Downtown San Diego: A Model For Fighting Sprawl

The recently released San Diego Downtown Community Plan is one of the most ambitious planning efforts currently underway on the West Coast. It calls for a dramatic increase in density and population (to 89,000 from its current 27,500) in the next 25 years."San Diego and other Western cities that for 50 years were models of suburban sprawl are now leading the nation in reversing that trend, said John Norquist, the former Milwaukee mayor who is now president of the Congress for New Urbanism. 'I think California is ahead of the curve on this stuff,' Norquist said. 'L.A. is becoming much more like a European city. And San Diego is being used as a model by Southwestern cities like Phoenix, Tucson and Albuquerque.'"