Contextualizing City Heights
Like much of central, southern, and east San Diego County, the neighborhood we now know as City Heights was originally occupies colonized and stolen Kumeyaay land. Beginning in the 18th century, Spanish missionaries at the Mission San Diego de Alcalá developed the mission system as a way to control, subjugate, and commit genocide against indigenous peoples.
When Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, it claimed the land and secularized the mission system, distributing the lands to rancheros. When the United States annexed the land, the modern era of American settler colonialism began. Settlement and any later development was facilitated by the forced removal of Kumeyaay people to reservations begun by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1875.
In the 1870s, merchants Frederick Castle, Samuel Steiner, and Abraham Klauber purchased over 240 acres of land northeast of Balboa Park with hopes of developing the area as the population of San Diego city rapidly grew. The small residence of 400 - 500 people was known as City Heights for its views overlooking the nearby harbor.
After recovering from a real estate bust from 1888 to the early 1900s, the opening of the Panama Canal and the planned Panama-California International Exposition spurred local voters to vote for City Heights to become its own incorporated city known as East San Diego on November 2, 1912.
During the early years of its incorporation, the population boomed from 400 to 4,000. Its trustees dubbed the city a “dry city” meant to be strictly residential and devoid of manufactories or industries. They also proclaimed that the city was founded upon the golden rule-- ‘Do unto others as you would that they do unto you and would serve as a model of a clean, healthy, and well-governed community from which every citizen would recieve equal benefit and share the same pride.
This was a claim the city never lived up to, as many of the benefits the land boasted were reserved solely for middle-class whites through a system of discriminatory residential segregation up until the 1960s.
East San Diego’s independence was short-lived as the land was annexed by the City of San Diego on December 31, 1923 becoming once again known as City Heights. In the years following its annexation, City Heights slowly began to be recognized by the City of San Diego and was afforded citywide services and improvements such as the electric street railway.
From the 1930s to the 1950s the area became an important commercial center, but began to decline in 1959 as Fashion Valley, Mission Valley, and the College Grove were developed. In the late 1950s, Caltrans’ plan to build the I-15 freeway cutting directly through the area furthered this decline, accelerating white flight and disinvestment.
Following the the Vietnam War, many refugees from Southeast Asia emigrated to the United States arriving at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. Often Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Thai refugees, these refugees settled in City Heights during the 1970s and 80s, due to the cheap rents resulting from disinvestment. Throughout the 1980s to the 1990s, resettlement agencies also directed many refugees from the Somali Civil War to City Heights.
This influx of Black immigrants coincided with the United States’ War on Drugs-- a highly racialized state initiative which sought to maintain classist and racist forms of oppression by largely criminalizing poverty, Blackness, and drug use. Black, Indigenous, and youth of color were frequently portrayed as criminals and gang members as economic deterioration was blamed on the communities most negatively affected.
Responding to this public health crisis with carcerality, in the mid-1990s, businessman and philanthropist Sol Price led and financed a redevelopment plan to create a multi-block "urban village," of which a new San Diego Police substation was to be the cornerstone.
An economic development non-profit (Mid-City Development Corp.) and area homeowners had proposed building the new substation in 1993, however, the city was unable or unwilling to put up the $3 million needed to build the station. With Price's funding, the station opened in 1996 and by 2000, Price had spent $70 million on the redevelopment of City Heights through his "urban village" model.
In addition to the police station, these funds paid for the construction of schools, libraries, housing, and retail centers through both public and private partnerships. Given its relatively cheap real estate prices, this attention and further “development-related” legislation such as opportunity zoning made the neighborhood of City Heights particularly succeptible to vast gentrification as families who have resided here for decades are being regularly displaced by higher-income arrivals and larger businesses. However, residents of this constantly-shifting and diverse community remain resilient in their struggle toward life, liberty, and dignity.
Throughout the centuries since its founding, the narrative that surrounds City Heights has changed just as much as its residents-- once praised for its egalitarian values as a model city, just decades later the neighborhood was described by media outlets as a crime hotspot. It is important that we maintain a critical awareness about how these narrative changes chart political agendas, demorgaphic shifts, and stark imbalances of power. The Speak City Heights program was designed to restore our community’s power to tell our own stories, to write our own narratives, to speak City Heights.
Sources:
City of San Diego and San Diego County: The Birthplace of California, Volume One by Clarence Alan McGrew
The City of San Diego City Heights Urban Village Fact Sheet prepared by the City of San Diego, Community and Economic Development Department and Redevelopment Agency Business and Community Outreach Program 08/02