In Golden Hill, residents banded together to try to stop an eight-story building with 180 apartments.
In University City, they fought against a proposal to allow townhomes in a single-family neighborhood.
In Point Loma, they're fighting a proposed four-story development with 56 apartments.
Across San Diego, more than a dozen community groups have formed in recent years to fight back against San Diego's push to build more housing. Their arguments are similar: Higher density will bring more traffic, make parking more scarce and disrupt the tranquillity of their neighborhoods.
But despite having similar concerns about citywide policies, the groups rarely spoke with or supported one another, said Eric Law, a retired Naval officer and Point Loma homeowner. That's why he and others last year co-founded San Diego United Communities.
Law described the organization as "a confederation of people across the city who are like-minded."
"The situation we had been in with the city is getting individually isolated on a particular topic and defeated," Law said. "We decided we were not going to fight individually. We were going to fight collectively."
Earlier this year, San Diego United Communities worked with former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, a Republican who now leads the conservative Lincoln Club Business League, to gather signatures to repeal city fees for trash collection and parking in Balboa Park.
The group has also gotten directly involved in electoral politics, endorsing three candidates for City Council: Mark Powell, a Republican running to unseat Democrat Kent Lee; Richard Bailey, an ex-Republican running against Democrat Nicole Crosby; and Martha Abraham, a Democrat running to unseat fellow Democrat Henry Foster III.
San Diego United Communities is nonpartisan and "grew out of the failure of both parties to represent the interests of the people," said Law, a registered Republican. "And so we all came together to represent our own interests because there was no one looking out for us."
To critics, however, San Diego United Communities is the latest manifestation of "not in my backyard" politics — and an attempt to reverse San Diego's trend toward electing Democrats to local office.
At an Oct. 1 press conference, County Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe said the group "masquerades as a nonthreatening coalition of neighborhoods, all while promoting racist and exclusive land use policies — those that leave people of color and poor people out of high-resource neighborhoods."
San Diego has numerous policies intended to correct the city's history of racial and economic segregation. High-resource neighborhoods — those with the highest incomes, cleanest air and best schools — are eligible for incentive programs that allow larger and denser housing developments than what zoning would otherwise allow. Many of the projects opposed by San Diego United Communities make use of those incentive programs.
"If you stand with (San Diego United Communities), then you stand 10 toes down in racist soot, breathing poisonous fumes of hatred and division," Montgomery Steppe said.
Doug Cohen, another activist with San Diego United Communities, rejected Montgomery Steppe's characterization.
Cohen said he got involved with the group after learning about Footnote 7. The now repealed footnote in the city's Land Development Code allowed denser housing in parts of Encanto and Southeastern San Diego by reducing minimum lot sizes from 20,000 to 5,000 square feet. The change, adopted in 2019, did not apply to wealthier communities such as Point Loma or La Jolla, despite those neighborhoods having the same base zoning.
Many Southeastern San Diego residents said the footnote was reminiscent of redlining, the historic practice of governments and lenders segregating cities by race.
Cohen, in contrast, dismissed the significance of redlining in today's housing market.
"It's been a long time since redlining occurred, OK?" Cohen said. "So that's not a thing anymore. It just isn't."
Cohen, who owns a home in Point Loma, added he did not believe Encanto and Point Loma are separated by wide economic disparities.
"The discretionary household income is certainly no worse in Encanto, and possibly it's on par with something like Point Loma," Cohen said. "So you have to really kind of understand what you're talking about when you're talking about the affordability of housing in San Diego."
A KPBS analysis found the nine census tracts within Point Loma have an average median household income of $145,157 per year. In the 10 census tracts within Encanto, the average median household income is $80,082. The countywide median household income is $109,132.
City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, who also spoke at the Oct. 1 press conference denouncing San Diego United Communities, told KPBS he believes the group is being used as "a convenient facade or vehicle for politicians who understand how bad the Republican brand is in San Diego, but still desire power."
Still, Elo-Rivera said he agrees with the group on at least one issue: short-term home rentals.
"It is real that short-term vacation rentals have impacted the ability for regular people to continue living in coastal communities in San Diego," Elo-Rivera said. "I am sympathetic to someone who has … watched short-term vacation rentals devour housing that their neighbors used to live in, and then be told we need to change your neighborhood in a significant way in order to make space for the housing that we need."
Law said San Diego United Communities is not anti-housing. But he said the city is building too many apartments, and that policies should direct growth to outlying areas where land is cheaper and developers can more easily build single-family homes.
"Millennial families want a small starter home with a patch of land," Law said. "That's exactly what (San Diego Mayor Todd) Gloria and the council have not done. … They've built more apartments. That is not what everyone wanted. No one wants those. The families are stuck in apartments they don't want."
State and local policies discourage building on undeveloped land that's far from jobs and amenities because it results in more driving, more greenhouse gas emissions and higher wildfire risks compared to growth in urbanized areas.
Elo-Rivera said even if some people in apartments dream of owning a house someday, the high cost of single-family homes makes that dream unrealistic for many people.
"Sometimes they want a bigger apartment, sometimes they want a townhome, sometimes they do want a single-family home," Elo-Rivera said. "But before any of that, they want to be able to live in San Diego. And we have a responsibility to create housing that people can live in at various stages in life, whether they're a young professional, whether they're a young family."
