San Diego’s Historical Resources Board will vote Thursday whether to recommend more than 400 properties in the Talmadge neighborhood as a historic district.
City staff recommended in their report to the board to vote yes. If approved by the state, it would be the city’s largest historic district to-date.
Proponents said the neighborhood’s Depression-era homes include the first California ranch house. If it becomes a district, any future outer development of the properties must look compatible with the original style.
Laura Henson, president of the Talmadge Historical Society, said it’s important to preserve the history of these homes. They were subsidized by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and financed by Joseph Schenck — a Hollywood producer whose wife Norma Talmadge and sister-in-law Constance Talmadge were stars of the silent film era.
Critics said there’s a dark side to that history.
New Deal subsidies almost never extended to Black homebuyers.
Films by Schenck and the Talmadges included racist portrayals.
And the neighborhood marketed itself as whites-only, boosting property values.
In 1936, the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation described Talmadge as “no ratio of concentration; no threat of infiltration, restricted to the Caucasian race.”
It designated Talmadge one of San Diego’s few green areas on redlining maps — highest rated with the most favorable lending terms. That green area traces roughly the same lines as the proposed historic district, behind the original wrought-iron gates.
Meanwhile, communities down the street were redlined, systematically denied loans and insurance based on the racial composition.
Henson argued that those racist housing policies ended 75 years ago, and the neighborhood has become more integrated over time.
“If we're going to apply that standard — that any community or any place that doesn't have a perfect past can’t exist — there’s a lot of things that can’t exist. United States being one of them,” Henson said.
Census data indicates the past has rippled through to the present.
Wesley Morgan, communications chair for the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) Democrats of San Diego, said naming Talmadge a historic district would worsen this divide by increasing home prices, decreasing property taxes and slowing housing development.
He’s also a member of the Mission Hills historic society.
“The historic resources board as a whole is definitely a forum of privilege where those . . . who have the resources to invest in spending the time to look at history and write reports, benefit from all of the privilege that they were able to put into that effort,” Morgan said.
He said the lack of diversity on historic preservation boards fails the rest of San Diego.
“The majority of people will never live in a historic district,” Morgan said. “They can't afford to live there. And those are our highest resource areas. Those are the areas with the best schools, with the safest streets.”
The board will vote Thursday at 1 p.m.
