High-density development is inevitable in cities across the planet. It is the 21st century’s secret sauce for dynamic regions like San Diego, that can take on the challenge to reinvent themselves and become resilient, climate friendly “ecocities,” as Berkeley writer Richard Register once described our sustainable future.
Building at gentle and medium density — development up to 10 stories — in the right locations will allow San Diego to respond to climate change by creating innovation districts and new villages closer to the urban core, unleashing a future where residents won’t have to drive two hours to work.
High-density housing sometimes gets a bad rap. But it is not, in itself, a bad thing. Often, debates over it are a stand in for a discussions of reinventing places that have outgrown their old identity and are screaming out to be remade into something better.
But location matters. We must carefully study every site proposed for a high-density project, to decide whether it makes sense given the history, surrounding conditions and future projections.
A prime location in San Diego that is ripe for added density and revitalization is the 1300-plus acre Midway district that currently houses a giant parking lot surrounding the Pechanga Arena, with warehouses, commercial centers and a few strip clubs nearby. In its 2018 Midway-Pacific Highway Community Plan, the city of San Diego recognized the problems facing the location, including “the dominance of auto-oriented land uses…and lack of pedestrian-friendly streets.”
Urban planners and city officials have come to recognize that the outmoded model of sports arenas as “spaceships” surrounded by a sea of emptiness, or, parking lots, must be left in the dustbin of 20th century auto-centric urban or suburban development.
The design model for the future, in California and across the planet, is to create mixed-use villages or innovation districts; one version of this kind of community is an entertainment complex or sports arena that anchors a larger mixed-use development plan.
In effect, a “village” emerges, one that provides affordable housing, creates jobs and preserves open space. Examples in the U.S. include Columbus, Ohio’s Nationwide Arena, St. Louis’ Energizer Park, Detroit’s Woodward Square and Cincinnati’s riverfront revitalization, to name a few.
San Diego correctly diagnosed that after some fifty years, its Pechanga Arena (originally built in 1966) district had fallen into precisely that obsolete “spaceship” syndrome and outlived its usefulness. The new community plan calls for a series of future village development projects in the area, the centerpiece of which would be the 49-acre “Sports Arena Community Village.”
This plan ultimately led to a city-led process to invite development proposals, and eventually the city’s selection of the current mixed use Midway Rising project. It proposes building a walkable community with a mix of some 4,200 residential units, with half of them reserved for people earning below 80% of the area income, along with a new arena, 14 acres of parks, and 130,000 feet of commercial space.
The main opposition to the Midway Rising project has been channeled through a citizen group called Save Our Access, which is committed to fighting higher density in the coastal zone. Their website is replete with incorrect generalizations about the Midway case. For instance, they claim that it will be “luxury high rises” (although 50% of the housing will be affordable), and that the alternative should be something called “River Trail Park”, which ignores the reality that the adopted community plan calls specifically for a mixed-use urban development on that site, not just open space.
But the real sticking point for the city (and latched onto by Save Our Access) is an outdated height limit that was put in place in 1972, when a referendum created a 30-foot height restriction for an area the city called the “Coastal Height Limit Overlay Zone,”
In retrospect, I would argue that the Sports Arena-Midway district should never have been part of that “coastal overlay zone”, since it already had the Sports Arena, and was becoming a major commercial zone even back in 1972. In any case, realizing this, in 2022, the city, placed Measure C before voters; the measure recommended removing the 30-foot height limit only in the Midway District. It won with 51% voter approval.
Save Our Access (SOA) had sued the city over the Midway Pacific Highway Community Plan’s density objectives in 2018 and lost. They then shifted gears, and challenged Measure C in 2022, and again the trial court ruled in favor of the city. SOA appealed, and back in October, the 4th District Court of Appeals shifted the momentum, and ruled against the city, claiming it violated the CEQA laws because its 2022 ballot measure did not analyze “the environmental impacts of taller buildings,” for voters. The state Supreme Court rejected the city’s appeal of that ruling a few weeks ago.
Much of the reporting on this outcome has characterized it as a huge setback or even a failure on the part of the city. I don’t agree. For one, in fact, the city did carry out an environmental impact study that touches on the very ecological concerns the court is calling out. The city’s environmental analysis in the 2018 Community Plan, which they updated, found the impacts of greater density in all four areas (noise, air quality, etc.) to be “less than significant.” That finding should surely be revisited.
But more than that, San Deigns should be celebrating the way Midway Rising embraces sustainable design innovation.
The project’s architects, Safdie Rabines, solved one of the biggest design challenges the plan faced — creating a livable new community with a potentially intrusive entertainment complex smack in the middle of it.
They moved the entertainment complex from the center of the site to the farthest point east, and then, use a village-centric open space element at the west facing side (what the plan is calling “The Square”) to create a design buffer between the arena and the residential-commercial blocks that make up the rest of the new community.
More importantly, relocating the arena to the eastern edge of the site also cleverly nudged it closer to another critical piece of the design plan- the site’s proximity to the Old Town Transit Station, about three quarters of a mile away. The city will, to be sure, need to do some work to create both a pedestrian pathway connecting these two sites, and a shuttle service between them.
That will allow a substantial number of the 10,000 or so new residents — and thousands more who attend events at the arena — to rely on the trolley, positively impacting air pollution and noise by reducing auto travel.
Second, Safdie Rabines has designed a medium density village that protects ecology and quality of life. It does this by creating giant blocks of both residential and residential-commercial development that completely surrounded by open space in the form of greenways, promenades and a main linear “plaza” that connects the western and eastern parts of the village, with shops and restaurants that will activate this corridor. Further, the masterplan weaves in bicycle and pedestrian linkages to the San Diego River and Mission Bay. Its 14-plus acres of parks and linear promenades offer public spaces for the surrounding San Diego community.
The Midway Rising “village” that emerges in this plan reminds me of the best qualities of innovation in Ildefonso Cerda’s pedestrian-friendly urban design plan for the Eixample (Expansion) of Barcelona, Spain, with superblocks near the globally recognized, icon of walkability- the Ramblas. Also, the Safdie Rabines plan minimizes the presence of cars by limiting their access into each building to the perimeter, while all the interior roads and greenways are for pedestrians and bicycles only (except for emergency fire truck access).
The overemphasis on “tall buildings” by the courts and groups like Save Our Access strikes me as misleading. The Midway Rising masterplan offers mostly eight story residential buildings, not out of scale for this setting, and hardly the evil “high-rise nightmare” portrayed by naysayers.
The arena building is slightly higher, since the nearby San Diego River’s marshy land around the site doesn’t allow for building below grade, and the height meets the projected size needed to house 16,000 spectators. In any case, visibility studies indicate that Midway Rising won’t significantly block views toward the sea from surrounding neighborhoods.
There are places along the coast where we should be careful about building eight or ten story high-rise buildings. The Midway Sports Arena site is not one of them. Rather, this can be a place that celebrates the fact that climate change and density are not mutually exclusive. And that San Diego’s coast can add affordable housing in the right locations.
Lawrence Herzog is a writer, photographer and lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at UC San Diego. He has also been an urban planning/design professor and served as coordinator/chair of the Graduate Program in City Planning at SDSU. Herzog has written or edited 12 books about cities, sustainable development and urban planning.
