment. I don’t know how all these landlords on air and b get any business for their homes for rent. Who wants to pay $8,000 to rent a room and share a home with three or four strangers? I guess some people just have money to burn to live with strangers is so weird. I saw one listing on air b and b for $127,000.00 per month for a home. Nobody’s house is even worth anywhere near that amount to warrant that price. I wonder how much business these people actually do when their prices are so high and people can just get their own motel for much cheaper. So this whole law to allow these people to build their own ADU’s has done nothing to help the prices for rent to go down, and has not improved the housing supply for people who still need housing. I am all for homeowners to be allowed to build these ADU’s, they should be able to build as much as they can on their own land. But I already knew this was not going to help the housing supply crisis. All the homeowners helped was themselves and their own family. Which I am all for them to do what they need to do for themselves. I just saw a horse trailer for rent on airbandb and they want $3,500.00 a month for rent. I don’t know what those people are smoking, because that is insane.
Housing as a default, is never addressed by our Board of Supervisors. This is because of all these stupid homeowners protesting any affordable housing anywhere in this county. Sadly and selfishly, the homeowners never want any of the rest of us to have new rental housing. Nor do they want anything that doesn’t directly benefit their bank accounts, or their airbandb. So sadly the rest of us cannot afford these sky high rent costs. You need to make at least $120,000 per year to even qualify to apply for rental housing. Now all these brokers and landlords charge $100.00 application fees for each person applying, they charge an admin fee of $200, a holding deposit of at least $400 to just hold the place off the market, then a security deposit equal to one month’s rent, and then the current month of rent. Just to move into a shoebox sized place with no upgrades and ugly outdated beige walls that nobody has ever wanted. The latest ripoff that these brokers and landlords are doing is only listing their non available unit to collect application fees in the thousands of dollars each month from innocent people who need housing. They then steal your application fee, deny you falsely claiming they rented it to someone else, and keep their rental listing saying it is available on all the platforms. It is outright theft from hopeful applicants and it is the lowest form of scumbags who prey upon honest applicants and steal their money. These brokers and landlords are posting thousands of fraudulent listings every day and ripping off the thousands of dollars from us and countless other victims out there. Largely these crimes go unreported because renters know nothing will be done. We know our district attorney will never convict these thieves robbing applicants to the tune of thousands of dollars. I spoke with a lady who said it took over $7,500.00 a month for six months before she got a rental. She has a great career and a great fico score and she was exhausted by the six months being unfairly rejected. Nobody deserves to be robbed and nobody should have to pay holding fees, application fees, security deposits that are sky high. There will be a continuous flow of homeless people since they have nowhere to rent, no actual rentals are available, and you have to be wealthy to rent here now. It’s only going to get worse because now most complexes are being bought out by greedy and neglectful corporations who never maintain their properties. They have these huge shell companies they call property management who also do nothing to maintain their properties they manage. All they exist for is to charge renters three times the amount of their water, sewer and trash cost because they use third party billing aka a company owned by the owner who extorts three times the amount of a tenants bills. Tenants are also billed for watering the common areas which are the landlords responsibility to pay for and maintain. Most of these places charge the most outrageous fees and it is causing a lot more homelessness. Our courtrooms keep churning the evictions though. Thousands of evictions are filed every month by these corporate landlords. Most tenants do not have an attorney to fight their wrongful evictions. So it just keeps churning more homeless into the streets. It is so wrong. I know our children’s generation is going to have the toughest time venturing out on their own. But I do know that the next generation does care about the homeless and the food shortages.