A new study offers a new plan for how the city funds parks, the coronavirus is complicating Plastic-Free July and more in our biweekly roundup of environmental news.
So last week I wrote about why your local park might suck.
It mostly depends on how much money developers are willing to fork over, which differs across San Diego. In newer, better-off neighborhoods, developers are required to pay a lot more than they are in older neighborhoods to help fund things like parks, libraries and fire stations.
This is known as the development impact fee and it got a little wild over the years as places like Del Mar Mesa in Carmel Valley, for instance, charged developers about $29,000 per home for parks projects while South University City charged just $609.
One city official acknowledged that the fee is one root of systemic inequity in land use planning. To solve it, the city now wants to harness and tame those fees so everybody is paying the same amount based on the type of housing they build. Going forward, that money would be poured into a single pot instead of 50 or so individual neighborhood pots, some of which haven’t been full enough for years to fix much of anything.
The city would then take responsibility for divvying out that money in a fairer way, it said. But how is still pretty weedy.
