Chula Vista’s Harborside Park is on the path to reopening. The city closed the park in 2022 amid concerns over criminal activity and a large homeless population. The community rallied around Harborside, which highlights a broader issue impacting Chula Vista: a disparity in the park space between the city’s east and west sides.
“How can you take the park away when the kids need someplace to play?” asked Cheryl Perez, gazing on the vacant, fenced-off Harborside. “Look at all the apartments over there, you’ve got all these kids in school here, and there's no place for them to go and play.”
Perez was part of the Harborside Steering Committee that pushed for months to reopen the park.
Chula Vista authorized the temporary closure of Harborside on August 23, 2022. It was originally supposed to last 90 days – but the park has been fenced off and vacant for nearly two years.
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“I would see kids sitting on little strips of land going to Oxford down here,” Perez said. “I’d always think, ‘How sad is it that they're sitting on this little patch of land in front of their apartment building when they should have a park just down the street?’”
Chula Vista Mayor John McCann long wanted to remove the fence, but the city council initially voted against reopening. Some city officials also considered leasing or selling the land to developers.
“The community came out for over a year to every council meeting and asked people to open the park,” McCann said.
That push led to another vote – this time, unanimous in favor of reopening Harborside.
“We were able to get the entire council to understand that we need to fund and reopen the park, put in security issues and be able to make sure that we have the park there for that community,” McCann said.
McCann said the city is putting in gates, lights and cameras to address safety concerns. He's hoping to reopen the park in early 2025, but said the city may be able to open by the end of the year if they can move quickly.
“We’re still dealing with supply chain issues and we’re hoping to be able to get things done as expeditiously as possible,” he said.
While Perez said she's grateful that Harborside will reopen, she said it’s part of a larger problem: a lack of parks on Chula Vista’s west side, particularly as compared the city's east side.
“There's no park anywhere else. There's no park for a mile around here,” she said. “Just go past 805 and you’ll see lots of open park spaces.”
She and McCann said the reason for the disparity is in part the city's age and growth. As Chula Vista expanded east, the newer developments included more green space than the older west side.
“The city of Chula Vista is over 100 years old, so as they grew out in the west side, there wasn’t the infrastructure, there wasn’t the planning - people would just build houses and not necessarily understand that if you’re going to bring in a community, you need to be able to have those open spaces and parks,” McCann said.
“We're an old community over here,” Perez said. “It wasn't planned out and developed the way the east side can be, but it leads to that deficiency of parkland over here.”
More work remains to address the disparity. McCann pointed to new developments on the bayfront, looking to earmark revenue for public works like parks and sidewalks on the city’s west side.
Chula Vista is also now asking for public input on a new park near the Citrus Bay development nearby.
But for Perez, even still behind the fence, the promise of Harborside’s reopening feels like a major victory.
“All I see is what it’s going to look like with the grass and the kids playing,” she said, looking out on the park. “This, I see potential, I see the future for this.”
