Photo by Annie Lane
By Sam Ollinger / bikesd.org
In late 1972, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) released a report detailing the impact that would result after the construction of I-15 (from I-805 to I-8, approximately 3 miles) through the heart of Mid-City, specifically the neighborhood of City Heights:
The project is in an urban area. Potential impacts are mainly on people, air quality and noise. Another issue is the use of land from the area known as Park de la Cruz.
The selected freeway design will displace about 650 apartment units or homes [Ed. note: displacing 2,000 people plus about 63 commercial units affecting 110 jobs and $1.5 million in annual taxable retail]. The impact of displacement is borne by the people in the path of the freeway. For some, moving will mean a disruption of life patterns. Others would have been moving away. For many, the Federal Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act of 1970 will bring economic benefits as high as $15,000 for moving costs, replacement housing payments and interest differential payments.
Environmental Impact Report for Mid-City’s I-15
The report goes on to state:
The displacement of commercial units does not seem to be a critical impact for the Mid-City area.
Using logic that only a highway focused agency could come up with, the report goes on:
Exhaust emissions will be concentrated along the Route 15 corridor. Future traffic that would have used city streets or other highway routes will use the freeway. People working or residing along Route 15 will have better air quality after the freeway is constructed. However, this will be due to vehicle emission controls and the passage of time. It probably will not be due to the freeway.
Under the Federal Clean Air Amendments of 1970, the San Diego Air Basin will have to meet national ambient air quality standards by 1975. The freeway projects will not be completed in time to have any effect in meeting the 1975 deadline. By today’s standards, 1975 and later vehicles will be essentially “pollution free”. The number of pre-1975 models will decline with time; few will still be operating in 1986.
The report gets worse:
There will be noise impacts on the people remaining along the freeway corridor. From a community point of view, the freeway can probably be seen as a benefit. Noise levels at the closest homes will be lower than they are today. However, the people are not the same. Those living on the east side of Central Avenue, Terrace Drive and 39th Street will hear an adverse impact.
The destruction caused by the building of I-15 through City Heights may never fully be understood, but a documentary titled “The Price of Renewal” does give some light on the issue.
As depicted in The Price of Renewal, after the Caltrans announcement in the 1970s to build a freeway through City Heights, residents abandoned their homes and crimes began to rise contributing to a decline in overall quality of life.
Today, City Heights is finally turning a corner. After decades of advocacy by committed City Heights residents, the Centerline Bus Rapid Transit will finally be built (downgraded from a light rail line). Caltrans will finally be applying for funding to build the I-15 bike path from Adams Avenue to Camino del Rio South – fulfilling a promise made nearly three decades ago – that will connect the Mid-City Community to Mission Valley. Andefforts are being made to eliminate the results of institutionalized neglect against a community made impoverished by former leaders too fixated on moving vehicles and building highways.
Ryan Wiggins, Randy Van Vleck, Emily Monahan, Laura Ann Fernea, Stephen Russell and Maria Cortez — at El Cajon Blvd. Transit Plaza celebrating Bike to Work Day. Photo City Heights CDC
I do spend a considerable amount of time thinking about people like James D. Knochenhauer, the Regional Representative at the Bureau of Community Environmental Management, who in 1971 wrote a letter stating that the I-15 project wouldn’t cause “any problems of health significance”.
Today City Heights residents experience higher rates of asthma (than residents in the rest of the county) and a lack of access to transportation options despite only a third of the residents having access to an automobile.
I do wonder if individuals like Mr. Knochenhauer thought about the community of City Heights and how his letter of support contributed to decades of decline in a once vibrant and thriving community.
I wonder if he ever regretted writing that letter.
Editor Note: More on this topic here and here.
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Recent studies present “evidence of a widening racial and economic gap when it comes to air pollution.” Barrio Logan is in the news at the moment and it is not the only San Diego community suffering from the consequences of air pollution. City Heights has the same concerns.
The Environmental Impact Report cited in Sam Ollinger’s article used the odd term “sensitive receptors” when discussing potential air quality impacts on the community. Sensitive receptors is Borg Speak for human babies, children, the elderly and people with chronic health issues.
The I-15 freeway through City Heights was constructed in proximity to high concentrations of “sensitive receptors” which in human speak means schools. There was also a plan at the the time to add senior housing to those same areas. Our mordant joke was that CalTrans had us from the womb to the tomb.
The Centerline transit implementation has proceeded at glacier speed. We refer to SANDAG as SANBAGGED.
City Heights has gotten more than its fair share of the bad stuff and not anywhere near all the good stuff that was promised. That is what happens when institutions are permitted to reduce human beings to sensitive receptors. It makes it easy to pour a lot of concrete and move on.
Sam Ollinger, you opened up this head (a “sensitive receptor?”) to a history I’d only dimmed perceived. The assumptions high environmental officials made about the improvements in air control due to imposition of pollution controls on cars (not to mention semi-trucks) were so way off the mark. That sort of disregard for “sensitive receptors” illustrates just how powerfully land use is dominated by industry.
City Heights is just one of thousands of national illustrations of the costs the huddled masses have paid for one of the cornerstones of corporate profits and provider of conveniences for the larger population. We still owe the people of City Heights, don’t we?
Sam: great article. This picture of Bike to Work day is from May 2011 on the City Heights Transit Plaza (not the Boulevard). I know, cause I took the picture. I still have the bell on my bike from the bag of geedunk (that’s a Navy term…) Sandag gave us.
As Anna Daniels points out, the promised projects including CenterLine have been moving at “glacial speed”. Compare to the “fast track” on the $2 Billion Mid Coast trolley. I don’t recall seeing the 1971 letter you posted. That is a great find. This is nearly 15 years before the final EIS document comes out where they determine that they must mitigate the adverse impact on “community cohesion” by building the 4 acre deck over the freeway which is home to Teralta Park today.
“The Price of Renewal” film is unfortunately, heavy revisionist history. Sol and Robert Price were still stocking shelves at PriceClub when the deal was struck in 1985 with then Mayor Hedgecock to not only build the required one block of cover, but add an additional block of cover a couple of blocks south. Ultimately the City funded a community led quarter of million dollar redesign that would have covered a contiguous three and a half blocks over the freeway, and housed a trolley station and all the other facilities which were eventually located at the fall back location of University and Fairmount (ie, the urban village).
As Barry Schultz a former CHCDC President noted at an event some three years ago, the City Council rejected the Community Vision plan because, as one then Councilmember noted, “land in City Heights will never be worth the square footage cost of building those covers.”
It is easy for some to diminish the advantages of reinvesting in older, distressed communities. We are fortunate that we had some community leaders who had a vision and acted on it. Teralta Park and Park De La Cruz and all the other amenities that some take for granted were fought for by people like Barry, Jim Bliesner and John Stump. And yes, Anna, you had a part in in, too. Now we have a new generation of leaders like Sam and her cohorts that understand the past in order to fight for a new, quality and equitable future. Don’t let “nobody” stop you!
Put this dislocation event together with those displaced by Price Charities who was avoiding the deck cover redevelopment and health benefit potential, chose to dislocate another 3000 residents. These two actions represent probably the largest relocation of residents from an urban environment in the history of the City. The question now becomes one of reparations . What do we do now to mitigate the effects of redevelopment and eminent domain?
Thanks all for the kind words and the added perspective.
The level of callousness shown by supposed leaders toward the older, urban communities still continues to amaze me.
Great work. Some miscellaneous bits:
* I recall the 3-1/2 block cover that Jay mentions as having been agreed to by Caltrans in order to solidify council and community support. I could well have that wrong, but sharing fwiw. (If it was agreed to, fulfilling that promise should be a precondition for approval of other projects, no?)
* A further failing of the project involved the grading through Ward Canyon. In order to keep the ascent mild, the “floor” for the freeway was raised massively, filling in the canyon to a much greater extent than the 15 had previously.
* The history also includes condemnation of the properties in the freeway’s path years before construction began. The community contended with a swath of blight and crime that inflicted damage outward. Inexorably, that led the community to press for the freeway’s completion rather than continue to suffer the alternative.
* I-15 was a bit of a capstone to the reorientation of San Diego’s class geography. The first middle class suburbanization was all eastward expansion along the mid-city mesa/ECB spine, as late as the 60’s. New developments had started in Clairemont and beyond, but they were, well, new. Mid-city and the college area were the existing middle-class (nicest along the north rim, but part of a whole). The Jewish Community Center was on 54th, the State Theater on ECB at 47th, etc. That that had only just started changing by 1972 is interesting.
Jeffrey: Caltrans agreed to accommodate the 2 1/2 extra covers IF the community and City paid for them. We discovered that Phoenix had build their covers by a different than the usual bridge method (sink pilings as columns, set the steel and rebar on ground at grade and tie to those sunk columns, pore the concrete and when cured, excavate down around the columns, voila’! , a cover). It was significantly cheaper. Didn’t matter. The City Council rejected our proposal which included a dedication of funding from the companion redevelopment district and they built the one block cover the good ol’ Caltrans bridge way. Won’t go into all the other shenanigans for now.
You are right, they left the condemned freeway corridor festering for years as vacant drug and crime emporium until the community rose up in arms. Frank Gormlie did a great graphic of “the hand of Caltrans” reaching in and upsetting the community. Anna Daniels chaired the community garden that was a landmark and wonder in the corridor for five plus years before they started construction.
Amazing!
Governmental agencies getting their way by any way they can: Bending the truth. Promising things they wouldn’t deliver. Flat out lying. You’d think the citizens would have learned their lesson by now and not fall for theses kinds of tactics. You’d think that… but you’d be wrong.
SANDAG is using the very same tactics right now with the Uptown Regional Bike Corridors Project. And backed by some good-intentioned but misguided bike enthusiasts, SANDAG is likely to get away with it.
Amazing!