Safety & beach proximity - Hillcrest, Mission Hills....

[NYSD1995]

Originally Posted by MAK802

I'm just getting acquainted with NP, and visited my friend last week. He lives a few blocks past 805...I'm still not that great getting around there, but you go past the 805 entrance and it's in that area. That area was even worse than where I walked!

That's City Heights. Go check out the neighborhood around Morley Field sometime.. it's very nice.

[MAK802]

Originally Posted by Sassberto

That's City Heights. Go check out the neighborhood around Morley Field sometime.. it's very nice.

Really? He claims he lives in North Park! It's the intersection of University & Swift Avenue.

I'm in Morley Field all the time, for various reasons. It is very nice, we live just a few blocks away.

[NYSD1995]

Originally Posted by MAK802

Really? He claims he lives in North Park! It's the intersection of University & Swift Avenue.

That's City Heights, even though the zip code is 92104. City of San Diego (and most residents) defines the eastern border of North Park to be the 805 freeway.

Western Neighborhood | Neighborhood Maps (http://www.sandiego.gov/neighborhoodmaps/western.shtml - broken link)

[kettlepot]

As Sassberto said, that area is City Heights.

City Heights is such a large and densely populated area (I think the City lists its population as somewhere in the 70,000 range), that City Heights is further subdivided into more areas. If your friend lives south of University Avenue he lives in the Cherokee Point area of City Heights. If he lives north of University Avenue and south of El Cajon Boulevard he lives in the "Corridor" section of City Heights.

Corridor is also the name given to the entire swath of the city of San Diego located between University Avenue on the south and El Cajon Boulevard on the north from Park Boulevard in the west to at least 54th Street on the east. The entire Corridor area was blighted with Huffman Hovels that increased the population density in the area far in excess of the infrastructure of parks, schools, and street parking to support it. Unfortunately, there is no economical means to de-densify an area. The only remedy to this situation is either a large infusion of public funds (yeah, like the city has any of that) to condemn blocks of apartments and tear them down to build schools and parks and such, or to hyper-densify the area even further, with the caveat that the new buildings will make up for the deficiencies of the old apartments lack of parking (meaning expensive underground parking), and that the Development Impact Fees of the new construction will pay for the parks, schools, and firehouses that were never built back in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

The building boom of the 90s and 2000s saw the start of the redevelopment of the western edge of the Corridor area, but it didn't get very far, Georgia Street at the most before it all hit the fan, and a few subsidized buildings around 30th & University.

[NYSD1995]

Originally Posted by kettlepot

Corridor is also the name given to the entire swath of the city of San Diego located between University Avenue on the south and El Cajon Boulevard on the north from Park Boulevard in the west to at least 54th Street on the east.

The density increases as you go east until you reach 100% apartment density in the Colina Del Sol area just west of 54th st. This was the vacant land buffer between the then-exurban areas of Rolando and El Cerrito and San Diego proper. In the 60's it was all scraped and packed with apartments. Crossing 54th st to the east you enter into more typical SoCal suburban development with mostly single-family homes, an occasional spread-out apartment complexes on main street frontage. It is literally a night-and-day change in the housing stock as you cross 54th.

One lesson of the 60's is that apartment density creates blight in middle-class areas, look at nearly anywhere in the central areas of San Diego, Escondido, La Mesa and you can see this in action. Developers rushed in to scrape vacated homes of white-flight families and packed in the low-income apartments. In upper-class areas apartment density is not nearly as negative. My neighbors say that in the 50's and 60's apartments in our area were filled with single young people and students, not a place for lifelong renting or raising entire families.

[kettlepot]

Originally Posted by Sassberto

My neighbors say that in the 50's and 60's apartments in our area were filled with single young people and students, not a place for lifelong renting or raising entire families.

Exactly. The thought was the apartments would be inhabited by starving students who would be sharing rides to school or work, and so there might only be one car per apartment not one car per adult, and that real family people would never be living in apartments so this density didn't require schools or parks for kids.

Such shamefully shortsighted development and planning practices. It was something between recklessly stupid and criminally negligent.

People complain about the large apartment complexes in Mission Valley, but they are night and day better than apartment living in a City Heights 8-pack or 16-pack Huffman. So when the hue and cry goes up about a Quarry Falls mega-development, I wonder in what other ways do these people think reasonably priced housing will be developed in San Diego? Because we have visible evidence of how it SHOULDN'T be done.

I've actually had people tell me that if we don't build the housing, people will be priced out, and they won't come. And to some degree that would happen, but mostly what will happen will be the Manhattanization of San Diego. And by that I don't mean skyscrapers, but the breaking up of existing housing and apartments into ever smaller and smaller units.

[NYSD1995]

Originally Posted by kettlepot

Such shamefully shortsighted development and planning practices. It was something between recklessly stupid and criminally negligent.

Also have to blame the families that abandoned their neighborhoods and sold their homes to developers .... white flight was mostly hysteria.. there were no race riots in San Diego.

[AnUnidentifiedMale]

In my opinion, the biggest crime in San Diego's housing history was the decision to allow cheap apartment buildings to replace so many of the Craftsman houses in North Park, University Heights, and Normal Heights. Imagine how charming those districts could have been if they had been allowed to remain intact. Instead, they look like crap with those "lovely" parking lots that sit right in front of the cheap apartment buildings. Just hideous.

[sdurbanite]

Originally Posted by AnUnidentifiedMale

In my opinion, the biggest crime in San Diego's housing history was the decision to allow cheap apartment buildings to replace so many of the Craftsman houses in North Park, University Heights, and Normal Heights. Imagine how charming those districts could have been if they had been allowed to remain intact. Instead, they look like crap with those "lovely" parking lots that sit right in front of the cheap apartment buildings. Just hideous.

Tell me about it! I always imagine what it would be like if all of the neighborhoods you mentioned were left intact

Since the damage is already done, my wish would be to replace all of the nasty apartment complexes with rowhouses/brownstones/lofts (San Diego-style, of course). And how about clearing a few lots and creating pocket parks instead? Big dreams, I know.