Testimonials
 

Bonnie Kutch

UC Homeowner Since 2016                                                                                  

After living within the confines of a high-density townhome community for 31 years and dealing with the headaches of a poorly managed HOA, I was finally ready and able to buy a small, single-family home where I had more privacy, a yard large enough to grow my own fruit and vegetables, and the freedom to remodel my home and yard according to my own tastes.

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I chose University City not only for its central location, but for its family-oriented lifestyle and diversity of residents’ ages, ethnicities, religions, and class. 

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UC felt like a place where I belonged from the first day I moved here in 2016; I knew this was where I wanted to live out my life.  Accordingly, I used a large portion of my retirement savings to remodel and modernize my home and landscape. 

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Today, my home is my private sanctuary where I enjoy entertaining, cooking, gardening, writing and creating artwork.  My dog has a large yard where he can run freely and have his dog friends over to play.

More than anything, I treasure the small-town feel of my neighborhood, where people greet one another and stop to chat.  The crime rate has stayed relatively low here because neighbors know and look out for one another.

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But the City of San Diego’s revised University Community Plan Update threatens to change all that.  It wants to add more than three times the density, as well as rezone our two nearby shopping centers to allow as many as 1,000 housing units, with no guarantee they will retain vital retail. 

The City’s utopian vision of UC fails to recognize that our community’s limited infrastructure can’t possibly accommodate more than three times the added population.

 

It hasn’t offered a means to add or widen existing roadways, nor provide additional parks and recreation centers, schools, libraries, aquatic complexes, fire and police stations, water and sewer, and more open space, because there’s no more land here to develop or otherwise utilize.

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It hasn’t offered any solutions to the correlating traffic increase, stating that everyone here will begin using public transportation or riding their bikes.  But that is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future and altogether impossible for most.

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It has not said how it will protect the safety of all the young children attending our three schools or playing at Standley Park along Governor Drive.

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The City has not provided any type of public facilities financing plan or schedule. Rather, it just okayed rules for shifting infrastructure funding from wealthy areas to low-income neighborhoods.  University City will be out of luck.

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The City’s “grand plan” for UC will benefit just three parties: 

1. members of the development community eager to build more high-rise, luxury housing units that will rent for $4,000/month and up and do nothing to help the lack of unaffordable housing;

2. UCSD, which has continued to increase enrollment without building enough on-campus student housing to keep up; and

3. the mayor and his administration, who will take in more money from building permit fees and increased property taxes while amply rewarding developers for their support of past and future political campaigns.

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The clear losers are the nearly 80,000 residents who currently call University City home -- a place that will become unrecognizable and virtually unlivable if the City of San Diego gets its way.

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I don’t want to live in a congested metropolis resembling downtown. If the City of San Diego’s growth plans for University City materialize, I will be forced to relocate to a different city, and my hard-earned savings and five years’ worth of work remodeling my home will be down the drain.  We must prevent this travesty from happening.

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