San Ysidro, Experts Preparing for Urban Face Lift

Corn Dogs - Raspados - Nachos - Cotton Candy - Pizza

--Bilingual sign over a San Ysidro fast-food shop

Two urban design experts made a sortie by air and land around the border community of San Ysidro, where two cultures flourish and sometimes clash, scouting out the territory before an assault team of professionals descend on the town next month to fashion a model of what the distressed community could become.

Architect Ben Cunningham, senior vice president of one of the country’s largest architectural firms, and David Stea, a Santa Fe, N.M., psychologist, flew in a Sheriff’s Department helicopter over San Ysidro’s crowded housing projects and eavesdropped on the Soccer Field, where Mexican nationals assemble for their trips north to jobs in the United States.

They toured the byways of the South Bay suburb by car, sampled the tastes and smells of a typical Mexican-style restaurant, then ambled along San Ysidro Boulevard, the town’s main street, window-shopping and making mental notes of pluses and minuses.

After a 10-hour stint, with barely a stop to retie a shoelace, the two pronounced San Ysidro “impressive.” Neither the knots of honking traffic nor the busy money-exchange houses along San Ysidro Boulevard impressed the visitors. The residents and merchants of the bicultural community drew praise.

Both men will be among the eight out-of-town experts who will lead locals on a fantasy trip during a four-day planning session starting March 19, a non-stop skull session that will turn out a homemade plan for San Ysidro, developed not by developers but by residents and businessmen who live and work in the South Bay community.

Stea, a veteran of the efforts sponsored by the American Institute of Architects to revitalize aging and depressed communities, sorts the target cities into three categories--hopeless, hopeful and in-between.

Without hesitation, he pegged San Ysidro as a “hopeful” candidate for restoration.

Cunningham, who took time out from his position as managing principal for a $500-million Chrysler Technology Center project in Detroit to volunteer for the San Ysidro effort, was a bit more circumspect.

“We didn’t know what to expect when we came in here,” Cunningham admitted. “We saw a lot. Yes, there are some problems. But this town has a lot going for it. It has leaders with ideas and a lot of energy.”

Cunningham, who will lead the eight-expert Regional Urban Design Assistance Team, said he participates in about one such architectural effort a year and estimated that better than 50% of the communities studied succeed in changing their images and their futures.

But, he warned, “don’t expect to see major changes. The changes don’t always show. They usually are attitudinal changes more than physical ones.”

The outside experts will huddle starting March 19 at the San Ysidro Community Center to produce a computer model of what San Ysidro residents want their community to be.

Ingredients going into the plan will include door-to-door interviews with residents, ideas from local businessmen and public officials, suggestions from a half-dozen Tijuana architects, and even drawings of a future San Ysidro by the town’s elementary school students.

“We don’t come in and tell them how their community should be,” Stea explained. “We listen and look and learn and compile a model of what San Ysidro people want their town to be.”

County Supervisor Leon Williams and San Diego City Councilwoman Celia Ballesteros, who co-chair the City-County Reinvestment Task Force, said that the megabucks that will be needed to revitalize the community will come mainly from private investment but that some government Block Grant money may be available to help turn the depressed San Ysidro economy around.