Community Health Disparities in the International Borderland of San Diego/Tijuana: Gentrification and Homelessness, Drought Restrictions and Limited Food Accessibility

Keywords: Landscape Ecology, Urban Landscape, Gentrification, Homelessness, Drought, Water supply, Food, Food Desert, San Diego, Tijuana
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

I use a landscape ecology lens to illuminate social sustainability and uncover community health disparities in the urbanized pattern of San Diego/Tijuana. As a sub-discipline of biology, landscape ecology is embedded in the natural sciences and concerned with issues of (ecological) sustainability within a positivist worldview. By adopting an urban landscape ecology approach to social sustainability, it becomes possible to analyze the urban pattern of San Diego/Tijuana with a quantitative focus on aspects that shape community health in the cross-border region. Attention will be specifically brought to the connected crises of gentrification and exacerbating homelessness, severe drought and uneven food accessibility. The paper shows that housing-related, environmental and infrastructural burdens are disproportionately affecting ethnically diverse, low-income communities. The compilation of respective developments uncovers a strong spatial pattern of a north-south gradient that is cut into multiple zones by several physical borders running in east-west direction. The spatial pattern reveals that the communities south of the international border are particularly affected by the drought conditions in the southwestern USA and northern Baja California as well as by increasing gentrification in and around downtown Tijuana. The zone between the international border and Interstate 8 – the urbanized and ethnically diverse communities of San Diego – are disproportionately affected by gentrification and homelessness as well as low food accessibility. The neighborhoods in the northern part of the region – the suburban beach communities – show significantly less impacts of gentrification, lower homelessness rates and are characterized by a higher availability of food choices.