Activist and Urbanist Collaborate for San Diego's North Park

North Park San Diego is an interesting mix of historic bungalows, hipster commercial nodes, and cultural diversity, on the one hand, and auto-oriented strip malls and drive-thrus, wide streets, and dilapidated six-unit apartment-over-car-park buildings. The community, close to San Diego's downtown and Balboa Park, has been experiencing a renaissance as people are migrating back in from the suburbs. Additionally, the city is installing or has recently installed, bus rapid transit (BRT) routes and stations, new bicycle infrastructure, and school-public joint use park facilities. The community is undergoing a Community Plan update. Long-time North Park resident, bicyclist, preservationist, and community activist Don Leichtling teamed up with urban planner, urbanist, and density advocate Howard Blackson to make recommendations for the Community Plan update,

In order that we may together plan the best possible future for our neighborhood, we have collaborated on these recommendations in hopes of helping both preservationists and urbanists understand and support these conclusions, which we feel best address North Park’s most pressing problems.

The abbreviated version of their recommendations is as follows: 

1. Expedite designation of potential historic resources. 
2. Build upon the new Rapid Bus transit route along El Cajon Boulevard to provide a more active multi-modal circulation system. 
3. Shift the development pattern from the current "auto-oriented strip commercial" to support a better mixed-use transit supported pattern, including an 80-foot height limit, set back and step down heights, more predictable city entitlement processes, protection of the historic residential blocks, and focus new development along the main transportation corridor (El Cajon Blvd.). 
4. Replace the most rundown of our auto-oriented Huffman six-pack apartments, with clear design policies and standards that allow North Park to test and measure proposed outcomes prior to enabling across-the-board retrofits, and a high-level 'community review' process with a one- to three-year 'testing' period. 
5. Make managed parking areas less difficult to create, more flexible to share, and easier to find, to discourage "hunt-and-peck" parking. Neighborhoods adjacent to business districts must have the ability to designate managed parking areas as a top priority.