The Center hosted its monthly Community Coalition Breakfast on March 17 to discuss San Diego’s community planning groups and the impact GLBT members have on them. Featured speakers included Todd Gloria, Congressmember Susan Davis’ 53rd Congressional District director, and Alex Sachs, board member for Uptown Planners.

Community planning groups are citizen organizations that form to advise the city on land use-based community goals and development proposals. According to the city’s Web site, community planning groups began to form in the 1960s and provide citizens an opportunity to advise the City Council, the Planning Commission and other decision-makers on development projects, general or community plan amendments, re-zone projects and public facilities. Community planning groups’ recommendations are components of the planning process, and are taken into consideration by the City Council and other city staff.

There are over 50 planning areas in San Diego, with some areas divided into multiple planning groups. The chair of each planning group sits on the Community Planners Committee, which was instituted to ensure communication and to solicit citizen input on citywide issues among the various planning groups in the city.

Gloria said he attends up to 12 different community planning groups a month.

“It’s an interesting experience for me because, really, every community is distinct,” Gloria said. “You have to understand why it’s very important for residents on a small scale to hear back from people and really talk about their neighborhoods.”

Gloria also serves on the board of the San Diego Housing Commission, which is a public agency that helps low-income families, seniors and people with disabilities afford housing. He said he often gathers valuable feedback at community planning group meetings about specific neighborhoods and their need for more affordable housing.

Uptown Planners is one of over 40 recognized community planning groups in San Diego, and represents the neighborhoods of Bankers Hill/Park West, Middletown, Mission Hills, Hillcrest, University Heights (west of Park Boulevard) and Marston Hills.

Sachs, who has been involved in Uptown Planners since 2002, said it’s an important community planning group because many GLBT people reside within the neighborhoods it represents.

“I think if you look at the stereotypes of what LGBT folks are all about, it probably fits right in with being involved with a community planning group,” Sachs said. “You get to be involved in aesthetics. You get to be the design police.”

Reports generated from the San Diego Housing Commission and the city’s planning department have a special section marked on it for community planning group feedback.

“If the developer needs to get some sort of approval from the community, it has to come to the community group first. Our role is purely advisory,” Sachs said. “We don’t have any kind of a binding role. However, we have a role.”

Sachs said there have been projects which did not adequately address the community’s concerns that Uptown Planners have fought against and won.

“Usually what happens is the developer goes back and works more closely with the community,” Sachs said. “Oftentimes the council member’s office has a really important role in helping to make that happen.”

He said Uptown Planners was involved during the planning process for the recently constructed 80-unit Egyptian condo complex located in Hillcrest at the intersection of Park Boulevard and University Avenue.

The relocation of the San Diego Youth and Community Services’ Storefront facility from downtown to their current location at Fourth Avenue and Walnut Street was one of Uptown Planners’ successes, Sachs said. The Storefront is a 20-bed emergency shelter and the only shelter in San Diego specifically designed for homeless and runaway youth.

“I think because of the fact that there were a number of LGBT people who were on the committee who understood the needs of an area like Hillcrest for an outreach to young people, I think that helped to ease the way for the San Diego Youth and Community Services to establish their facility here,” Sachs said.

Sachs said the Uptown area has seen the largest turnover of apartment to condo conversions in the city. He said one of his biggest criticisms is that certain buildings not ideally suited for condo conversion have been converted. As an example, Sachs referred to multi-family housing units built in the ’60s and ’70s called “Huffman six-packs,” which were named after developer Ray Huffman.

“These kinds of projects becoming condominiums probably should not have happened,” Sachs said. “There probably should have been policies in place to try to kind of put the brakes on that before.”

The Uptown area is changing drastically, with a large number of condo conversions forcing renters, seniors and people with disabilities to leave, Sachs said. “It’s going to be, in the long run, a bad thing for our community, because we’re going to lose the diversity of income as well as the diversity of racial and ethnic diversity, and some of our LGBT diversity,” Sachs said.

Gloria said there is a condo conversion ordinance that is moving forward on the city level. He said he is particularly interested in changing the tenant notification process, since many people receive notices of condo conversions but the language is not written clearly enough to understand.

“It is the bare minimum. I don’t know if you can devise from what you’re given what’s going to happen to you. For that reason, people will often move before they should,” Gloria said.

Another issue that needs to be resolved for those forced out of their apartments is relocation assistance, Gloria said.

“Currently in the city of San Diego, not everyone gets it. It seems to me that if you’re being forced to move [and] there’s an expense associated with that – I don’t care how much you make, you probably deserve to get assistance for that, particularly if someone else is making a profit because of you,” he said.