Wow, 19 years! Strange to think there might be people posting in the old thread who hadn't even been born when it started.
Seeing as we have a new thread, perhaps it's time I go over once again that perennial problem with building skyscrapers in downtown San Diego: the airport.
Depending on how you measure it, San Diego International might be the closest airport to a major city center in the world. Certainly it is within the top 5. To say this location is less than ideal is an understatement. Our airport is hemmed in by hills on three sides and a military airfield on the forth, a muddy beach covered with the dredged clay we pulled from the harbor to make our ship channel. The single runway is too short for many international flights, and already at capacity most hours of the day. Fog is also a constant issue, made worse because the commonly used approach from the east has too many obstacles to build a proper bad weather landing system.
The story of how this came to be is long and complex, but the short of it is the San Diego region doesn't have a lot of good places to build an airport, and the US Navy went and claimed all the good ones before modern commercial air travel was really a thing. Much ink has been split on studies trying to find a new spot, or how to share a location with the military. Trust me when I say that everywhere you can think of has already been looked at and rejected for various reasons. After over 50 years of looking those in charge have mostly given up, as decades of saving up money for a new airport has left our current one a mess of "temporary" patchjobs left standing long past what their designers ever intended. The new Terminal 1 that opened this week (
) is the first thing ever build on that field not intended to be torn down in 15 years or less.
Our tiny, crowded airport is stuck right next to downtown, and this isn't changing anytime soon, so we here in San Diego have the unique problem of needing to design our buildings so that airliners don't accidentally run into them. I know that sounds a bit dramatic, but in reality it's a very solvable engineering problem. Aircraft already fly in defined paths, approaching to land and takeoff in straight lines with strict requirements to know their exact position (within a well regulated margin of error). Keep skyscrapers out of that boundary, avoid reflective surfaces to keep from blinding pilots as they fly on by, and everything will be fine.
Prior to the 1950s this mostly worked on the "build and lets hope no one runs into it" system, and quite frankly it's surprising we didn't have more problems with airplanes running into buildings back then. Fortunately the propeller planes of yesteryear were more maneuverable than the jets of today, and pilots generally didn't try to land in bad weather or fog. But that wasn't going to work in the modern age, so the CAA (predecessor of the FAA) established a model regulation to govern building heights around airports:
14 CFR Part 77.
Part 77 defines a series of
imaginary surfaces, angled panes cutting through the sky. Any structure that breaches them is presumed to be a hazard to aerial navigation. It took a bit of doing, but soon enough almost every city near an airport adopted these guidelines as law, denying building permits to any building that would violate them. It helped that the CAA/FAA was offering federal money for airport improvements if they did, even money to buy out the one or two properties that were already in breech so they could be demolished.
San Diego was different. To follow the Part 77 guidelines, San Diego would need to
demolish every building in Mission Hills, Hillcrest, Bankers Hill and Balboa Park along with most of the buildings in northern Point Loma, then remove the top 20-30 feet of topsoil. Most of the buildings on Cortez Hill would need to be removed, including El Cortez, at the time the tallest building in the city.
Obviously the City of San Diego wasn't very interested in doing that. But now we've reached an impasse. Notice how I said above the FAA published "model" regulations, and local cities adopted them? That's because the FAA, like the rest of the federal government, has no say in land use decisions. The constitution has a list of things our government is allowed to do, and courts have determined deciding how tall building can be isn't one of them. So San Diego told the FAA they could take their airport money and shove it, we're not going to demolish half our city because you came up with some new rules.
(in reality the the FAA told San Diego to build a new airport, and basically gave the City a blank check to buy the land for it. They tried purchasing Montgomery Field, Otay Mesa, Mission Bay, offering to buy or share either Miramar or North Island but the Navy rejected commercial airline service at any of these places, saying it would interfere with military readiness. It was only after that, with the FAA still intransigent, that City leaders started getting pushy about letting people build in downtown)
But anyone who took a civics class might remember that the 10th amendment says any powers not given to the federal government fall to the states. The State of California
could tell San Diego how high it could build. So the FAA went and told California that if San Diego started interfering with air travel, they would halt all airport funding across the entire state. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed, and a deal was struck. The California legislature gave Caltrans the authority to deny permission to any building the FAA determined to be a hazard. Caltrans made it known they would use that authority on any building taller than 500 feet that breached a Part 77 surface. The FAA agreed that buildings shorter than 500 feet in downtown San Diego would not be presumed hazardous, even if they penetrated Part 77. San Diego agreed not to build anything that would make the FAA have to alter the flight path into San Diego International, if the FAA determined that through a study. And the FAA agreed to start funding airport improvements there like any other.
50 years later, and that's still the way things are. Nothing taller than 500 feet, nothing that interferes with the flight path, and San Diego gets a pass from Part 77. The only other cities I know of with similar deals are San Jose and Boston. The latter has built several 500+ footers by taking a much more hostile tack with both the FAA and their home state than San Diego ever has, which has ended up in court more than once. My impression is that the current leadership in San Diego doesn't consider that worth the fight, especially as San Diego has far less power in our state legislature than Boston does in its.
While "nothing taller than 500 feet" is an easy rule to comprehend, "nothing that interferes with the flight path into San Diego International" can be much more difficult. Officially, the only way to determine this is to submit a
FAA Form 7460. Then the FAA will do a bunch of math to see if your proposed project might interfere with air traffic, determining latitudes and longitudes and measuring how far the edge of the building is from the nearest runway. As you can imagine this is not a quick process, so the airport authority has released a series of
Airport Land Use Comparability Plans which provide
maps
San Diego International, naturally, requires a much more complex map than other airports, which can get away with just the Part 77 surfaces. In
previous years the info available was somewhat limited, it included factors effecting landing aircraft but not those taking off. Recently though we've finally gotten data for both, and it's been put into ArcGIS for precise viewing:
https://experience.arcgis.com/experi...e967311cfb1095
(This a pretty powerful tool but can be tricky to use, for the simplest version I would recommend hiding all map layers other than Max Structure Height and Max Structure Height Analysis. Then, just click on the spot you're interested and it will tell you exactly how high you can build. If you're wondering why some areas are thin strips, that's because many height limits are actually angled. The only way to program that in was as a series of strips for every 1' of additional height. You can see the actual area boundaries if you switch on the San Critical Surface Area layer, which maps what the lowest limiting factor is for every location. As of Jan 2026 this tool only contains data for San Diego International, you need to consult the
other ALUCPs to see height limits from those airports. Data from Tijuana airport and other airports in Mexico is not included.)
This is a lot of info, but I hope it answers everyone's questions about why we can't build higher than 500 feet in San Diego, what can we build and where, and why this is going to keep being a limit for the foreseeable future.
Prev
Linear Mode
