President’s Corner: Addressing UH’s Housing and Infrastructure Challenges
We’re coming up on our busy events season in UH. First, we’re going to be enjoying the Hsi Fang Temple’s Under the Moon Lantern Walk Through the Heights on October 3, the UH Garden Club’s Pickling Party workshop on October 11, followed by the UH Fall Festival on October 18 which will be the biggest event of the year. Ending the month will be trick or treating on Park Boulevard on October 25 and, of course, the famous Halloween on Maryland Street will delight kids and adults alike on October 31. UHCA is proud to help bring our neighborhood together by helping with and/or producing these events.
UHCA, as part of the Community Coalition of University Heights, is part of a bigger conversation around the changing housing landscape in UH. We are taking a slightly different approach than other organizations in San Diego—we are saying “YES” to more affordable housing and at the same time challenging the results we have seen in our neighborhood, “What have all of the efforts and programs to address this problem accomplished?” Because if what we have been trying for more than a decade hasn’t resulted in positive change, are there other approaches we should be exploring?
We’re also asking hard questions about how our infrastructure has to evolve to support more residents, how zoning changes impact our existing diverse mix of single- and multi-family housing, and—perhaps most importantly—where are our residents in their 20s and 30s, which make up just over 50% of our community’s population, going to live and potentially buy a home? And is affordable housing being spread out across all of San Diego versus being concentrated in our already intensely dense area? We’re asking all of that while striving to maintain the elements that made UH the attractive neighborhood we all wanted to move to in the first place.
We have two articles in this issue talking about how development and policies are impacting affordable housing, highlighting how current programs not only aren’t resulting in more affordable housing, but are leaving an entire generation with limited options, effectively creating a “renter’s prison” with high rental costs and little-to-no hope of affording a first home in the neighborhood.
In the coming months, we’re going to be featuring guest articles talking about innovative “out of the box” solutions, and try to spark a community-wide conversation about what we can do on our own and together to make a difference. I’m not naïve enough to think we can solve this problem in the short term with some articles and a few rallies, but I firmly believe that if we band together, we may be able to make things even a little better. It has to start somewhere and while we may not necessarily be able to move a mountain, maybe we can make a start by making a few nice hills.
UH Population by Age from Statistical Atlas 2020
