Mira Mesa: The Black Sheep of San Diego

Mira Mesa, a neighborhood in the western part of San Diego, is an area with a short but controversial history. A result of a housing boom after World War II, the neighborhood grew criticism for many effects of its rapid growth. A 1980 article about Mira Mesa by the San Diego Reader is damning in its appraisal of the neighborhood—even its title, "San Diego's Most Wretched Neighborhood," makes the sentiment clear.

A paragraph in the Reader article describes a speech made by California Assemblyman Robert Frazee at an "I Love Mira Mesa Day" celebration, in which he talked about Mira Mesa's rapid development, saying “Mira Mesa is a sign of real hope for our people in California. We need to have more Mira Mesas.” In response, the article says:

Of course, there will never be another Mira Mesa, and there are plenty of people who would disagree with Frazee that the place represents a sign of hope; that is, unless the hope is that it won’t happen ever again.

A harsh passage, but the Reader wasn't the only source of anti-Mira-Mesa sentiment. Judging by the politics at the time, this feeling about Mira Mesa was actually quite popular. In fact, Pete Wilson ran for mayor of San Diego (and won!) on a platform that included the slogan "No more Mira Mesas." It's clear that Mira Mesa was, to say the least, not well-respected in its early time. But what happened in Mira Mesa's history to merit such a reputation? And, more importantly, was this reputation even merited?

To answer these questions, it's important to understand Mira Mesa's place in San Diego history.

Mira Mesa, before it became Mira Mesa, was mainly an area for the army and navy. Mira Mesa's Hourglass Field (seen in the map below) was used as an auxiliary landing field during World War II, and the surroundings were used as a test area.

Following the war, a housing crisis, paired with the application of mass-production techniques to house construction, led to a tract housing boom in San Diego. In the decades following the war, home ownership numbers soared, and tracts of mass-produced houses appeared across San Diego. Mira Mesa arose as a community.

Zooming out a little, it's worth noting that the phenomenon of tract housing in general had its fair amount of critics. One major criticism was the environmental destruction necessitated by tract housing; in order make building sites flat so as to accommodate wide tracts of housing, workers would often clear trees and fill wetlands. However, many critics railed against tract housing for a different reason altogether: it didn't look good. In his book God's Own Junkyard, Architect Peter Blake critiques tract housing at large, decrying "the massive, monotonous ugliness of most of our suburbia."

These criticisms were in full force when it came to Mira Mesa. A section of the San Diego Reader article is dedicated to slamming Mira Mesa for its identical-looking houses, saying, "to drive the streets of Mira Mesa for any length of time is to understand fully the meaning of the word monotony." The early perception of Mira Mesa was as a neighborhood straight out of the uncanny valley, consisting of arrays of the same house with no variation whatsoever. Having lived in this neighborhood for the better part of twenty years, this characterization isn't entirely unmerited (twice in the last few months, I've had to recover packages that were delivered to different, albeit similar-looking, houses in the neighborhood).

But, early problems with Mira Mesa go deeper than that. Its existence as a product of a rapid housing boom means that houses were developed incredibly quickly, and the population boomed just as fast. In fact, the development and subsequent population growth was much faster than city planners anticipated. As a result, Mira Mesa was left with a skyrocketing population, and very few services like schools, parks, or police stations. Early on, children in Mira Mesa were forced to attend school in a different neighborhood. More troubling still, there was only one road connecting Mira Mesa to the rest of San Diego. Even commercial establishments were slow to develop in Mira Mesa—people frequently had to drive to other neighborhoods like Poway or Clairemont to buy basic goods. According to a child interviewed in the Reader article: “If you wanted a Coke, you went to Poway.”

Much of Mira Mesa's early bad reputation was a reaction to this misstep in development. This reputation stuck with Mira Mesa for years—a 1988 Los Angeles Times article about Rancho Penasquitos, another quickly-developing community, refers to Mira Mesa as "a horrible mistake."

The early troubles in Mira Mesa's development are definitely unfortunate. But, now that Mira Mesa's gotten on its feet, is it fair for the neighborhood to be entirely defined by that moment in its history? Looking at the history of Mira Mesa in context of the tract housing boom, Mira Mesa is an interesting phenomenon.

Mira Mesa is, and always has been, a community with a large Filipino population, hence its semi-derogatory, semi-affectionate nickname "Manila Mesa." Being close to a naval air station, many Filipinos who were on active duty brought their relatives to Mira Mesa to settle down. And, for many Filipino immigrants, Mira Mesa's cheaper houses made it easy to achieve some approximation of the American Dream: a normal house in a neighborhood, cars in garages, and a place to call home. These factors in combination mean that Mira Mesa's history is tied with Filipino history in San Diego.

Interestingly, tract houses were not just associated with aesthetic homogeneity. Tract housing districts were largely viewed as places for majority-white families of the same ages and means. According to a book on tract housing in California, tract housing was largely as an environment where ethnic identity takes a backseat to cultural homogeneity. Per the book, "new suburbanites frequently left their ethnic identity behind when leaving the old Irish, Italian, or Polish urban neighborhoods, becoming simply (white) Americans." Ignoring the Eurocentric viewpoint, the message is clear: tract housing was associated with cultural sameness.

But, situated in an environment associated with casting off ethnic identity, Filipinos in Mira Mesa did quite the opposite. Per the Reader article, there was actually significant tension in Mira Mesa because Filipinos didn't assimilate. "The Filipinos," said Mira Mesa social worker Rose DeLeon, "are somewhat clannish, but that’s because many of them are unfamiliar with the food, language, and customs of the United States." This is evidence of Filipinos keeping their own traditions, even at the cost of greater acceptance within the community.

In an interesting decision, the Reader article calls Mira Mesa culturally homogeneous—but with a slight caveat. "In short," the article says, "Filipinos notwithstanding, Mira Mesa was and still is primarily a community of young, white, middle-class families." "Filipinos notwithstanding" is an interesting phrasing, since the Filipino population ratio in Mira Mesa at the time of the article's publication was about four times greater than the ratio in the rest of the city. If Filipinos are considered, Mira Mesa served an important role as a place for many Filipino immigrants to live and form a community, which shouldn't be discounted.

Mira Mesa is, in many ways, a paradox. Considering its early infrastructure, it shouldn't exist today. Plus, the neighborhood is currently home to a thriving Filipino population, which flourished despite the tendency for tract housing neighborhoods to erase ethnic identity. All too commonly, critics of Mira Mesa only focus on the administrative failures, and not on the neighborhood's interesting cultural position. Mira Mesa's current reputation is little changed from that of the 1970's—the neighborhood continues to be derided, albeit for different reasons (mainly stereotyping the neighborhood with danger, but dissecting the racial undertones of that stereotype is a whole other project).

Material evidence of Mira Mesa's early life continues to exist, as the tract houses are still standing (and, if anything, have spread out). Being a Filipino who's lived in Mira Mesa for the better part of twenty years, I want to advocate for a better perception of the neighborhood. Rocky as its start may have been, the neighborhood serves a valuable cultural function, and deserves recognition beyond just one dimension. The question of whether there should be more Mira Mesas is still hotly debated—but whatever the answer is, I'm glad there was at least one.

Blake, Peter. 1964. God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape. Holy, Rinehart, and Winston, New York

Board, Josh. 2003. Mira Mesa. San Diego Reader. San Diego

Hope, Andrew. 2011. Tract Housing in California, 1945-1973: A Context for National Register Evaluation. California Department of Transportation

Keller, Larry. 1980. San Diego’s most wretched neighborhood: North to Mira Mesa. San Diego Reader. San Diego

Ray, Nancy. 1988 City’s Penasquitos Failure Follows Mira Mesa Disaster. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles