During the past 25 years this small city—four square miles, 28,000 souls, southern boundary extending to the Mexican border—took some decisive steps to preserve its special character and its natural environment. Now it is working on an economic development plan that taps into and supports its natural assets.

It’s worth noting that despite its grandiose name, Imperial Beach is not wealthy. It has the lowest per capita sales tax revenue in San Diego County. Until recently it was primarily blue-collar, now it’s mostly a bedroom community for military people, law enforcement and other public servants, teachers, and other working people in the lower income brackets of the middle class. Some higher-income professionals have lately begun to move in. The city was first developed as a resort in the 1880s and ’90s, at about the same time as Coronado Island, but was marketed to Imperial Valley farmers for summer homes. “I don’t know how successful that was,” said Mayor Diane Rose, “but the name stuck.” Today the town is a popular destination for Imperial County residents who beat a path due west to escape the desert heat.

When Mayor Rose, attending a recent conference, heard talk about “smart growth,” she had the satisfaction of knowing that her city had been putting life into that concept for quite a few years. “More and more cities are considering open space as part of their infrastructure, as important as schools, streets, and sewers,” she said. “That’s what people who are thinking of moving into a community look for. But we have more than just parks and green space. We have real environmental assets, so we hope to tap into these as part of economic development. We have the ocean to our west, San Diego Bay [with its recently-designated South San Diego Bay National Wildlife Refuge] to the north, and the Tijuana Estuary to the south.”

The town’s southern neighborhoods lie on the edge of what in coastal southern California could be counted as wilderness. To the south and east, a huge expanse of wild open space lies surrounded by cities. Altogether, some 4,000 acres— dunes and saltmarsh, riparian floodplain and coastal scrub upland—extend across the Tijuana River Estuary and on toward the Border Highlands and Mexico, with Tijuana’s seaside bullring to the west and city center to the east.

In the late 1960s, a large marina development was proposed at the south end of town, in the saltmarsh at the mouth of the Tijuana River. A majority of local citizens had expressed support through an advisory vote, but a few, with the help of their Congressman, Lionel Van Deerlin, campaigned successfully to protect the marsh as a wildlife sanctuary. It was a daring and controversial step at the time, but in 1980 they reached their goal. The Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge was established. In 1982, when the 2,531-acre Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve was created, one of only 26 such conservation areas, the refuge was incorporated into it. The destruction of wetlands for development was stopped right at sidewalks’ edge in Imperial Beach.

The result is a sense of time suspended. If you walk south from downtown on Seacoast Drive past the last house, and get up to the back dune, your eye can travel along a sandy strand for two miles, all the way to Mexico. Midway, the Tijuana River breaks the bar and flows into the ocean. On the west side of the street is a row of small homes, with street ends allowing you to enter the beach or relax on a surfboard-shaped bench. On the east side of the street, where similar houses would likely have been constructed had the proposed marina complex prevailed, there is an expanse of marshland such as can be seen in very few places in southern California. From the urban sidewalk—with no wall or fence between you and the wildland—you can watch herons and egrets stalking just a few feet away, almost within reach. In spring, you may hear the clucking chatter of the endangered California light-footed clapper rail, for there, deep in the pickleweed marsh, among sinewy tidal channels, is one of its prime mating grounds. This experience becomes even more amazing if you look around and notice that the marsh is bounded on three sides by residential streets.

Should you want to find out more about this unique place, head from Seacoast Drive and Imperial Beach Boulevard to the corner of Third Street and Caspian Way. Walkers can choose either city sidewalk or earthen path to the Tijuana Estuary Visitor Center, operated by California State Parks, which also serves as administrative center for the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve and the Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge.

In the visitor center you will find various exhibits, as well as people who can tell you about the plants and wildlife around you, the colorful history of the place, and current challenges, including the federal government’s massive border fortification project, which would move millions of tons of soil to fill canyons in the Border Highlands, forever altering its profile and imperiling what has been accomplished to protect the rich estuarine resources below. Someone can show you the native garden, a wonderful place to view and hear both songbirds and shorebirds, or direct you to nearby Oneonta Slough. The tide again flows in and out, native plants have been reestablished, and a wooden footbridge has been built so you can now enjoy a peaceful walk and take in the scene—the rich green stands of cordgrass, the life of the mudflats at low tide. The bridge is a good place to look back at the visitor center and consider that it stands on a former dump site, adjacent to smelly ponds that once held partially treated sewage. Just 25 years ago, these wetlands were a no man’s land used for dumping of waste, both formally and informally. Now thousands of children from around San Diego and (fewer, lately) from Tijuana come each year to learn to know and appreciate what is here.

Mayor Rose and other city officials talk with infectious enthusiasm about all this and how it was accomplished. “In the 1980s and ‘90s there was a real push for high-rise, high-density development. Cottages were being torn down and blockbuster condos put in,” said Rose, who has spent 25 years in the mortgage banking business while also taking time for civic work. “Investors wanted to just get in, build high, and get out. But we live here! This was a real downward cycle, with investors looking for big buckets of money up ahead. So citizens passed two ballot initiatives, the first of which set a 40-foot height limit for the whole town; the second basically downzoned the entire town.” Nothing over 30 feet is allowed at the beach anymore.

“We’re a perfect example of a small city where the citizens took charge of their destiny and made democracy work,” said Patricia McCoy, city council member for the past seven years.

The City encourages small property development and improvement, and conversion of rental units to condominiums. The result has been “real neighborhood revitalization,” said Rose. “Within the last decade we’ve seen an increase in owner occupancy and the reverse of the broken window theory,” which holds that when blight begins in a neighborhood it spawns more blight. “We see condo conversion as a real benefit for neighborhood stabilization and improvement. Housing is being upgraded and sold, reasonably priced, to people who are, for the most part, first-time homeowners.” When Mayor Rose hears the “smart growth” buzzword, she can smile, knowing that “we were doing that ten or 12 years ago.”

During the past decade the City has invested close to $15 million in improving the waterfront and downtown—the pier plaza, street-ends at the beach. It has also partnered with Scripps Institution of Oceanography in setting up a system of ocean-current monitoring that enables lifeguards to close the beach as soon as they see an oncoming problem, rather than wait for authorization from the county health department. This increases beachgoers’ protection against water pollution hazards.

All this has improved quality of life in Imperial Beach and boosted the summer tourist industry, yet the City still finds it hard to meet basic service needs. There simply is not enough tax money coming in. “Our wealth is in natural resources,” said Mayor Rose. Therefore, with funding assistance from the Coastal Conservancy, last summer the City hired a team of consultants to come up with a plan in which its natural wealth would serve as “a platform for economic development,” Rose said. Over the past year, the team worked with the City and groups of citizens, business people, the Fish and Wildlife Service and other public agencies, and concluded that redevelopment oriented around ecotourism is feasible. “Imperial Beach could readily attract the birder market niche, with little investment on the part of the City,” the team stated in its draft report to the City. Because birders like to go to the birds’ winter homes, they could take up the slack during the regular tourist off-season. The consultants suggested that the City look into the possibility of developing a “birding enclave” on its waterfront, with bed and breakfasts and other small-scale local services, and that the City market itself as a birding destination.

A keystone in such an ecodevelopment program would be a rebuilt and improved Seacoast Inn. According to the Specific Plan worked out in a collaborative process that includes the property owner, local citizens, and public officials, the 38-room, three-story hotel would be torn down and rebuilt at its current 40-foot height but would be moved back 30 feet from the beach. A strip of beach now in private ownership would be restored to the public.

The goals of the current vision will not be easy to attain, but Imperial Beach has a good track record of achieving what its citizens set out to do. On Earth Day this year, yet another milestone was celebrated at the Visitor Center: the Estuary has been listed as a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention (see Coastal Viewpoint).

Soon after, another happy news bulletin came from the saltmarsh: a rare yellow-crowned night heron had been sighted at Tijuana Estuary, 2,000 miles from its Gulf Coast home. It made its West Coast debut in the restored tidal channel, near the footbridge and visitor center. It remained the next day. Best of all, it showed itself to be very cooperative and photogenic. The Audubon Society rare bird alert was sounded and soon out-of-town license plates were seen aplenty on the green outskirts of town. The town was abuzz with this promising signal from nature. Many think Imperial Beach’s future wealth will be developed and savored just this way, modestly, one day at a time. And that in this next chapter of the city’s history, all that its citizens now cherish will be preserved.

Jim King is a longtime champion of the coastal borderlands. He now represents the Coastal Conservancy on the North Coast. Rasa Gustaitis is the editor of Coast & Ocean.