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Commentary: Housing plans should not lead to polarization

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San Diego has always built new housing, and will continue to do so. We’ve always been a city that welcomes those wanting to live here. Currently there is need to focus increased energy on home building, both due to demand, but also because the state has mandated we do so. That doesn’t mean we should disregard good planning and robust community involvement in the process. Great cities strive to meet the needs of changing times with the aspiration of great design. Good urban planning and housing are connected, it’s not one or the other.

However, we have entered a needlessly polarized environment with inaccurate and unsatisfying acronyms: NIMBY and YIMBY, leading us down a rabbit-hole of development culture wars. Are YIMBYs really suggesting we should allow developers to build anything anywhere they want? Are NIMBYs fighting every new project proposed in their neighborhood? In hopes of lower housing prices and benefit to the environment, do millennials not care about good design or protecting the quality of life in San Diego? Are boomers fighting to keep new development out of their neighborhoods to selfishly increase the value of their homes?

Related: Why San Diego neighborhoods should embrace denser future

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I don’t believe that is the reality of where we are, but I frequently experience that polemic. I encounter youthful density warriors in Next Door dialogs and planning meetings. While I welcome their participation in the development dialog, I am often frustrated that their entire position is that our city should approve projects without any community input (except theirs). I read about communities fighting a variety of housing projects, not out of greed, but out of love of their community, and justified fear of change.

What I fear is that the simplistic tool of creating good guys and bad guys, is a self-serving tactic of those whose agenda is not beneficial to the community’s greater good. Developers, responsible to their bottom line and global investors, benefit greatly by excluding the community from the process. Our politicians, who sadly seem to have too-cozy relationships with developers, find their political ambitions enhanced. Lobbyists and not-for-profits, finding developers easy sources of funding for their (unrelated) agendas, cynically provide fuel for this dangerous fire.

Bankers Hill’s ongoing battle at 6th Ave and Olive Street illustrates what’s wrong with the way this civic situation is currently being negotiated. There is a large list of players: a massive global developer, an attractive site, ambitious politicians, a money-hungry land owner, a civically-active community, city-connected lobbyists, not-for-profits moving beyond their appropriate mandate into building design, and well-intentioned youthful activists entering land use debates for the first time. Currently, this kitchen-sink of participants creates a dynamic that has no room for good urban planning. Particularly frustrating is disregard for Uptown Community Plan, which exists to guide the dialog and the design. Sadly, the plan seems to be in the way of developer profits. The most powerful players, using the YIMBY/NIMBY culture war, are trying to take from the public realm to benefit only the developer and the land owner. While YIMBYs have been convinced they are fighting for housing, the increased housing units within the project was never challenged by the community. Ultimately the fight was simply to remove the community’s voice, giving it over entirely to the developer. But the power-players in the situation never revealed that to be their goal.

What we need in our communities is a shared goal of QIMBY (Quality In My Back Yard). Instead of ignoring the city’s community plan and other important, legally agreed upon, planning tools as is being done in Bankers Hill, we need to go further to enhance and protect those tools.

Hearty discussions about community plans should occur at a policy level, so discussions around a single project aren’t free-for-alls as in Bankers Hill. We must stop this destructive and simplistic NIMBY/YIMBY way of discussing development, and instead focus on the issues that create good design and great cities. We need to include all stakeholders equally at the table, and then get creative to approve buildings, of all sizes, to address the need for housing and build a livable city. In some neighborhoods we need to lead the world on how to build a dense low-rise city; in others we may need go as high as our structural engineers allow. But we really don’t need our politicians inappropriately putting their powerful fingers (both in front of, and behind the curtain) on the scales in the process. Most importantly we need dDIMBY (democratic Development In Our Back Yard).

McMakin is an artist and a member of Bankers Hill 150 community group.

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