Growth, Traffic, Airport Are Issues for ‘90s : Future: High housing costs may send workers south of the border in search of affordable housing in the new decade.

People are lined up on the freeway, trying to get to work from San Diego’s most popular new suburb--Mexico.

It’s 7:15 a.m. In 45 minutes, you and thousands of others will have beaten the morning rush--you hope--only to sit at your desk for eight hours before returning to the San Diego/Tijuana/drive-time fray.

The scenario is more likely than you might imagine.

Thousands may work in “America’s Finest City” but they won’t be able to live here. Those who cannot afford California may look in desperation to Baja California, or points many miles east of here.

Welcome to San Diego in the 1990s.

The place where the population will continue to boom; where the Hispanic and Asian communities will gain increasing prominence; where the work force will undergo sweeping changes. It’s the place with more traffic, more smog, and a vexing need to resolve such problems as what to do with the airport and how to build more jails.

With a population expected to reach nearly 2.8 million in the year 2000, growing 16% from today’s 2.4 million, San Diego County will continue its urbanization curve through the 1990s, demographers predict.

Even more stunning growth is expected in the San Diego Unified School District. From 1986 to the turn of the century, the number of students is expected to increase 46% to 165,000. The largest increase is expected to be in the high-school population.

But planners say those increasing numbers of people will be increasingly squeezed for places to live--leading to higher prices, vanishing open space and the emergence of new suburbs.

Max Schetter, director for the Economic Research Bureau of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce, said the county growth will produce surprising shifts and turns, not the least of which is the “Tijuana factor,” in which not only do Mexicans continue to migrate to the United States to find jobs, but U.S. residents move in the other direction, with affordable housing in mind.

The poor and lower-middle class might settle in Mexico only because the average price of a San Diego home may be prohibitive by the year 2000, outstripping gains in income.

The average household income is expected to rise 90% during the decade, to $92,400. But the average home price is expected to rise by 124%, to $439,500.

“The huge numbers of Hispanics and Asians coming into the county will work in San Diego but may live in Mexico,” Schetter said. “As housing becomes less affordable, they’ll have to consider Tijuana, or points considerably east of here.

“People will want to work here but can’t afford to live here. It could affect all ethnic groups of the lower middle class (including non-Hispanic whites).”

As workers line up at the border, creating massive traffic jams in an effort to get to work, Schetter predicts, the county will need new border crossings.

Schetter and other experts say that,

except for the upper class, those who wish to move within the county--”to trade up”--will be severely limited in doing so.

Residents will have massive equity in their homes, but it won’t do them much good unless they move to another region, because all the other houses in San Diego County will have gone up just as much.

In response to the demand for housing, during the 14 years from 1986 to 2000, the number of housing units is expected to increase by 37%, to more than 1 million. Vacant land is expected to undergo a corresponding shrinkage of 100,000 acres, a loss of about 10%.

Ethnic Makeup

Given the press that the increasing Hispanic population has received, it is not surprising to most San Diegans that continuing migration and high birth rates will mean that the number of Hispanics in the county will more than double, to 700,000, from 1980 to the turn of the century.

But what confounds even some demographers is that the Asian population will more than triple during that time, to 356,600. The change was not foreseen until recently.

But Richard Madsen, a sociologist at UC San Diego and contributor to the book, “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life,” said the Asian explosion makes perfect sense when considering its sources: Hong Kong, Indochina and other cities in California.

Control of Hong Kong reverts from the British to the Chinese in 1997, so Madsen believes refugees will leave Hong Kong--San Diego being only one destination--over a gradual 7-year period. He believes the evacuation of Indochinese from Cambodia and Vietnam has by no means ceased. He sees greater numbers of Japanese and Koreans arriving in San Diego because of its promise of opportunity.

“You have as many as 50,000 people a year leaving Hong Kong now,” he said. “Plus, the Hong Kong government recently turned away thousands of Indochinese refugees. They had to return to Vietnam. Sooner or later, some of those will come here.”

Madsen sees the West Coast as becoming “much more multiethnic in the ‘90s.

“Every generation has had its share of immigrants, but clearly the most visible immigrants in this generation will be Asians and Hispanics. It presents certain challenges.

“America has long been dominated by European values. The mentality has been WASPish or European, and that may change. Americans have tended to be more open than some societies, but on the other hand, this nasty streak of racism seems to be coming back. I thought racism had waned after the civil rights movement, but that isn’t the case at all.”

The non-Hispanic white population--in 1988, 67% of the county’s residents--is expected to fall to 58.5% by the year 2000. The county’s black population is expected to stay about the same, at nearly 6%.

Neither the San Diego Police Department nor the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department keep statistics on so-called hate crimes, except to say that they rose significantly in the 1980s. Madsen fears the county’s clash of cultures may ignite more in the future.

He noted, for instance, that the number of Asians entering the state’s elite University of California system increased dramatically during the 1980s, with the trend expected to flex itself more strongly during the next decade. As minorities win out in academic and professional challenges, “it’s not hard to see,” he said, why tensions will be inflamed.

Age

The aging baby boomers will play a major role in making San Diego an older county in the year 2000.

In 1980, the median age was 28.8 years; by the year 2000, it is projected to be 35.8--just about middle age.

Jeff Tayman, senior planner with the San Diego Assn. of Governments (SANDAG), said that change will affect the make-up of families, putting older parents at home with their children. “The baby boomers are having kids a lot later,” he said. “We’ll have a lot more parents, 50 and 60 years old, with kids home. It’s kind of terrifying when you think about it. We expect to see a tremendous increase in high school students in the Nineties.”

Madsen, the sociologist, said older parents may be a change for the better.

“Such parents will probably be more mature, more comfortable materially and thus better able to take care of children,” he said. “I see it as a plus. They may feel more sympathetic to paying for education, as much as they do, say, for health care.”

But those older parents are expected to face double burdens--caring for their own parents at the same time that they care for their children.

As life expectancy increases, the number of double-generation elderly is expected to increase--”younger” senior citizens in their 60s, for example, caring for parents who are in their 80s.

“We’ll see a significant increase in the elderly,” Tayman said.

Employment

Tayman predicts dramatic changes in the county’s work force. He said that more than half the new workers will be female, and more than 60% of new workers will be minorities. He said that only 15% of new workers will be white, non-Hispanic males.

Because of the increasing entry of women into the workplace, he foresees child care becoming perhaps the most major employment issue of the 1990s. In addition, the new ethnic makeup will make affirmative action a major issue of the new decade, he said.

“We expect to see a lot of discrimination suits.”

Those workers are expected to go to jobs increasingly centered in the high-tech arena and focused more and more away from the military.

Recent studies of employment trends predict the number of direct military jobs staying the same in the county through the year 2000. But Schetter said those figures might have been outdated by a combination of glasnost and the federal deficit.

“It’s a trend that’s been growing for a long time,” he said. “At the end of World War II, 70% of all county jobs were oriented to the military. Now, the figure is somewhere near 20%.”

Even if the number of military workers remains the same, it will be dwarfed by expected increases in other fields. For example, the number of retail service employees will increase from 1986 to the turn of the century from 141,069 to 203,307. Manufacturing, which employed 127,893 people in 1986, is expected to provide jobs for 200,000 by the end of the new decade.

Overall, the county’s work force is expected to increase during that time by 50% and almost 500,000 jobs--none of those in the armed services.

And very little of that increase--139, to be exact--is expected to fall in the agricultural category, a sign of increasing urbanization in the county.

Schetter said the county is becoming more high-tech, more white-collar, more business-oriented and much less dependent on the military.

No sleepy little Navy town any more; no rural backwater in the shadow of Los Angeles.

Transportation

The dramatic increase in the number of workers also puts pressure on the county to find a way of getting those people to work.

“Because of the growth of the work force, the increase in traffic will be much greater than the growth of the population,” Tayman said.

Tayman said San Diego’s “drive-alone” compulsion has to cease, or the rush-hour commute will be “horrendous,” on the order, say, of Houston or Los Angeles. He said the current average of 1.1 San Diegans commuting to work each day by car must increase to 1.5 or 1.7 by the end of the decade to avoid disastrous traffic snarls. As a result, Tayman said car-pooling may evolve from the realm of “polite suggestion” to a legislative mandate born of necessity.

Bill Tuomi, SANDAG’s transportation expert, said San Diego County has 56% more traffic today than it did nine years ago. He said new freeways, extensions of old ones, an expanded trolley line and a commuter rail system through North County will ease the traffic burden, but the key is boosting the passenger load per car.

Tuomi said that 55 million people ride the county’s trolley or bus lines each year; the number “needs to reach” 95 million by 1995. In the 1990s, the trolley’s eastern end, now in El Cajon, will stretch as far as Santee. It will move north, from downtown to Old Town and will soon service the new Convention Center as well.

Tuomi said the No. 1 traffic hot spot of the 1990s is Interstate 5, specifically the junction of Interstates 5 and 805.

“Interstate 5 carries more than 200,000 cars a day now,” Tuomi said. “In 1980, the number was 100,000, so it’s doubled in a decade. We’re expecting 310,000 cars a day on I-5 by the year 2000. That’s definitely a source of concern.

“Interstate 8 is our most heavily traveled freeway, handling about 270,000 cars a day. We expect to hold at that number until the year 2000. The traffic growth of East County is no longer as fast or fierce as up north. We expect the extension of California 52, which now goes from I-5 to Tierrasanta, to be extended to Santee and to ease the west-east burden dramatically.”

The other major transportation conflict of the 1990s will be the airport.

Jack Koerper, SANDAG’s special projects director, said the question of what to do with Lindbergh Field will be resolved in the Nineties, one way or the other. If it isn’t, if procrastination rules, then that in itself will be a decision, Koerper said: “Some people don’t act until there’s a crisis, so maybe we’ll have one.”

The Navy objects to making Miramar Naval Air Station the site of a new regional air facility, although the air station comes up repeatedly among the panels charged with making a decision on a new location. The Navy says the air station is not now and never will be available to civilian use.

Koerper sees potential crises as an air crash in the downtown area, traffic so ugly on Harbor Drive that “you’ll have to arrive two hours early to catch your flight.”

“Or we might have our air-carrier service curtailed because of use restrictions on the runway,” he said. “Lindbergh might be taxed with one big convention after another coming in to use the Convention Center. We’ll find we don’t have the airport to accommodate the Convention Center, and then we’ll do something.”

The Prognosis

Tayman and others say San Diego “will be more big-city in the years to come,” taking on the good, and the bad, that come with high-level urban living.

We may see a downtown sports arena, and a professional basketball or hockey team to play in it; we should see at least one more Super Bowl (probably in ‘93); at least one baseball All-Star Game (for sure in ‘92) and maybe another World Series.

Tayman and others think planning is sophisticated enough here to prevent San Diego from becoming a crude clone of its northern neighbor, Los Angeles.

“Ironically,” said Schetter of the Chamber of Commerce, “our organization was formed in 1870, and the issues they were talking about then--housing, transportation, water, commerce, jobs, crimes . . . are the same ones we’re talking about now. We seem to have done pretty well between then and now. I see no reason why we can’t move forward with hope.”

On a Growth Curve: PROFILE OF SAN DIEGO COUNTY

An older and higher-income population of San Diegans will crowd into more expensive houses in the year 2000, planners predict. The county expect to add about 400,000 new residents in the 1990s. While much public attention has been given to the projected rise in Hispanic population, it is the Asian population that will have the largest relative growth.

More people in the same space Population in San Diego County

1960: 1.03 million

1970: 1.36 million

1980: 1.86 million

1989: 2.42 million

2000: 2.78 million

For Sale

INCOME RISING, HOME PRICES RISING MORE Average income per household and average home price: 1980: Average Income Per Household: $28,200 Average Housing Price: $116,800 1990: Average Income Per Household: $48,600 Average Housing Price: $195,700 2000: Average Income Per Household: $92,400 Average Housing Price: $439,500 GRAYING OF THE COUNTY: Median age in San Diego County

1980: 28.8 years

1990: 32.5 years

2000: 35.8 years

COUNTY’S CHANGING FACE

1980 Non-Hispanic White: 73.8% Hispanic: 14.7% Asian/Other: 5.9% Black:5.4%

1988 Non-Hispanic White: 67.0% Hispanic: 18.6% Asian/Other: 8.7% Black: 5.5%

2000 Non-Hispanic White: 58.5% Hispanic: 23.6%

Asian/Other: 12.0% Black: 5.9% Note: Does not equal 100% due to rounding.

Sources: San Diego Assn. of Governments (Sandag); Economic Research Bureau, Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce; Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy, Palo Alto.