Gen Z and millennials offer up housing solutions for San Diego, Tijuana

New lockers for San Diego’s homeless, a community-oriented neighborhood next to the Amazon warehouse in Tijuana and other ideas won awards at a design competition this week.

Forty-eight proposals were submitted for a housing design challenge Tuesday at the World Design Policy conference in downtown San Diego. Eventually, three winners were selected.

Roughly 150 people attended the competition at the new RaDD (Research and Development District) building on the waterfront. It is the first major event at the 1.7 million-square-foot property built by San Diego-based life science real estate developer IQHQ.

Teams came from a variety of backgrounds and ages. The competition was for all aspects of housing issues, so most of the proposals focused on homelessness.

The youngest group, from La Jolla Country Day, beat out university students from across San Diego County and Baja California to get the $1,000 “most implementable” award.

They designed a locker system for homeless residents of San Diego where they could keep belongings. The lockers looked a bit like Amazon lockers, big enough for large packages but not so big that they would greatly stand out.

The team of Arian Ludwig, Rafaella Timmerman and Danny Breise, all 16 years old, said while San Diego does have a storage system for people experiencing homelessness, it uses bins that look like trash cans for items and has limited space.

“It signifies their stuff is worthless,” Breise said of the current trash can system.

The locker designs showed prototypes that could be colored green to blend in more with surroundings, have slanted roofs for rainy conditions and varied sizes depending on need. The women suggested a fingerprint lock system for security.

The competition was part of the World Design Policy Conference, tied to the World Design Capital event. San Diego and Tijuana won the joint distinction in 2021, and the conference was one of the last events of the yearlong process. The cities will hand over the World Design Capital title to the Frankfurt, Germany, metro area on Saturday.

One group from Tijuana won the human-centered design award, also for $1,000, for its vision for the shantytown called Nueva Esperanza outside the Amazon warehouse. Images of the area, featuring homes made out of wood scraps, cardboard and tarps went viral in 2021 because of the contrast to the new 344,000-square-foot Amazon building.

Sarah Cristina Grageda Viguerias, 19, an architecture student at Tijuana’s Universidad Xochicalco, built a utopian vision of the site. It featured housing for migrant families and singles, a community center, schools for adults and children, public bathrooms, a community garden and more.

The model included a large area for parks in its center with plans for a skate park and space for bus lanes. Viguerias, and other team members, said the idea of the project was to create a healthy place with upward mobility for migrants pouring into the city, and for other low-income residents of the neighborhood.

The $1,000 most innovative award went to a group of professional women who created something called the Community Building Playbook. It was a snazzy pamphlet that gave homeless shelters ideas for building community, such as wellness workshops, a resident council, expression nights with things like painting and a community garden.

Maura Deignan, 38, said the idea from her and her friends was based on the need for people down on their luck to create community. She said social isolation creates weak ties among people and can result in less access to resources.

Some of the other concepts were NextStepSD, a crowdfunding site for homeless people; DocuHome, a website for homeless people to digitally store sensitive documents, like birth certificates; and HomeStart, a rental website exclusively for college students.