The goal is reversing the lingering effects of redlining, a federally endorsed practice in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s in which banks and mortgage lenders rejected and approved home loans based on race, income and neighborhood.
San Diego officials say redlining is the main reason majority-White neighborhoods dominate the northern and coastal parts of the city, while Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are mostly confined to southern parts of the city.
While such segregation won't be solved quickly or easily, city officials say they took a modest step in that direction this month when the City Council voted 5-4 in favor of some complex new housing policies.
The policies soften rules that allow taller apartment buildings and more backyard units when a property is near mass transit, now allowing the property to be as far as 1 mile away — instead of a previous half-mile requirement.
The policies also extend those softer rules to mostly suburban areas deemed "high-resource" by the state because of the presence of high-paying jobs and strong educational opportunities.
Affected areas include all the city's coastal neighborhoods, most of the city's eastern suburbs including Allied Gardens and San Carlos and all the city's north inland areas except parts of Scripps Ranch.
City officials said those areas were added because they are mostly White, high-income neighborhoods that could become more diverse with more high-rise and mid-rise housing that includes subsidized units for low-income residents.
"We are tasked with overcoming past discrimination where people of certain races and incomes were not allowed to live in certain areas," said Seth Litchney, the city's housing policy program manager. "Providing affordable housing in those areas helps overcome that pattern of discrimination."
Under most of the city's low-income housing programs, subsidized units are reserved for people making less than 80 percent of the area median income — $72,900 for a single person.
Critics say the new policies won't make much difference because San Diego is creating only rental opportunities, not homeownership opportunities, for people of color in the city's mostly White neighborhoods.
But city leaders say growing up in a high-resource area, whether your family rents or owns, can boost a person's chances for success in life.
"We know the distance between a person's home and good jobs and good schools and grocery stores play a role in the likelihood of a person having what many of us would deem a successful life," said Council President Sean Elo-Rivera, who was part of the five-member majority that approved the new policies.
"We need to do more to make it easier for people of all incomes and all backgrounds to live in neighborhoods with more opportunity," he said. "I don't think someone's destiny is determined in a negative way because they don't necessarily grow up in a high-opportunity area, but the data says there are exponentially more hurdles in front of them to achieve their potential."
City officials have also focused in recent years on helping low-resource areas with more parks, libraries, streetlights, sidewalks and other infrastructure, but those changes haven't yet brought more high-paying jobs.
The new policy only addresses income, not race — but officials say the two things trend together.
For instance, Black people make up just 6 percent of the city's population but twice as big a share — 12 percent — of the number of people whose incomes were below the poverty level, data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2021 American Community Survey show.
Twenty-nine percent of the city's people are Latino, whereas 38 percent of the city's population in poverty is. For White San Diegans who aren't Hispanic, the numbers are close to the reverse: They make 42 percent of the general population but a smaller share, 29 percent, of the number of people in poverty.
And in 2019, the median household income in the ethnically diverse neighborhoods that make up the city's federally designated Promise Zone was $37,640 less than the city overall, $41,250 versus $78,980.
While the part of the new policy aimed at racial integration affects a relatively limited portion of the city, officials say it makes an additional 3,342 more acres eligible for high-rise development and multiple backyard units.
Circulate San Diego, a housing and transit advocacy group, praised the city for adding the high-opportunity zones to the policy.
"Fair housing is all about undoing the segregation that was created by government policies and discrimination in the past," said Jesse O'Sullivan, the organization's policy counsel. "Residential segregation by race and income has historically been enforced by exclusionary zoning."
Circulate lobbied for the racial integration component because the city's initial proposal for housing policy changes near transit would have unintentionally worsened the problem.
The initial proposal would have created more opportunities for subsidized housing in racially diverse, low-income areas than in White, high-income areas.
Heidi Vonblum, the city's planning director, said officials were eager to make the change because it helps them achieve fair housing goals mandated by the state.
"We cannot be putting forward proposals that only increase housing opportunities in lower-resource areas and protect high-resource areas," she said. "It's not fair to only have affordable housing opportunities in low-resource areas. People will say they want to protect their neighborhood, but these are high-opportunity areas that could be developed to provide new housing."
City officials say part of their motivation is a 2018 state law, AB 686, that aims to reduce housing discrimination. "Local agencies must facilitate deliberate action to explicitly address, combat and relieve disparities resulting from past patterns of segregation to foster more inclusive communities," it says.
Vonblum said other recent steps the city has taken on fair housing include new neighborhood growth blueprints that add significantly more housing capacity in areas such as Mission Valley and Mira Mesa.
The city also has one of the least restrictive policies in the state on backyard units, which can create more affordable housing opportunities in wealthy White areas.
Neighbors for a Better San Diego, a group that typically lobbies against high-density housing in single-family neighborhoods, opposed the entire package of new policies based on contentions most people won't walk more than half a mile to transit.
Ricardo Flores, executive director of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation of San Diego, called the city's new effort toward making neighborhoods more diverse a worthwhile step, but said the fact that it doesn't create homeownership opportunities for people of colors in wealthy White areas means it won't make meaningful changes.
"It doesn't fundamentally change who has ownership opportunities in those neighborhoods," said Flores, whose nonprofit advocates for low-income housing. "All this is going to be doing is creating more renters, and rents keep going up."
He said better solutions would include subsidies for first-time homebuyers and reducing the share of San Diego's residential land — 81 percent — that is devoted to single-family housing.
Flores supports allowing lots to be split more aggressively, which he says would lower property costs and boost homeownership opportunities for people with lower incomes.
"The new policies will just be cramming more into the same small amount of land," Flores said.
But rental opportunities for people of color in White neighborhoods are still a significant step, said Climate Action Campaign, a local nonprofit that has blamed redlining for the fact that the neighborhoods most vulnerable to the effects of climate change are disproportionately neighborhoods of color.
"We believe people should be able to live in any neighborhood where they want to live," said Madison Coleman, a policy advocate for the nonprofit.
Elo-Rivera said that's the city's goal.
"In San Diego's best version of itself, there would be housing opportunities for people of all backgrounds and all income levels in all neighborhoods," he said. "That is not the San Diego that we have today, largely because of decisions made in the past."
Elo-Rivera said city officials must find solutions, despite hurdles and backlash.
"How we work to remedy that is going to be messy sometimes and less than ideal," he said. "But it is undoubtedly true that making it easier to build housing generally, and affordable housing specifically, in high-opportunity areas is a way of helping address — and at least partially remedy — the harms of the past."
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