Background
City Heights is a vibrant inner-city community in the Mid-City San Diego neighborhood. Approximately 78,000 people live in a 3 square mile area. A significant number of these residents are immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa. Homeownership rates and household incomes are lower than average for San Diego County as a whole. About 40% of adults in the community are high school graduates.
In 1994 Sol Price became interested in City Heights as a result of a newspaper article about a Vons grocery store closing in the community. At the time City Heights had the highest crime rate in San Diego County, gang activity and drug dealing were rampant, housing was substandard and public services were lacking. Sol and former City Councilman William Jones had been working together to open a retail store in an inner city neighborhood in San Diego. Believing that the Vons store might be a good site, they soon learned that the City of San Diego had already secured the site for a new police substation, but didn’t have financing in place. Sol Price made an agreement with San Diego City Manager Jack McGrory whereby Sol would loan the City the money for the building construction if the City would agree to repay the loan in a timely manner and design into the building a gymnasium for police employees and the public to use, public meeting rooms and windows on the street side of thesubstation. The purpose of these facilityadditions was to make the substation as community friendly as possible. The City agreed and the project was completed less than two years later.
While working on the development of the police substation, Sol and William decided that Sol would focus on non-profit work in City Heights while William would focus on for profit real estate development. The “City Heights Initiative” was conceived as a holistic approach to the revitalization of an inner city community. The Initiative focused on improving housing, retail, healthcare, education, social services, public safety, job opportunities, and other quality of life issues and services.