Obamacare, Fracking, Immigration? Newsworthy, no doubt but the big story here is who lives in Mira Mesa...and who doesn't. According to the city of SD and the Mira Mesa Planning commission (yes, I am a member..), the community of Mira Mesa extends from the 15 to the 805. There are huge concrete statue signs proclaiming Welcome to Mira Mesa as you get off both freeways. The post office and police have further divided the area west of Camino Santa Fe into Sorrento Mesa or Sorrento Valley. How a mesa can be a valley is beyond me.
In the last 2 weeks a huge eruption has begun. Some street flags and other signs have been erected in "Sorrento Mesa/Valley" announcing Mira Mesa events/activities. Mind you, Sorrento has no schools, shopping, athletic fields or parks. All parks fall under the Mira Mesa Rec Council.(of which I am also a member) They have no councils or planning boards.
What Sorrento has is high value homes as well as light industrial, biogenetics and tech type businesses.
This is what was in today's UT by local columnist Logan Jenkins.
Want to pick a fight in west Mira Mesa?
Put up a sign saying you’re in Mira Mesa.
The half-century-old Mira Mesa community plan includes the area around Mira Mesa Boulevard, from I-805 to I-15.
Driving in from the west, however, you’re dwarfed by tech parks and business-oriented hotels. Turning north on Camino Santa Fe, Lopez Ridge homes overlooking Peñasquitos Canyon are larger, newer and higher (in altitude and price) than more modest homes on the eastern flatland.
The bedroom community of the ’60s has been injected with major money on its western flank.
Real estate agents and San Diego cops have taken to ID’ing the area to the west of Camino Santa Fe as Sorrento Valley, a historic name that evokes the magic of Silicon Valley.
When a handful of Mira Mesa signs and banners popped up recently, residents saw it as an Invasion of the Brand Snatchers. They revolted in what some Mira Mesans view as a snobby mob attack.
Angry activists shouted that Sorrento Valley had evolved into a “neighborhood” distinct from Mira Mesa. In their view, property values would crater if Mira Mesa insisted upon claiming its full footprint.
After a storm of sound and fury, Councilwoman Lori Zapf’s office promised to remove the remaining signs, the ones that hadn’t been knocked down.
In San Diego, we count 52 communities. Many more neighborhoods market themselves as distinct states of mind and body (and even stomach). Think Little Italy.
Most city dwellers live within concentric circles of geographic identity. People want small worlds within larger ones. It’s a desire wired into the human psyche. (To locals, I always say I live in Bird Rock, or Baja La Jolla, never the community of La Jolla.)
In time, the expanded Sorrento Valley (or more aptly, Sorrento Mesa) will be a recognized neighborhood within the community of Mira Mesa. But the transition should not be as ugly as what’s transpired in the past few months.
The trashing of Mira Mesa, a diverse, family- oriented community where Lopez Ridge sends its kids to school and sports, has been super unseemly. And the clumsy installation of Mira Mesa signs was a needless provocation.
Meanwhile, at the intersection of Mira Mesa Boulevard and I-805, you can’t help but notice a long-standing monument sign welcoming motorists to ... Mira Mesa.
If Sorrento wants to be recognized as a distinct community, they should figure out how to do that. And quit trashing Mira Mesa.
It is what it is...
Namaste
