Co-opting the Neighborhoods Agenda

The local San Diego GOP attempts to steal a page out of the Democratic playbook in an attempt to rewrite history and claim the neighborhoods agenda for its own.

By Andy Cohen Over the past two decades, the economic and development focus in San Diego has been overwhelmingly focused around the “downtown special interests” that have controlled the city’s political agenda during that time. For two decades, whatever the big, powerful moneyed interests wanted in San Diego, they got. That’s not to say that San Diego hasn’t benefited at all from some of the policies enacted during that period. It has. Downtown has undergone a pretty spectacular transformation. The massive General Dynamics complex in Kearney Mesa has been almost completely redeveloped (although not without significant controversy). Sorrento Valley has become a tech Mecca of sorts. But it has been the downtown special interests that have dictated the who, what, where, when, and how of everything that has happened. It has served to make rich people multitudes richer, but it has done relatively little to bring about broad based reforms and economic development to the nation’s eighth largest city.