Otay Mesa and San Ysidro: New Hopes, Old Neglect : Border Town Feels Strains of Apartments, Ethnic Mix

Andrea Palacios Skorepa--born and raised in this community hard by the Mexican border--remembers when she joined VISTA, a domestic version of the Peace Corps, and was sent to help the people of the impoverished south Texas town of San Benito.

“I looked around and I said, ‘This place is like the place where I grew up.’ That’s one of the reasons I came back,” said Skorepa, who today is executive director of Casa Familiar, a counseling, social services and juvenile diversion agency working in the heart of this community’s old residential neighborhood.

What Skorepa returned to is a community that historically has been the most neglected in San Diego, both benignly and purposely.

“There was a great reluctance by officials in San Diego to view the border as an opportunity,” said former San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock. “San Diego was an Anglo town and that was the psychology.”

In some ways, little has changed here. Twenty-nine years after San Diego annexed the 2,000-person town by running a political umbilical cord 14 miles down the middle of San Diego Bay (past two other cities) to lay claim to the border crossing, San Ysidro has yet to produce its own home-grown council member.

The vast majority of residents here--84%--are of Mexican descent, and a third of them speak only Spanish, government studies show. On average, people in town earn much less than people in the rest of the city and in San Diego County.

For example, a new economic study done by the city says that the average San Ysidro family has a yearly median income of $13,186, compared to $26,095 for a typical family in San Diego and $27,128 for county families. Compounding this disparity is the rate at which household incomes are increasing. In this area, San Ysidro lags far behind the city and county.

Other statistics are equally grim. In 1980, nearly four of 10 San Ysidro households fell below the federal government’s poverty level of an $8,414 annual income for a family of four. While the trend in the rest of San Diego is toward older and smaller households, in San Ysidro it’s the opposite. Here the population is characterized by young and large families, with an average household in 1985 composed of nearly four people with a median age of 21.

Despite all that, however, San Ysidro is in the midst of a transition, one that simultaneously holds out the promise of changing for the better and the risk of making matters worse.

Pushed along by a development boom that is adding 1,000 new apartments, town houses and condominiums a year, the community is growing faster than city officials ever expected. The population is now estimated at 16,200, and the latest city projections are that San Ysidro will be home to 45,000 people by the year 2000, an average yearly growth rate that far outpaces the rest of San Diego and the county over the same period.

But some people, such as Doug Perry, who is chairman of the local citizens advisory planning group, worry that most of the new multifamily housing will perpetuate the influx of low-income households.

“We’re trying to prevent what is happening . . . the construction of large, dense apartment developments,” said Perry. “We don’t want to become the city’s poor section. I know we won’t be a La Jolla, but there’s no reason we can’t have quality housing and keep our old community flavor, that thing that makes us different.”

Part of the problem is that some of the new apartments are being built on property that years ago was zoned for multifamily housing. As a result, a developer can obtain building permits without having to go through the full-scale planning review process, which would allow residents to evaluate the project.

What happens all too often, according to Perry, is that residents are in the dark until they see the tractors show up, and by then it’s too late. Even some developers are critical of the lack of controls.

“I think growth should be better monitored,” said Barry Ross, president of Robinhood Homes Inc., a company that has built houses and apartments in San Ysidro and the South Bay since the 1950s. “It can start with the City Council. A lot of junk is going up. . . . It’s up to the city to do something. They are under a lot of flak and rightfully so.”

The new apartments and the people they bring are putting a strain on the town’s streets and schools. Officials from the Sweetwater Union High School District, for example, have called on the City Council to impose a building moratorium in San Ysidro because of school overcrowding.

Aside from such obvious growth impacts, there is another, more subtle, strain on the community. Growth is bringing new people and adding a new ethnic mix to the population, a combination that isn’t necessarily welcome.

“You have to understand that the majority of people living here don’t know there is such a thing as a planning council and those kinds of things,” Skorepa said. “They see the apartments and new people and suddenly there’s a lot of different people to absorb. There’s a feeling by a lot of people that we’re being invaded . . . as more blacks and Anglos move in.”

Skorepa said she is among the minority who view the construction of new apartments as something positive in the long run. “We see people who come in and who need housing,” she said. “They live 10 to a room, and a two-bedroom apartment is beyond their wildest fantasies. The apartments represent hopes for them.”

Opinions also vary about another change that is set to occur a few miles to the east: the development of Otay Mesa.

Planned and touted as the new home for San Diego’s industrial growth, the mesa is expected to generate tens of thousands of jobs over the next 30 to 50 years. Most of those jobs will require the kind of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who dominate the San Ysidro work force.

The Otay Mesa Community Plan, as well as city officials and developers, all point to the advantages Otay Mesa will bring to San Ysidro. “People have been asking when we’re going to bring jobs to the south . . . because so far we haven’t,” Councilman Bill Cleator said during a City Council discussion in March of development on the mesa. In the discussion, Cleator called the mesa “a gold mine.”

“I have a dual feeling,” Perry said. “What’s going to happen in Otay Mesa is tremendous and we want to be included, but I think they are leaving us out.” He and others are trying to develop ideas--such as job training for residents and a new border road--to ensure that the town gets its share of the new jobs.

Without such programs and specialized help, “We’ll end up sweeping the floors and cleaning up, like we always do,” Skorepa said.

Some people believe that, along with more jobs and better-quality residential buildings, what’s needed in San Ysidro is a basic change of attitude.

“There are people in San Ysidro who still think of themselves as the stepchildren to the rest of the city,” said Danny Martinez, who monitors the town as an aide to Councilman Uvaldo Martinez (They are not related.). “They can’t afford to think that way and belabor the point or they’ll be passed by.”

To help the town deal with the changes, the American Institute of Architects, responding to a request by city and county officials, is sending what’s called a Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team here this summer to identify growth-related and urban design problems and offer possible solutions.

Later this year, a half-mile section of San Ysidro Boulevard--the town’s old and narrow main street now inundated with garish money-exchange stores--is slated to undergo the first of a $4-million to $5-million widening and face lift.

And $300,000 is being spent on planning for the town’s first auditorium and cultural center.

“Left alone, San Ysidro was always going to be a small town,” Danny Martinez said. “But that’s not the reality anymore. What we have to deal with is how are we going to accommodate it (growth). We want to upgrade the quality of life and also have it benefit San Diego as a whole. Changes are already in place and you can’t turn back the wheels.”