The Complicated Gentrification in Barrio Logan

Sara Moreno

San Diego is a city in Southern California with a population of over 1.4 million people (2024 Census). The city is located on the Pacific Coast and is the eighth largest city in the United States, and continues to grow because of its pool of work opportunities and the beaches and warm climate it boasts.

For this article, I will focus on gentrification in Barrio Logan, San Diego, and how the neighborhood wants gentrification to benefit natives in a way they call “gentefication”. Barrio Logan is a historic Mexican American/Chicano working class neighborhood located just south of downtown San Diego, close to the city’s naval base.

The neighborhood has experienced rising rent and cost of living since the neighborhood started to gain more attraction from outsiders. Cost-of-living and rental increases have had a greater effect on Barrio Logan natives who are not as wealthy as the new people moving into the neighborhood. With the wealthier newcomers, people native to Barrio Logan are being displaced because of inflation and rising  housing costs (LA Times Today).

Barrio Logan’s native population is primarily made up of blue collar workers, and while incoming wealth can help the neighborhood improve its infrastructure and businesses it offers, it has to welcome them without compromising the residence of native Mexican Americans/Chicanos that are at a financial disadvantage.

Starting in the 1940s, U.S. naval operations, along San Diego Bay, cut off Barrio Logan’s resident access to the beaches along the waterfront. The city of San Diego rezoned the neighborhood to permit rapid industrial expansion. Blight-causing operations were designated to the Barrio Logan area and resulted in the loss of residential structures and harmful environmental degradation (Diaz, 2020). A long-standing demand from residents for a community park seemed to be on the verge of being met following the city’s approval of the plan. But, on April 22, 1970, community activists noticed construction equipment being set up around the site that had been designated for the park.

Barriers between the Mexican Americans and White Americans in San Diego were amplified with the construction of a freeway overpass over Logan Park. The massive bridge supports and retaining walls ignored the needs of the Logan Park community. In an act of resistance to the construction of Interstate 5, gorgeous massive murals that depicted the Chicano rights struggles were painted on the freeway overpass’s walls (LA Times Today). In the face of the construction project that tore through the community and tore many residents apart, the murals preserved the culture and values Barrio Logan holds.

Today, Barrio Logan is known as an artistic, industrial neighborhood with Mexican roots. Chicano Park and its artwork gave the neighborhood its fame and the attraction of nonnatives. With the influx of tourists, former warehouses in Barrio Logan have turned into art galleries, restaurants, and breweries. The neighborhood is close to Woodbury School of Architecture, and attracts college students. 

In How to Kill a City by P.E. Moskowitz discusses the phases of gentrification, and based on what is known about Barrio Logan, the city has been in the second phase and is starting to enter the third phase. The second phase is characterized as the time when young people begin to move into a neighborhood, new restaurants and small businesses start opening, and media companies begin to cover stories about the revitalization of the community (Moskowitz, 33). 

The response to the freeway overpass in Logan Park was a reclamation of the values and culture of the community that has ironically resulted in gentrification in the neighborhood. The art scene in Logan Park has made it a popular spot for tourism, which in turn has increased the number of startups in the area, as well as expansion of existing businesses. The bustling art scene has attracted white, wealthier people, who have driven up rent prices and displaced hundreds of local Mexican American families that had roots there for many decades. In 2017, when Chicano Park was designated a national historic landmark the community itself started to gain a lot of recognition for its art scene, which was drawing in thousands of visitors to the large murals and Chicano-run art galleries (LA Times Today). 

Natives of Barrio Logan hope that with the influx of middle class people there will be socially responsible development. However, it is difficult to ensure that without input from local planning committees. A place with culture like Barrio Logan has profit potential because it is attractive and welcomes the idea of personal liberation and economic possibility, which in turn leads to personal agendas.

Currently, the Latino driven art scene is starting to deteriorate because art gallery owners cannot afford the high rents which wealthier outsiders are able and willing to pay (LA Times Today). It is important that city planners and developers in Barrio Logan make decisions with the intention of preserving the community’s heritage because that is where its value is derived from. 

The  neighborhood will benefit from housing people with higher incomes because they have wealth that can fund the projects Barrio Logan has been trying to complete for decades. This sounds like a catch-22, in which Barrio Logan cannot escape gentrification and displacement because it needs the wealth of new businesses and residents in order to sustain its growth.

The Chicano Park Steering Committee (CPSC) was created in April of 1970 as a grassroots organization of individuals who volunteer their time and energy to ensure that the original stated goals of the development and expansion of Chicano Park are adhered to. The committee was established in April of 1970 with the stated objective  to “oversee (on behalf of the community) the continuing development and expansion of Chicano Park and to ensure that the park would be developed in a Chicano/Mexicano/Indigenous style” (Chicano Park Steering Committee).

Real estate interests profit by speculating on previously marginal properties. With the CPSC’s input, moneyed real estate interests will not be the only beneficiaries of gentrification. 

One of the original goals of the Chicano Park and the CPSC was to transform the gray concrete that characterized the site into an aesthetically pleasing view that showcased the culture and values of Chicano people. Today the murals in Chicano Park are world-famous and make up the world's largest outdoor art gallery.

The murals are a growing collection; the last mural added to concrete pillars was “Brown Image” by Victor Ochoa and others, for Brown Image CC in June of 2022 (Chicano Park Steering Committee). The CPSC decides the priorities or order of business of organizations and manages the general course of its operations in a way that aligns with the hopes for Chicano Park. The CPSC hopes that Barrio Logan’s park will eventually stretch all the way to the bay. With this project, residents of Barrio Logan would be able to walk from the edge of Interstate 5 to the San Diego Bay without ever leaving the park.

In 1987 the CPSC, with the support of the Barrio Caucus and the California State Legislature, got the California Coastal Commission to vote in favor of developing the land at the foot of Crosby Street into a park (Chicano Park Steering Committee). 

San Diego Unified Port District officials and commissioners did not want the park to be built by a maritime industrial area. The piece of land in question was the last undeveloped site on the San Diego Bay and represented the only chance for bay access for the Barrio Logan community. Barrio Logan now owns Chicano Park and the park site by the bay, but still needs to fill in three blocks between the sites in order to complete the connection. For the CPSC,  “All The Way To The Bay" represents the community's plan to expand the vibrant cultural and recreation center that started under the freeway overpass.

Barrio Logan needs the money of wealthy incomers to push ideas for the neighborhood’s expansion forward. Residents want the neighborhood to continue to grow and develop as a result of what they call “gentefication”. “Gentefication” would be gentrification led by Barrio Logan’s own Latino people (LA Times Today). There is a push and pull of gentrification because it is difficult to avoid changing a community’s character when indulging the different tastes of wealthier people. But Barrio Logan believes in socially responsible development that does not leave its native residents behind.

Ownership of the community by the community is the ideal solution. There is a long history of human activism in Barrio Logan. Recently, “Plan Barrio Logan” was the city’s community plan recently passed unanimously by the city council which will create a buffer zone between residential areas and industrial areas, provisions for affordable housing, in order to protect people who have long-standing roots in the neighborhood (City of San Diego).

Some possible solutions for avoiding what sounds like a catch 22 is for Barrio Logan to ensure affordability of housing units and giving native residents the ability to remain in their homes even as surrounding properties sell or rent for higher. Barrio Logan could also consider rent controls or preserve federally subsidized housing programs. It would be important for the Barrio Logan community to be educated on their options for housing. Involving the community in the process of designing and redeveloping their neighborhood would also help preserve its culture and values. Barrio Logan can expand the CPSC or create more organized bodies or partnerships with the purpose of mitigating gentrification.

It is important that native residents of Barrio Logan remain in the neighborhood's central locations and do not fall victim to rising property values which could force them to the outskirts of Chicano Park. Barrio Logan should have location-efficient mortgages that provide competitive rates and low down-payments for those who want to live in “location-efficient communities”, so that residents have convenient access to resources and the need to drive anywhere is minimized. 

With the expansion of Barrio Logan and the business growth around Chicano Park, new jobs will become available, which can hopefully benefit the Barrio Logan natives. Job programs for residents of the community can help maintain the level of connection and involvement the native Chicanos have to the evolution of their community. By encouraging employment of Barrio Logan natives, the need for subsidized housing can be minimized because they will be financially stable.

New housing-related investments should be made to benefit current residents. Development proposals should be reviewed to determine whether the changes could cause displacement. One way to determine how a building project could impact current residents is by conducting a resident impact assessment. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides information on how to conduct a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) in order to evaluate the potential public health impacts of a plan, project, or policy on people in its vicinity before it is built or implemented (Healthy Places, CDC).

The steps to conduct an HIA include screening the project to determine if an HIA is necessary for it; scoping the project to identify which health risks and benefits to consider; assessment to identify the populations that would be affected by the project and quantifying those impacts; recommendations which suggest practical actions for promoting health and minimizing negative effects; reporting these results to decision makers, affected communities, and other stakeholders); finally, monitoring and evaluating the HIA process to determine how it impacts the decision on the project (Healthy Places, CDC).

For the projects proposed in Barrio Logan, there needs to be assessments for how current residents of the community will be affected by new projects. Much like an HIA, there needs to be a tool to assess how the proposed decisions will affect the population and whether vulnerable residents (older and/or low-income residents) are more likely to be impacted. An assessment for vulnerable residents can provide recommendations during the decision-making process and reduce inequities within the community.

What is happening in Barrio Logan is seen across all of San Diego County. An annual count of homeless people collected by the Regional Task Force on Homelessness in February of 2022 found 4,106 people living without shelter countywide, with 2,494 within the city of San Diego. With people living in homeless shelters included, the county’s total homeless population was 8,427, which is a 10 percent increase over the most recent previous count from 2020 (Warth, 2022). 

Works Cited

U.S. Census Bureau quickfacts: San Diego City, California. (n.d.). Retrieved April 12, 2026, from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sandiegocitycalifornia/PST045221 

Los Angeles Times. (n.d.). Los Angeles Times. Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://www.latimes.com/california/barrio-logan-gentefication-latt-123. 

Magazine, S. (2020, April 28). Fifty years ago, fed up with the city's neglect, a San Diego community rose up to create Chicano Park. Smithsonian.com. Retrieved December 2, 2022, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/fifty-years-ago-fed-citys-neglect-san-diego-community-rose-create-chicano-park-180974764/ 

Chicano Park Steering Committee. Official Chicano Park Website. (n.d.). Retrieved December 3, 2022, from https://chicano-park.com/cpscwhatisthe.html 

Warth, G. (2022, September 7). Downtown San Diego homeless population hits record high. Tribune. Retrieved December 3, 2022, from https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/homelessness/story/2022-09-06/downtown-san-diego-homeless-population-at-record-high 

Barrio logan - previous planning efforts, studies and reports. The City of San Diego. (n.d.). Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://www.sandiego.gov/planning/community-plans/barrio-logan/planning-studies-reports 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). Healthy places. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved December 3, 2022, from https://www.cdc.gov/healthyplaces/hia.htm