First of two editorials
As city planning disasters go, this was the mother of colossal blunders. In the 1940s, National City decided that a turn-of-the-century residential neighborhood was better suited as an industrial center and changed the zoning to allow manufacturing. By the 1960s, this cinder-block concept was in full swing. Cinder-block buildings for auto body and paint shops popped up in some five dozen small residential blocks, nudging shoulders with fading wooden houses on woefully narrow lots.
This version of market-force redevelopment never really clicked. The homes never went away, although two-thirds of them have absentee owners today. With city officials and zoning laws standing in their way, homeowners could not do major remodeling; the housing stock continued to decline. Industrial users prospered but had no room for expansion or places to park growing numbers of customer cars. Without building expansions, upgrades for modern pollution equipment slowed to a halt.
What you have a half-century later is a civic eyesore. For many out-of-towners, it is their first – and only – impression of National City.
A new planning concept is in place in National City today: Lure or push as many industrial users as possible into an industrial park across Interstate 5, then harness market forces to reshape the 118 acres into a modern residential neighborhood. A neighborhood with compatible mixed uses and the latest in urban-scape improvements such as more realistic street widths, angled parking, traffic-calming features and attractive walkways and plantings.
A three-year effort is coming to fruition. Never mind that as yet there is no industrial park to lure businesses to. The city has just released a study on the industrial park concept and the City Council will discuss it Aug. 19. The West Side Specific Plan, meantime, comes up for a public workshop at 6:30 p.m. July 30 at the Martin Luther King Center on East 12th Street. Then, on Aug. 19, the City Council is scheduled to define the scope of the environmental studies, a prelude to adopting the plan.
A specific plan is a rough game plan designating intended future uses in an area. Environmental studies are done for the entire area. A property owner or developer of a project that falls within that spectrum can escape much of the expense and delays associated with environmental studies.
The West Side Specific Plan Area encompasses about five dozen square blocks. It is home to 284 households with about 1,000 residents. This is an impoverished area with a median household income of just $42,000. The West Side is also home, according to the Environmental Health Coalition, to toxic substance levels several times those in the rest of the city. Many of the 100-plus industrial shops, if given a building's equivalent of an automotive smog test, would flunk.
There is broad consensus that families with small children and shops with paint fumes and industrial-caliber solvents don't belong next door to each other. There is skepticism, however, as to whether National City has the financial means to lure businesses from cramped and low-rent quarters into spacious and modern facilities with accordingly higher rents.
The other part of the concept, however, is to revitalize the West Side, encouraging landowners to convert to new and more lucrative land uses, pushing out industrial tenants and scrapping existing buildings. A split has developed, however, pitting those who would like to see one-and two-story homes and property owners who say parcel accumulation and construction costs will only pencil out with higher-density residential.
With everyone agreeing on the concept goals, the challenge for politicians is to win broad agreement on the execution.
Next Saturday: Some suggested tweaks, before kickoff, to the West Side game plan.
