Above photo: PANA.
In San Diego’s City Heights community, refugees and immigrants are leading an effort to build a community-owned affordable housing and cultural space.
When Ramla Sahid was five years old, she and her family fled Somalia to escape the civil war that had engulfed the nation. Nearly 35 years later, living in San Diego as a refugee, she’s working to create what might be the country’s first community land trust for immigrant and refugee families.
In 2015, Sahid founded the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans (PANA), a nonprofit staffed by refugees and working toward building economic, social and civic power for refugees and displaced communities around San Diego.
Using $8.58 million in grants from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, the California Endowment and the state government, the organization secured 2.2 acres of land in San Diego’s rapidly gentrifying, highly diverse City Heights neighborhood in 2023.
Now, the nonprofit is working to raise an additional $4 million to develop a multipurpose “Global Village” campus featuring affordable housing, child care, small business incubation, and other resources for the region’s refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants — with residents owning and controlling development.
“We need more land to be out of private hands and into community hands so we can foster self-determination and belonging for refugee immigrant communities,” Sahid says. “So we don’t have to give up who we are, culturally and as a community. And we can build our cultures and our practices into these civic spaces.”
Plans for Global Village: The Refugee & Immigrant Cultural Hub project were designed in partnership with more than 2,000 community members who migrated from Somalia, Afghanistan, Mexico, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and other nations. Local immigrants held discussions, created drawings and played with models to inform the design.
Their collective vision: 167 units of larger affordable housing, transitional housing for migrants and asylum seekers, a market for small business incubation, a community convening space, emergency services, and a nonprofit hub offering child care and other wrap-around services.
“Housing insecurity is becoming more and more of a challenge in terms of being able to remain [in San Diego], and that is also impacting our organization’s ability to remain in the historic communities we’ve been in,” Sahid says. That’s important for a vulnerable population that has already faced displacement at least once.
“It’s not just the housing crisis,” she adds. “Commercial spaces are also becoming increasingly expensive. So all of that work of trying to fight for fair housing, trying to promote an equitable development that supports low-wage workers in securing affordable housing and protecting tenants who are at risk of displacement is absolutely essential.”
San Diego is already one of the least affordable cities in the world, according to a 2024 study from Chapman University. The region is also home to one of the largest populations of refugees and asylum seekers in the state, with over 30,000 refugees having been resettled in the San Diego region since 1975, according to the International Rescue Committee.
According to a 2023 report from the San Diego Foundation, nearly 22% of San Diego County’s population is made up of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, making it the ninth-highest total immigrant population among all U.S. counties.
Sahid says that the idea for the Global Village emerged from the 2020 U.S. census, when PANA conducted outreach to more than 47,000 African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian residents across San Diego’s Mid-City neighborhood to encourage participation. The organization also sought residents’ input on how to address the unique needs of the community.
Muna Shatow, who immigrated to the U.S. with her family from Somalia in 1999, hopes that the Global Village will not only serve as a space for businesses, food and the arts, but also a place for wellness and communal gathering that meets the unique needs of refugees.
Shatow has worked with the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans for the past three years. She says that housing is one of the most important issues for the organization’s beneficiaries, as extremely long wait times for affordable housing are a common obstacle for refugees. According to County of San Diego data, applications for Section 8 housing can take 10 years or more before space opens up.
“It’s so hard to be patient when you’re placed on a waiting list for years,” Shatow says. “It’s so expensive that you can hardly find a place to rent. My friend now lives in a one-bedroom apartment that costs $2,500 [a month]. It’s horrible. Everywhere it’s high. Life right now is so hard in San Diego, but when you have more low-income and affordable housing, there will be better futures for families.”
Besides a growing affordability crisis and a housing shortage, immigrant communities are also faced with an openly anti-immigration federal government that is expanding its travel ban to more than 30 countries and ramping up immigration enforcement nationally.
“ICE is taking everybody and anybody. It’s not only refugees, it’s everybody now,” says Shatow. Back in 2008, she was detained by ICE for several hours along with her infant daughter. Shatow says local immigrant and refugee communities are once again living in a state of fear. “They [the government] make us fearful to talk … Every time we go out, we take our ID.”
This past fall, ahead of a planned immigration enforcement campaign in Minnesota, President Donald Trump lashed out against Somali immigrants in a racist tirade, calling them “garbage” who “contribute nothing” to the country. He also suggested all Afghan arrivals should be halted, vowing to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions…and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States.”
Sahid says the only solution is connecting with one’s neighbors and building community power, both of which are second nature to immigrant and refugee communities like the one she grew up in.
In 1993, after a brief stint in Texas, her family resettled in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood. “We resettled in a very culturally rich and diverse community,” Sahid says. “City Heights at that time had already had a very established and rich history of resettling refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and other parts of Southeast Asia, including Laos. And then Ethiopians, and the next wave was the Somalis, [like] my family in the early 90s.”
Growing up in a diverse immigrant community concentrated in a neglected part of the city wasn’t without conflict, she says, but residents also showed remarkable unity as they came together to fight for their shared needs.
“You had the African and Latino moms organizing the school district to make sure we got what we needed,” she says. “The immigrant experience of fighting together, fighting each other sometimes, but also fighting together to create a beautiful neighborhood … that is how we know to survive.”
