Chula Vista officials are now planning to reopen Harborside Park.
The small southwest Chula Vista park has been closed to visitors for more than a year and a half. City leaders had been exploring the possibility of shuttering it for good and using the land for a housing complex.
But Tuesday evening, the City Council said they would move away from that option and begin the process of reopening the park instead.
The Council’s decision came after dozens of residents held rallies and spoke at public meetings over the past year, urging city leaders to change course and reopen Harborside. In a letter to the Council this week, Parks and Recreation Chair Martín Calvo called the community support “undeniable” and “overwhelming.”
Tuesday’s decision was not binding and could potentially be reversed at a later meeting. Still, all five councilmembers said they would support the reopening plan.
At the same time, several councilmembers defended their past decision to look at different paths for the land that Harborside sits on. Deputy Mayor Jose Preciado and Councilmember Alonso Gonzalez emphasized that the city still does not have laws banning residents from camping in public parks.
“Everyone, when you open a park, has access to that park,” Preciado said. “We hope that everyone respects the rules and regulations connected to the park. But if somebody chooses to habitate in the park, we really are not able to move them.”
Still, many residents celebrated the Council’s decision.
“I’m feeling really happy,” said Leticia Lares, who had organized rallies and spoke at many City Council meetings in support of the reopening plan. “I’m not going to trust 100%. But yes, I’m really happy.”
Officials said the new plan to reopen Harborside will take at least eight months.
In the last year and a half, Harborside Park has become the center of citywide debates over housing, homelessness and environmental justice.
In August 2022, the City Council voted to close the park for the first time. Their goal was to evict dozens of unhoused residents who had taken shelter there — many of them amid the turmoil of the pandemic — citing higher rates of arrests and reported crimes than other city parks.
Homelessness advocates and unhoused residents tried to stop the closure with an injunction, but city leaders ultimately decided to move forward. They raised a chain link fence around the park and promised to reopen it swiftly.
Then, this past May, councilmembers made the surprise decision to keep the park closed and explore leasing or selling the park for housing. That decision reignited frustration for many residents over the lack of green space in West Chula Vista, where there is far less parkland than on the wealthier east side.
The park has also become closely linked with the political careers of several councilmembers, including Andrea Cardenas and Mayor John McCann.
Many residents have expressed particular frustration with Cardenas’ decisions on Harborside. The Democratic councilmember, who represents southwest Chula Vista, was the first to make the controversial suggestion to look at selling or leasing the parkland.
Cardenas is currently facing unrelated charges of felony fraud.
The park has also become a major talking point for McCann, a Republican and the only councilmember to vote against exploring using the land for housing. Last year, the then-councilmember and mayoral candidate campaigned heavily on closing Harborside Park and evicting the people living there. And just this past weekend, McCann spoke at another rally in support of residents pushing to reopen the park.
The City Council’s decision on Tuesday was the most significant update on Harborside since this past May, when the Council voted to explore using the land for affordable housing.
The cost of reopening the park has increased since it was first considered last year but remains within the city’s financial limits, city officials said. They said the new plan will cost $1.1 million — up from an original estimated cost of $900,000 — and would be funded by Measure P, the citywide tax for high priority infrastructure projects.
Ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, city development officials had also put together a detailed plan for building affordable housing at Harborside.
That plan would have added a residential building with 168 units, along with a possible recreation center, and would have taken at least four years to complete, according to city officials.
Chula Vista does need to build more affordable homes. A 2023 San Diego County Grand Jury report found that the county’s second-largest city failed to meet most of its state-mandated housing goals, as did almost all other cities.
Critics of the plan to add homes on Harborside argued that it would be unfair to southwest Chula Vista, a poorer and more industrialized neighborhood, to take away one of the few parks they have.
During Tuesday’s meeting, several councilmembers also argued that the decision was more complicated than residents were making it out to be — particularly because Chula Vista is still deciding how to regulate encampments in public areas.
“This issue, as we’ve heard today — it’s so nuanced,” Cardenas said. “The primary concern for everybody here was to first address the safety issues that we had.”
Gonzalez went even further, arguing that the reopening of Harborside could be a reason for the city to look towards a farther-reaching law on public camping, similar to San Diego’s controversial ban, as a way to prevent people from taking shelter at the park.
“Hopefully it reopens in coordination with the camping ordinance,” he said.
McCann also took a forceful stance on the unhoused community, arguing that city authorities would already have the legal power to remove residents who try to camp at Harborside. He argued that one of the main legal challenges the city had faced in the past was a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that blocked city authorities from removing people from public parks because Chula Vista had no homeless shelter at the time.
“Well,” McCann said, “Now we have a homeless shelter.”
The City Council plans to revisit discussion of an encampment ordinance in the new year.
