Carolina Gregor (left) and Elisa Arias are working toward defined development and better borders through careful planning and governmental cooperation. (photo/lambertphoto.com)

Carolina Gregor and Elisa Arias have more in common than being mothers of fraternal twin girls (ages 15 and 8, respectively), natives of South America (Chile and Argentina) and planners with the San Diego Association of Governments (Sandag). The pair are playing key roles in shaping San Diego’s development future, from how aging baby boomers will access transit to the region’s relationship with Tijuana and Baja, an area posed in the next decade to reprise western Riverside County’s role as San Diego’s affordable-housing relief valve.

Gregor coordinated the preparation of the Smart Growth Concept Map. A first of its kind, the map’s colored dots show 200 areas in San Diego County with the potential to accommodate higher-density development. It is an outgrowth of the Regional Comprehensive Plan and will influence the spending of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars over the next 30 years.

Arias is managing the development of the Otay Mesa-Mesa de Otay Binational Corridor Strategic Plan, an unprecedented planning effort that, among other things, seeks to protect the border’s annual $24 billion import/export economy. The effort has engendered extraordinary cooperation between Tijuana and San Diego, causing Arias to joke she is working more closely with her Mexican counterparts than her peers do in neighboring U.S. counties.

Can’t Stop The Change

The ebb and flow of housing and economic cycles aside, San Diego County will be a changed region three decades from now. “We are looking at about 1 million new people in the next 30 years, 450,000 new jobs and about 300,000 new homes,” says Gregor. “We are looking at where this is going to occur. We are looking at environmental restraints and trying to control urban sprawl.”

All of Sandag’s work is done in a support position to elected officials representing local government and has little meaningful land-use authority of its own. Before the concept map was tackled, results from the Regional Comprehensive Plan were shared with each of the region’s 18 cities. As the projections were explored, Sandag asked each city how its plan meshed with the document and where each wanted and could accommodate smart growth.

The term “smart growth” is shorthand for a dense collection of mixed housing and support services adjacent to easily accessed rapid transit services. The working definition has seven categories from a minimum of 75 dwelling units and 80 employees per acre in a metropolitan center (Downtown is San Diego’s only area in this category) down to a minimum of 10.9 dwelling units and no employees in a rural village, such as Alpine and Ramona. Two future “urban centers,” the second densest category with a minimum of 40 dwelling units and 50 employees per acre, were identified: San Marcos and Otay Mesa.

The concept of smart growth is hardly new, but it got away from U.S. planners in the last century. “We sort of took a big detour in the post-World War II period when the U.S. built the interstate highways system,” says Bob Leiter, Sandag’s director of land use and transportation planning. “People could get from any job site to any home site via a car. That is why we had the downtown decline through the 50s to 70s.”

While Sandag’s last update of its 2030 regional transportation plan revealed the likely locations of 150 transit stations by 2030, where denser growth could be expected, Sandag knew local governments had the clearest ideas of where their communities would grow. “We have a choice of where to build public transit services,” says Leiter. “We want to match that up with where smart growth is occurring and will occur.”

Every municipality in the region identified areas where they support denser growth matching one of the seven definitions. The resulting map contains 200 such locales, a third more than what Sandag identified in its comprehensive plan. Gregor calls the increase in supply “reassuring,” as it will help address future housing needs.

For participating cities, the concept map can lead to treasure: $280 million in smart growth money to be dispensed over 40 years from a voter-approved transportation tax. Gregor says the funds are an incentive to push projects along. Among the steps a city can take to qualify is to put these projects at the front of the permitting line. As more projects come forward in the 200 areas, Leiter expects Sandag will direct other dollars their way. “The idea is to create a framework under which a lot of incentives are provided under smart growth, then to work with jurisdictions and developers to match up projects with the incentives,” he says.

Binational Smart Growth

Bob Leiter, Sandag’s director of land use and transportation planning, says incentives will spur smart growth projects as cities take advantage of available funding. (photo/lambertphoto.com)

San Diego also is employing a smart growth strategy to plan for its expanding relationship with Tijuana and Baja California. Already about 30,000 people a day from Tijuana commute to San Diego to shop, work or go to school. Those numbers will grow as more Americans avail themselves of the cheaper housing being provided by Baja’s booming residential industry. For now, vacation and retirement homes get the headlines. But consider that in 2006, 17,000 housing units were built in Tijuana, up from 14,000 units in 2005. A typical new home in Tijuana is 968 square feet and starts at $32,000. Not inviting? How about a 2,100-square-foot, four-bedroom, ocean view home in a gated community in Tijuana? A report from Sandag shows those run about $186,000.

Of course, the brutal reality is an unpredictable border commute, one that dampens the enthusiasm of potential transborder residents. The newfound binational planning alliance is dedicated to resolving those issues.

It would be unfair and inaccurate to say San Diego and Tijuana have lacked a cooperative relationship.

At the turn of the 20th century, Tijuana had a population of 273. It zoomed when the United States adopted Prohibition. Americans flocked south for libations and have not looked back. That influx brought jobs — including, eventually, maquiladoras — and attracted Mexicans north to the border town. Today, at 1.6 million residents, Tijuana is the sixth largest city in Mexico. When combined with San Diego’s 3 million people, the cities represent the largest urban settlement along the U.S.-Mexico border and are among the 10 largest metropolises within the NAFTA market.

The regions didn’t arrive at this point without talking a lot of business, and politics, but mostly business. But when it came to practical planning, efforts were few.

That now has changed.

About two years ago, discussions began on developing a government-sanctioned binational strategy plan. Getting there required securing approval from the Tijuana City Council, a body on which a member may serve only a single three-year term. The project was approved last September. By tradition, planning efforts initiated by the Tijuana council usually must start, or finish, before that group’s term ends. A final plan will be presented in a few months to officials on both sides of the border.

As the working group dug in and talked with its clients, attention turned to the Otay Mesa and Mesa de Otay areas. State transportation planners in California and Baja became involved, as were officials from San Diego County, Chula Vista and the city of San Diego. The key Mexican contacts for the San Diego planners were Ana Elena Espinoza, director of Tijuana’s Instituto de Planeación (IMPlan) and Esther Martinez and Carlos Lopez with the Secretaría de Infraestructura y Desarrollo Urbano del Estado (SIDUE).

“We looked at issues related with transportation, commercial development, housing and the environment,” says Arias.

The biggest issue the group chose to tackle is the congested border crossings.

San Ysidro-Puerta México Port Of Entry is the busiest land port of entry in the world, seeing up to 50,000 northbound vehicles and 25,000 northbound pedestrians each day. One out of every 10 people who enter the United States each day through any land, sea or air port of entry does so through San Ysidro.

But those are people counts.

The big commerce is farther east, at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry, where 752,981 trucks carrying commercial cargo crossed in 2006. It is the third ranking port of entry in the United States, handling nearly $30 billion in imports and exports last year.

Yet it is often a jammed mess, a victim of both thriving binational commerce and intense security. With little room to expand on the U.S. side, and virtually no room in Mexico, it is an economic choke point.

As a result of the cross-border planning cooperation, both San Diego and Tijuana have set aside 80 acres of mesa property for a new crossing. “That is an exciting development,” says Arias, “in that we know the region, on both sides of the border, has agreed on the need for a new border project.”

The goal is to have the new crossing open by 2013. “We are optimists,” Arias acknowledges.

Mexico already is planning to terminate in the Mesa de Otay neighborhood — where the new border crossing will be located — a major new highway that will connect Tijuana and Rosarito Beach. That $120 million highway will travel through the Valle de Las Palmas development, a $1.2 million satellite city expected to accommodate 1 million new people.

Upgrading and expanding the border crossings on the U.S. side likely will cost nearly $1 billion, notes Hector Vanegas, manager of Sandag’s Border Program.

Vanegas says San Ysidro needs $530 million of work to expand its Virginia Street crossing. The new Otay crossing will cost $400 million plus $120 million in roadway improvements. How to pay for those projects is unknown. “I don’t see where we would get that money,” he says. Traditional federal and state sources are likely, as is some kind of toll option, says Arias.

Vanegas jokes the issue also is of personal interest beyond his job or even his former service as the consul of economic affairs assigned to the Consulate General of Mexico in San Diego. “My wife and son cross the border every day,” he says. “My wife takes our son and drops him at her parents’ house before going to work. They monitor the border every day. The border is my (work) life and my marriage.”

Jokes aside, something must be done, he says.

“It is not that Mexico is losing money,” says Vanegas, noting the hours and hours trucks idle before being able to cross into the United States. “No, we in the United States are losing money on the order of billions of dollars.”

“There are massive delays,” agrees Arias. “That creates lost economic opportunity for the region. The transportation structure has not kept up.”

While 2013 may seem just around the corner, 2030 does not. But perhaps by then the results from the newfound cooperation with Mexico, along with San Diego’s embracing of a smart growth strategy, will have made this a better place. "When we are talking about smart growth, we are talking about quality of life and enhancing quality of life," says Gregor. “We are talking about places people want to be.”