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Your Community Planning Group Needs You!
By Jaye MacAskill
March/April 2019
 With San Diego's legendary weather and glorious coastal setting, the demand for housing in our city will always be on the rise. As San Diego evolves to meet the needs of its growing population, residents who care about historic preservation must take action to safeguard one of the city's most important assets: its unique and irreplaceable architectural heritage.
San Diego's latest growth spurt is having a significant negative impact on many desirable older neighborhoods, such as downtown, Hillcrest, North Park, University Heights, Normal Heights, Golden Hill, and Barrio Logan. New mass-density condominium towers and apartment complexes are rapidly making permanent changes to the landscape and skyline. Meanwhile, many of our earliest buildings and places that create character and serve as important links to individual community histories are suddenly threatened or being lost.
If you are concerned by what you see happening in and around your neighborhood, one of the most effective ways a citizen can help is by volunteering to serve on a Community Planning Group. Each area of the city has one that acts as an official advisory board to the City of San Diego on issues including plan updates, zoning amendments, and development projects. Most of these volunteer boards meet monthly. Several communities, such as Uptown and North Park, have ad hoc and subcommittees that dive deeper into specific topics, such as historic preservation and community plan updates.
Community planning groups can be very effective, but the City's routine failure to listen to their recommendations is one of their greatest challenges. Also, many planning groups are in desperate need of new members. If you are passionate about the place where you live, SOHO encourages you to make time to attend local planning group meetings, have your voice heard, and, most importantly, consider nominating yourself to serve a term on the board. Planning groups can be a vital instrument of our democracy, but public participation is absolutely necessary for them to function as they are supposed to.
As community planning groups struggle to fill elected positions, their authority is being attacked by forces aiming to eliminate them and to limit as much community input as possible. This orchestrated push is coming from developers via Councilmember Scott Sherman, who recently chaired a City audit committee criticizing the groups for lacking transparency and needing "reforms." A recent San Diego Union-Tribute article about the audit failed to point out that Sherman has a long track record of being unfriendly to the public input process, and has proven himself over and over again to be particularly hostile to historic preservation. He has gone so far as to advocate irresponsibly for the abolishment of the Mills Act.
In addition to Sherman's antics, community planning groups face another, possibly even more insidious attack. Developers are attempting to undermine the groups' effectiveness by nominating themselves to serve on boards and by encouraging their employees to join their own neighborhood planning groups to advocate on behalf of private business interests. To stave off this trend, community planning groups need to have a diverse group of members who responsibly represent the interests of all residents and local independent business owners. Property ownership is not required. Anyone who lives or operates a business within a planning district has a right to attend meetings and to run for an elected position.
To protect not only our city's architectural heritage but also its democracy, citizens must get directly involved with Community Planning Groups and not let the personal agendas of developers and politicians take over. Please consider joining your Planning Group to make a difference by supporting historic preservation.
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