In a powerful, truth-telling op-ed, LISC San Diego executive director Ricardo Flores shows how his city must take intentional action to throw off the Jim Crow-era legacy of redlining that still prevents economic mobility for many San Diegans. That local example, and Flores’ arguments, are applicable to cities and towns all across the country. It’s imperative and high time that all municipalities heed the message.
The op-ed below was originally published by The San Diego Union-Tribune:
Commentary: It’s time for San Diego housing policy changes to distance the city from an undeniable racist past
Amid so much disturbing news, let’s not forget that there’s a critical upcoming election to choose the next mayor of the city of San Diego.
One overriding theme that continues to emerge is the notion that single-family neighborhoods should be protected from, well, “fill in the blank.”
In effort to add context to this emerging narrative, we would do well to remember why we have single-family communities in the first place.
In the 1930s, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration created maps of every major U.S. city, showing where people of color and the poor lived. Known as redlining maps, they were used as a tool to discourage, even prohibit, federal funding and public resources away from poor ethnic neighborhoods.
Now, those maps reveal the disgraceful history of exactly how local zoning was and still is used to segregate communities, with the implicit, immoral goal of keeping people of color locked in downtrodden neighborhoods that were little more than self-perpetuating pockets of poverty.
Simply put, if they couldn’t get loans, they couldn’t buy homes.
Today, large cities such as San Diego, indeed, countless cities and towns of all sizes and locales around the nation, remain nearly as racially segregated as they were in the Depression-era 1930s — revealing a shameful time capsule.
Pull away the preening veil of “America’s Finest City” and our current patterns of neighborhood segregation all too sadly mirror an undeniable racist past.
Nearly 90 years later, San Diego’s sociodemographics have shifted so that more than half — 57 percent — of the city’s residents are people of color.
Knowing this, how can the city of San Diego and any candidate running for local office morally justify these Jim Crow-era laws that relegate so many thousands of people of color to low-income, high-crime communities?
They can’t — not if they have the kind of rising social conscience that’s gained far wider local, national, and global consensus since the filmed killing of George Floyd and subsequent outcry.
Mapping Inequality, is the work of a four-university collaborative, that aggregated the HOLC maps and accompanying neighborhood descriptions from across the nation and presents them in a browsable, digital map that helps us visually explore inequality in America.
In that spirit, LISC San Diego is proud to partner with a conscience-driven coalition comprised of the Urban League of San Diego County, the Chicano Federation, Casa Familiar, the San Diego Black Chamber of Commerce, National Black Contractors Association and MAAC to voice our strong objection to these exclusionary zoning laws and policies.
We recently requested that Council President Georgette Gómez, along with Councilmembers Monica Montgomery and Vivian Moreno — each of whom represent the most segregated and economically-challenged districts — lead the effort to end exclusionary zoning laws, such as single-family zoning.
Simply put, the best way to do that would be to amend the city’s Small Lot Subdivisions ordinance of 2015, allowing it to be applicable throughout all San Diego, specifically in all single-family zoned neighborhoods.
Allowing homeowners the opportunity to subdivide their own lots to sell as individual parcels or to build and rent out will provide more “middle income” housing for ownership and wealth building, while lowering rents by increasing the housing supply.
Most importantly, it will mark the end of exclusionary zoning laws that have segregated people of color from predominately White, wealthier neighborhoods since the 1930s and before.
With one-third or 1 million residents in San Diego County now living at or below poverty levels — the typical family of four lives on less than $54,000 a year — we can no longer “be patient” or “move slowly.”
The time for creating even one more well-intentioned but do-nothing advisory committee is long past. The time for doing the right thing has come.
Finally.
We ask that every candidate running for local office — especially for mayor — commit publicly to ending the segregationist planning policies within the city of San Diego and support our coalition’s efforts to amend and expand the Small Lot Subdivisions Ordinance of 2015.
Knowing San Diego’s undeniably racist housing history, we ask our mayoral candidates and others seeking leadership roles, will you support us?
San Diego’s now-majority residents of color eagerly await your commitment to the moment and to a more equitable future for all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ricardo Flores, Executive Director, LISC San Diego
Ricardo Flores became executive director of LISC San Diego in Spring 2017. Prior to that, he served as chief of staff for San Diego’s city council president, and was a senior aide to U.S. congresswoman Susan Davis. A native of City Heights, Ricardo graduated from UCLA and today, he and his wife live in the Kensington neighborhood with their rescue lab.