Tijuana’s Advocate for Change Brings Hope to a Restive City

Carlos Graizbord used to shield his eyes when he drove by the dusty squatter settlements clinging precariously to the hillsides of this border city.

The dirt roads, the makeshift homes pieced together out of tires and plywood, the chaotic jumble of neighborhoods that sprouted of their own accord--all of it was too much.

It wasn’t just the immense poverty that depressed him. It was that fixing the untamed colonias was up to him. As the new director of Tijuana’s Institute for Municipal Planning, Graizbord had to find a way to bring order to one of North America’s most unruly cities.

Three years later, the illegal shantytowns are still there, but the determined planning director no longer averts his gaze. His short tenure so far has given him hope that transforming this sprawling metropolis--in ways both small and large--is indeed possible.

“There is no bigger challenge,” he said. “Maybe Calcutta. But I do believe that if we persist with our effort, we can change the city, slowly.”

For evidence, he looks to Avenida Revolucion, the mostly seedy downtown strip of bars and clubs that is slowly taking on the appearance of a pleasant pedestrian promenade.

After the city began planting rows of neatly trimmed shrubs, widening the sidewalks and installing benches, the local merchants began cleaning up the facades of their shops.

Next, Graizbord dreams of rehabilitating the Alamar River, a polluted waterway that cuts through the northeast of the city, into a vibrant 7-mile greenbelt with gardens, recreation and housing. And he hopes to make the poor colonias that have cropped up all over the city into orderly villages with paved roads, running water and community centers.

It’s a lot to expect in a place where a third of the city lacks basic services like sewage lines, where half the new homes go up unapproved, where officials worry about running out of water in three years.

But Graizbord, a Harvard-educated urban planner who has worked for the cities of Riverside and San Diego, said he now believes that small initial achievements can be followed by greater ones.

“I’m not quixotic and naive,” he insisted. “This is extremely complicated and difficult, but it’s possible.”

Tijuana officials and urban planners on both sides of the border praise Graizbord for bringing badly needed optimism and vision to a restive city.

But high hopes alone cannot overcome unpredictable politics, a sluggish bureaucracy and a sheer lack of money.

The planning institute gets by on a $1-million annual budget, just enough to pay the salaries of its 40 architects, engineers and urban planners.

More often than not, Graizbord has to try to raise money from the private sector to bring his plans to fruition, such as a statue commemorating local teachers.

He’s also managed to launch the streetscape project along Avenida Revolucion and add traffic improvements to a busy intersection.

“We don’t know when he will be able to realize his dreams for the city,” said Jose Luis Castro, director of the urban planning department at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana. “I think the attitude of Carlos is a good one. There has to be optimism about bettering the city.”

*

Tijuana began as an arid border outpost in 1889, but only truly began to grow after World War II. The city’s population has about doubled every decade since then, fueled by migrants seeking work in the United States or in the city’s foreign-owned maquiladora manufacturing plants.

Tijuana is now a city of more than 1.2 million--the exact figure is difficult to ascertain because of the number of illegal settlements and migrants passing through. With growth at twice the national average, the city population is projected to reach 2.5 million by 2020.

For the first time, city officials are trying to figure out how to manage that growth.

“Planning is a concept that in Mexico and Tijuana has not been very present,” said Tijuana Mayor Jesus Gonzalez.

Three years ago, the City Council established the Institute for Municipal Planning as a quasi-independent agency, designed to free planning from the wild swings of Mexican politics.

Graizbord, 58, was chosen as its first director.

A native of Guadalajara, he studied architecture at the National University in Mexico City, and then urban and regional planning at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. He was doing long-range planing for the city of San Diego when the job opened up in Tijuana.

“I do love difficult things,” he said.

Every day he makes the commute from his manicured San Diego neighborhood of Scripps Ranch to the sparse two-story offices of the institute, located on a frenetic Tijuana avenue. (He said he has remained in San Diego because his wife works there.)

Graizbord’s shirt pocket is always stuffed with half a dozen pens and pencils, which he frequently yanks out to illustrate an idea for visitors.

His wife, Carmen, says ruefully that he regularly springs out of bed at 6 a.m. on the weekends and rushes to the computer to e-mail his staff a new idea.

But he loses sleep too--about last year’s severe budget cuts and the fear that a new city administration might not be as supportive of long-range planning.

“Today, I’m in an optimistic mood,” he told a visitor with a grin on a recent afternoon, his thick glasses perched on his forehead. “Next time you come by, who knows?”

Graizbord’s efforts so far have earned him kudos from city leaders anxious to show investors and tourists a remade Tijuana.

“He has worked very hard against the odds, breaking the bureaucracy of the government to achieve these projects,” said Jose Galicot, owner of a telecommunications company and president of a new organization working to improve the city’s image. “There are many people in Tijuana who talk and don’t do a thing. Graizbord is a thinker and a doer.”

But getting things done is not always easy.

*

On a recent spring afternoon, Graizbord navigated the jumble of unmarked streets that make up Tijuana’s downtown, pointing out the peeling billboards, the heavy electrical wires sagging in front of windows and the cacophony of signs that leap out from record shops, bars, souvenir emporiums and cheap motels.

“You see all that mess?” he said, exasperated. “Let’s clean up the signs, put the electrical wires underground and add trees. Just beautifying it will have a big effect.”

Graizbord believes that simple steps like these will act as “detonators,” slowly altering the way people perceive the city and their investment in it.

At the end of Avenida Revolucion, he pointed with pride to the rows of neat shrubs that line a few blocks of the street.

Eventually, Graizbord hopes to extend the streetscape project down the length of the downtown avenue to the international border and, one day, to a pedestrian walkway that would link to a shopping mall north of the border.

For now, Avenida Revolucion dead-ends at the corrugated metal fence.

But Graizbord hopes that the modest beginnings on the avenue eventually will lead to grander transformations.

“The challenge is to fight against the backlog,” he said. “We won’t rehabilitate the entire city. But we can make it a better place to live.”

If city officials have any complaints about Graizbord, it’s that they want him to get a long-range plan for the city done faster. They are convinced that any hope of controlling the area’s growth lies in targeting new development.

“There are two Tijuanas,” said Manuel Guevara, the city’s secretary for urban growth. “The one already built, where our parents and grandparents live, and the second Tijuana, the one that will be built in the next 20 years. We need to build that one better.”

Graizbord said he understands those pressures, but he’s worried that some city leaders are unrealistic about the pace of change.

“People can’t expect quick results,” he said. “This isn’t a tanning bed.”

Over on Tijuana’s east side, Graizbord wants to launch a $5-million pilot project to demonstrate how the city’s impoverished neighborhoods can be improved. About 5,000 people now live in ramshackle houses that make up the hillside colonia called 10 de Mayo. Graizbord’s staff, with the help of planners from UC San Diego, have outlined a project that includes paving the streets, installing water and sewage lines and rehabilitating a dry and trash-laden creek bed into a lush neighborhood park.

The institute has approached the nearby maquiladoras, which employ many of the residents, to invest in the project. So far, one company has agreed to consider the idea.

Graizbord hopes to connect the 10 de Mayo park to a larger ecological preserve along the Alamar River, a tributary of the Tijuana River that frequently floods during heavy rains.

He envisions building riverfront parks and housing, and even a botanical garden showcasing various flora from around Mexico--plans that evoke American environmentalists’ hopes for resurrecting the Los Angeles River. The price tag for the Mexican project: around $100 million.

The planning institute does “excellent work, really first-rate,” said Keith Pezzoli, a professor of urban planning at UC San Diego, who is working with Graizbord on the 10 de Mayo project.

“But building plans is one thing. Implementing them is another. Where is the money going to come from?”

The lack of money is also evident in the shortage of code-enforcement officers--100, or about a third the number needed to rein in illegal construction.

The lack of oversight was evident during a recent drive around the city. Graizbord passed a truck depot next to the Alamar River, where a dozen large vehicles idled, disgorging thick clouds of black smoke.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do with this,” he said with a sigh.

Around the corner, a tractor cleared mounds of dirt from the side of a hill that appeared sliced in half--a site of new housing development.

“That’s illegal,” he said, shaking his head.

Then Graizbord suddenly brightened.

“That’s the wonderful thing,” he said. “There’s always something to do. If you worked in Paris, there would be nothing left to do.”