Outside Experts Call For New Deal for San Ysidro

San Diego City Council members were told by a team of urban design experts at a packed San Ysidro meeting Monday night that the city “has failed to provide an equitable distribution of resources to San Ysidro residents.”

The experts, brought together under the co-sponsorship of the American Institute of Architects and the City-County Reinvestment Task Force, have created a plan to revitalize the border suburb by drawing on the complaints and dreams of the community’s residents.

About 250 residents, some of them waving signs calling for better schools, less development and a local voice in San Ysidro’s future, attended the special council meeting in the border community to hear eight outside experts relay the area’s criticisms and dreams. The council accepted the new plan and ordered city officials to begin work on updating the 14-year-old San Ysidro community plan.

The urban design plan paints a picture of a forgotten border community of 20,000 people wedged between two cities of a million or more inhabitants, powerless in the political arena and used as a dumping ground for unwanted projects by the city and county of San Diego.

The team of architects, social scientists and business people drew their proposals for the revitalization of San Ysidro from residents’ own views, which, the study said, go virtually unheeded by local officials. San Ysidro is extremely depressed despite being part of the prosperous Sun Belt city of San Diego, the urban designers said in their report.

Among the major recommendations were:

- Levy a user or transient tax at the border crossing to fund community programs.

- Adopt a moratorium on all projects in San Ysidro until there is more community input into the planning process.

- Create a San Ysidro-Otay Mesa Community College financed by assessments on new South San Diego development.

- Initiate a political awareness campaign to increase the number of voters in the community and the number of San Ysidro residents on San Diego city and county boards, commissions and committees affecting the community.

Currently, the study stressed, “San Ysidro suffers from a position of relative powerlessness with regard either to San Diego or Tijuana. . . . Some citizens cannot vote and others do not vote; in either case, they see the votes of a community of less than 20,000 as having little effect upon decisions made in and by a city of more than a million inhabitants.”

The urban designers also commented: “There is general agreement (San Diego Chamber of Commerce brochures to the contrary) that the educational system is deficient in many respects,” including a 60%-plus dropout rate, overcrowding, inadequate developer fees, little after-school recreation and lack of summer use of school grounds.

“There is no indication that this is a product of bilingualism,” the study reported. It recommended that additional educational opportunities be developed within the community because “education does not guarantee upward mobility, but, as San Ysidro parents know, upward mobility is impossible without education.”

Historical districts designed to prevent the intrusion of unwanted, unaesthetic buildings in the little town’s center and throughout its residential districts gained the design team’s recommendation as did creation of a commercial complex around the U.S. border crossing.

“Multifamily, low-income housing built during the 1980s is seen as unplanned, aesthetically offensive, and symbolic of the ‘dumping’ of low-income people displaced from elsewhere in San Diego County into a town that is incapable of absorbing them,” the report stated. Historic districts were recommended--”not to make ‘El Pueblito’ a quaint historical museum” but to “shut down inappropriate and destructive new residential construction; restore dignity to commercial areas along San Ysidro Boulevard; provide an opportunity for a major new village plaza, and put control of development back into the hands of the people who live here.”

Hopes that high unemployment rates in San Ysidro can be erased through employment from tourism and maquiladoras (trans-border assembly plants) are not borne out by economic studies, the report stated. Both offer low-paying jobs, not sufficient to provide the wages needed to live in the San Ysidro community, according to the study.

“New jobs created by maquila activity that will be located in San Ysidro will be virtually non-existent,” the report said, because the assembly plants hiring 80% of the workers will be located south of the border and will pay minimal wages, averaging 80 cents an hour in March, 1986.

Funds to finance the revitalization of San Ysidro should come from the town’s unique location at the world’s busiest border crossing, the report stated. Among suggested revenue sources:

- A toll on tourists entering the United States by car at San Ysidro.

- A tax on money exchanges in San Ysidro casas de cambios.

- More aggressive marketing of parking in the United States for tourists visiting Mexico.

- A tax on auto insurance purchased for travel in Mexico.

- Increased and more visible tourist facilities to attract visitors who wish to shop and visit in Mexico but would prefer to stay overnight in the United States.

In the political arena, the design team recommended creation of a satellite City Hall in San Ysidro, removal of the at-large election process to allow San Ysidro to select its own representatives, and creation of a San Ysidro Advisory Board with the power to influence San Diego city and county officials on San Ysidro issues.

At present, “of the 42 appointed boards and commissions, not one single member is a San Ysidro resident,” the report noted.

The Regional Urban Design Assistance Team spent four days exploring San Ysidro and environs and on two of those days took public testimony from San Ysidro residents. The team was led by architect Ben Cunningham of Houston and included five other members from around the country.