For Maria Guadalupe, the rising cost of living in San Diego is a bitter rejoinder to the American Dream.
Raised by immigrant parents in Tijuana and San Ysidro, Guadalupe, who now works in Chula Vista as director of operations for a community lending agency, said lack of affordable housing has shadowed every step of her family’s climb up America’s economic ladder.
Her first year in America, Guadalupe said, she lived in her grandmother’s garage in National City. She was eight years old.
Eventually, her parents became citizens and saved up to buy a condominium in San Ysidro. Guadalupe went to college and hoped to build a life as a middle-class professional.
But even after earning a master’s degree and finding work in financial services, Guadalupe said she couldn’t afford to move out of her parents’ condominium. Nor could her sister, who lived at home part of the time she attended UC San Diego because campus housing was too expensive.
Only by combining forces was Guadalupe’s family able at last to feel more secure about their future. Five years ago, Guadalupe’s parents sold their condo and, together with Guadalupe, her sister and her sister’s husband, bought a century-old five-bedroom house in Chula Vista.
“It’s a 1916 fixer-upper,” Guadalupe said of the home where she now lives with the other four members of her family. “It’s been quite the money sucker. [But] it’s still our home.”
“I wish I could speak on home ownership in a positive light,” Guadalupe said. “The chokehold is just too strong.”
Stories like Guadalupe’s are common in predominantly Latino South San Diego County, where incomes are among the lowest in San Diego and a third of residents report struggling to afford housing and other basic necessities.
Until recently, South County’s overwhelmingly Democratic elected leaders responded to such concerns in traditionally Democratic ways. They adopted tenant protection ordinances (as Chula Vista and Imperial Beach did in recent years) and approved project-labor agreements with labor unions raising salaries on city-affiliated construction projects.
But those policies have not quelled voters’ demand for relief. And so, increasingly, Democratic leaders are turning to a strategy once more commonly associated with Republicans.
They are targeting California’s bedrock environmental laws, which they say drive up costs, slow badly needed home construction and prioritize the interests of wealthy, white coastal homeowners over the needs of working families.
Over the past year, South County leaders ranging from local city councilmembers to state lawmakers have worked to weaken California’s landmark Environmental Quality Act, taken on the state’s powerful Coastal Commission, voiced skepticism of costly new emissions regulations and even given a thumbs down to electric cars, which state Assemblymember David Alvarez in a recent interview called “unrealistic [for] communities like mine, which are urban, but they are older, more middle class and lower income.”
This year, Alvarez, who represents all three South County cities along with portions of southern San Diego, was a leading member of a coalition of legislative Democrats who successfully rolled back portions of the environmental quality act, or CEQA, to make it easier to build housing.
He also introduced legislation to weaken Coastal Commission oversight of new student housing construction after hearing from student advocates that lack of affordable housing at coastal universities is driving some students into homelessness.
Responding to constituents’ complaints about rising gas prices, Alvarez introduced a bill that would authorize blending more ethanol into fuel dispensed at the pump – even though the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations oppose ethanol on grounds that it encourages environmentally harmful farming practices.
And he agreed to co-lead a legislative committee scrutinizing recently adopted regulations mandating lower carbon emissions from gasoline produced in California oil refineries. Though the regulations are a long-sought goal of environmentalists, Alvarez said they risked raising gas prices for his already overburdened constituents.
“To my environmentalist friends who really care about the environment for everyone, we should not be okay with the status quo,” Alvarez said. “At the end of the day, people in California want to see not just one interest group win but to provide solutions for all people in California.”
Alvarez stressed that, like his constituents, he and other South County Democratic leaders remain committed to many environmental goals, especially improving air and water quality in lower-income communities plagued by toxic industrial emissions and other pollutants.
But he said that when environmental regulations block needed housing or raise the price of basic necessities, he is willing to set aside Democrats’ customary lockstep alliance with environmentalists.
“I come from an environmental justice community where we suffer from some of the highest levels of asthma and hospitalization rates suffering from air quality issues,” Alvarez said. “[But] people in communities I represent want to see housing opportunities for their kids…They say, ‘Where are my kids going to live?’”
Other South County Democrats voice similar views.
Joining Alvarez on the legislative committee scrutinizing the new gasoline emissions regulations is Assemblymember LaShae Sharp-Collins, who represents Bonita, Spring Valley and parts of southern San Diego.
In a May interview with Voice of San Diego, Sharp-Collins said her constituents, like Alvarez’s, rank the cost of living as a top issue. “We need more single-family homes,” she said.
Chula Vista City Councilmember Jose Preciado, who this year replaced Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre as South County’s representative on the California Coastal Commission, said he planned to use his time on the commission to advocate for the kind of ambitious building projects Chula Vista has prioritized at its redeveloping bayfront.
Chula Vista officials recently celebrated the opening of a 1,600-room high-rise hotel on the city’s waterfront. In coming years, the hotel will be joined by additional development projects, including high-rise condominiums, office buildings and recreational facilities.
“The people left out of housing are traditionally groups that are lower income,” Preciado said. “My goal is to, within the constraints of the coastal zone and Coastal Act [which sets development guidelines for California’s coastline], encourage and support more development.”
San Diego City Councilmember Vivian Moreno, who represents neighborhoods south of downtown, based her recent campaign to fill a vacant seat on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors in part on promises to speed up home construction by reconsidering county environmental rules that make it harder to build housing in undeveloped areas.
In an interview with Voice earlier this year, Moreno said the environmental rules, though supported by environmentalists as a key method of lowering carbon emissions, might actually be counterproductive.
“It might be that by limiting development [in San Diego County], we’re actually forcing people to drive even farther” to new home developments in Riverside or even Mexico, Moreno said.
Environmentalists have taken note of South County leaders’ new attitude toward environmental issues. Some are not happy about it. Others are adjusting to the region’s changing political dynamics.
The Sierra Club’s California chapter recently blasted the CEQA rollback Alvarez championed, calling it a “half-baked [policy] written behind closed doors [that] will have destructive consequences for environmental justice communities and endangered species across California.”
Lobbyists for the Coastal Commission, aided by environmentally-minded Democrats in the legislature, worked overtime to water down Alvarez’s proposal to eliminate commission oversight of university student housing. The bill is now parked in a state Senate committee and has been whittled to a series of administrative tweaks.
Mark West, director of Sierra Club’s San Diego chapter, said he could not comment on specific legislation or statewide political issues. But he said members of his chapter are aware they need to do more outreach in South San Diego County to ensure environmental issues remain relevant to residents there.
“Sierra Club is over 50 years old, and we have a North County chapter that’s almost as old,” West said. “During that time, we have not had a successful growth of membership in our South County communities.”
West, who served on the Imperial Beach City Council from 2016 to 2020, said “there’s a multitude of reasons” for the lack of South County Sierra Club members.
But he said his chapter now has a South County conservation manager and plans to become more active advocating for cleaner air in the region, more access to open space and a resolution to the ongoing sewage crisis in the Tijuana River.
“We want to take our chapter to South County,” West said. “We are definitely taking a larger front-facing role in South County issues.”
For some Democrats, the overture from environmentalists may be too late.
Saad Asad, advocacy and communications chair for YIMBY Democrats of San Diego County, a Democratic coalition that advocates for more home construction, said environmental roadblocks to housing and other necessities have contributed to a regional split between wealthier, environmentally minded North County Democrats and their South County counterparts, who say some conservation goals are a luxury lower income people simply can’t afford.
“Locally it’s dividing Democrats,” Asad said of environmental issues. “North coast Democrats have more homeowners. South Bay Democrats are more likely to be renters and have more housing instability, so you have politicians like Moreno and Alvarez who advocate for more housing.”
Kate Rodgers, a student at UC Berkeley who leads a statewide coalition of college students advocating for more student housing, said environmentally minded Democrats’ intransigence on home construction risked alienating even young voters, once considered a reliable linchpin of the Democratic coalition.
Rodgers said that she and other student advocates working to support Alvarez’s Coastal Commission bill were surprised to find themselves at times receiving more support from Republicans than Democrats.
“Republicans have been incredibly receptive thus far,” Rodgers said. “They are approaching the issue from a different angle than I am. But that’s okay with me. Because if we can collaborate, from our perspective it’s about making our coasts more affordable and equitable and easier for renters and students to live in.”
For Maria Guadalupe, the political debate over the cost of living not only impacts her pocketbook – it has begun to darken her view of America itself.
Guadalupe said her family came to the U.S. fleeing drug violence in Mexico with hopes of building a better life in a place with more economic opportunities.
At first, she said, as her parents became citizens, bought a condominium and sent their kids to college, her family did seem to be moving up America’s economic ladder.
But she said the crushing rise in San Diego’s cost of living, along with stricter and often cruel-seeming federal immigration policies, have led her to question whether America remains a land of opportunity for people of all backgrounds.
“Money does truly rule this country,” she said. “The wages of working people haven’t increased when CEO salaries have…Society pushes people to come together to get housing to get ahead and be able to save.”
Guadalupe said she felt politicians have lost touch with what voters like her family actually need – an affordable life and the assurance that they, too, have a place in American society.
“Hopefully, the Democratic party has a reckoning that they need to…provide for people and not just talk about it,” she said.