Back in the spring, I wrote about a study that was done by the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley that measured “downtown recoveries” using mobile phone data.

In other words, it looked at where people’s phones were lingering to try and determine if they were back in the office and doing things downtown.

The headline finding was that San Francisco had the lowest recovery quotient (RT) and that Salt Lake City had the highest, alongside cities like San Diego, Baltimore, and Bakersfield.

But why was there such a spread in recoveries?

One possible explanation was commute times. The cities with the lowest average commute times seemed to generally perform better in this study and have higher recovery quotients. But it’s maybe more nuanced than this.

Here is a recent Brookings article by Tracy Hadden Loh that looks at this same study. And to give just one example, she notes that San Diego’s airport happens to fall within the same zip code as its downtown. Meaning, airport traffic would have been picked up as downtown traffic.

The article also includes the above chart, showing the amount of downtown apartments built since 2019. I don’t think I knew that Chicago was so prolific.

The University area is one of 53 community planning areas in the City of San Diego. And this one, as the name suggests, houses the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), which is at the northern end of the blue transit line.

The last time the University Community Plan was updated was in 1987, and so it's an old plan and it is currently being redone to better align with the City's current strategic plan -- which includes things like "creating homes for all of us" and "championing sustainability."

The final draft community plan won't be available until later this year, but there are two draft scenarios available for download. Here's what Scenario A looks like:

The "T" circles are transit stops on the Blue Line (which runs south to downtown and then to the Mexico border), the olive green areas are institutional (UCSD, hospital, etc.), and the purple areas are "urban villages" with densities that go as high as 218 dwelling units per acre (darkest purple). For the other areas, please refer to the legend.

Now let's put this residential density into some sort of context. One acre = 43,560 square feet. So we're talking about 218 homes on every 43,560 square feet of land. For context, our mid-rise Junction House project is 151 homes and our site area is approximately 22,000 square feet (about 0.5 acres). That puts us at roughly 302 homes per acre -- more than what is proposed here.

In total the revised plan could allow for somewhere between 35,000 to 56,000 new homes in the University City area. Not surprisingly, the community has reacted by organizing rallies, such as this one, here, called "Honks against housing":

(I used a screenshot because embedded tweets don’t seem to show up properly in my email newsletter.)

This is, again, not unexpected. And all of the typical things could be said about incumbent residents opposing new homes on top of an existing transit line, next to a major university. But what stands out to me about this protest is its format.

These residents are worried that high-rises will destroy their community. So presumably they are looking to get the word out to as many people as possible. And one of the ways they have decided to do that is stand on the side of a busy road and appeal to people in their cars.

Ironically, I think this actually reinforces the need for an updated Community Plan. Because it speaks to the car-oriented nature of this community and the need for better land use planning around its existing transit stations.

In my view, the line of thinking here should not be, "this is going to destroy our community. How will our roads ever accommodate 35,000 new homes?" It should be, "how do we better plan this community so that our next generation of residents have the luxury not to have to drive everywhere?"

If you'd like to offer constructive feedback on this plan, I'm told that you can email Nancy Graham at nhgraham@sandiego.gov.

San Diego-based Jonathan Segal is a unique kind of builder in that his firm doesn't have any clients. They act as both the architect and developer for all of their projects. This gives them a lot of control over the building process, but also more freedom to experiment.

ULI recently interviewed Segal about his micro-housing project on 320 West Cedar Street in San Diego's Little Italy (called The Continental). And I think it's a pretty interesting case study for us to discuss here on the blog.

It's a 5,000 sf corner site, and Segal developed it with 42 micro units (5 of which are priced at 65% of AMR), two retail spaces at grade, and a separate "single-family townhouse" for his son that sits on top of the retail space at the corner.

The idea was to create relatively affordable "workforce" housing, which is why there's also minimal parking. The 37 market-rate units are currently priced between $1,595 and $1,995 per month, and the affordable ones are about $900 per month.

Segal is forthright in the interview in saying that leasing velocity was slow following completion in December 2019. It was hard to rent these kinds of units in San Diego without any parking. But he viewed the project as an experiment and eventually he did find product-market fit.

The mix of housing types here is also noteworthy. Presumably his son could have just gone out and built a more typical grade-related home. But why do that when you can build on top of an urban retail space and add 42 other homes to the lot?