Keystone turns student climate change resolutions into reality with a flagship, climate-smart village that demonstrates the District truly listens to the next generation. This 1,500-home community serves as a permanent teaching tool where student board members can see their advocacy for equity and sustainability come to life in a tangible project.

• The Education Center is located on a transit-rich hilltop, surrounded by a neighborhood with an exceptional 92 Walk Score. Creating 1,500 homes maximizes the environmental benefit of public land, allowing 50% more staff to live car-lite lifestyles than competing plans.

• By housing 1,500 school district employees on-site near transit, Keystone drastically reduces vehicle miles traveled (VMT), directly addressing the 62% of District emissions caused by commuting. The Keystone "car-lite" design removes hundreds of daily car trips from the road, improving local air quality for students and neighbors.

• A smaller project on this site would be a missed opportunity to meaningfully lower the District’s carbon footprint. Projects the size of the Education Center, close to the city center only become available once in a generation.

Keystone's mass-timber "kit-of-parts" allows for factory-cut assembly, creating a remarkably quiet work site compared to traditional concrete builds. This innovation reduces heavy truck trips by up to 80%, significantly cutting noise, dust, and congestion right next to Birney Elementary classrooms.

The use of mass timber significantly also reduces the site's embodied carbon footprint and acts as a long-term carbon store.

Keystone is planned as a fully electric campus featuring district-scale heating and cooling designed to use roughly 40% less energy than standard systems. This pairs with on-site solar to create a model of sustainability that the rival proposal’s conventional building-by-building approach cannot match. Keystone integrates Solar PV roofs and orients buildings to maximize natural daylighting and ventilation.

San Diego’s leading housing, climate and mobility activists are asking the Board of Education to choose the proposal that creates the most potential housing at the Brucker site.

Keystone delivers 50% more housing than the closest competing proposal and 100% more units than Monarch. In the words of the city’s leading activists, “the magnitude of the housing affordability crisis demands transformative action. The redevelopment decisions taken by SDUSD today will exist for a hundred years and significantly shape the surrounding community. SDUSD ought to maximize this opportunity and pursue the development of the most possible homes …”

Distributed density allows more residents to share infrastructure and resources, significantly reducing their environmental footprint compared to suburban sprawl. Both the 2016 and 2024 Uptown community plans contain a specific policy (LU-2.17/LU-2.24) that calls for the reuse of the San Diego Unified School District Education Center to include medium-high residential development, mixed-use opportunities, and public space. The 2024 Hillcrest Focused Plan Amendment further expanded this vision by adding capacity for 17,200 additional homes in the Hillcrest and Medical Complex neighborhoods to celebrate a "complete neighborhood" that welcomes everyone. Choosing to develop below maximum capacity would allow fewer families to reside in an accessible neighborhood and would reduce the project's ability to create downward pressure on area rents.

By reusing excavated soil on-site to create landscape features like the "Habitat Hill," Keystone avoids thousands of haul-off trips that would otherwise send dump trucks through the neighborhood. This smart logistics strategy directly reduces construction-phase emissions and disruption around Birney Elementary.

In another example of adaptive reuse, Keystone restores and enhances existing historic structures (Annex 1 and 2) rather than demolishing them.

Keystone treats existing mature greenery as key assets, prioritizing the protection of heritage Canary Pines and a grand Ficus in place. Special care is taken to transplant the Heritage Oak Tree to a more central location, using the same technology as the San Diego Zoo used recently to save an 80-foot tree in its gorilla enclosure. Keystone includes "shade tree groves" and supplements existing greenery with new canopy trees to ensure a comfortable pedestrian environment, reduce the urban heat island effect, improve air quality and reach a goal of 30% shade coverage for the site.

Keystone places all ~1,514 parking spaces in a single underground garage, keeping all heavy concrete work below grade and removing cars from surface streets, creating a safer, pedestrian-first environment for children. Underground parking also eliminates the noise and visual blight of the above-grade parking structures in competing proposals.

Keystone features dedicated, well-lit pathways that extend the reach of the SANDAG's planned bikeway directly through the property. The plan creates a seamless link to the Normal Street Promenade and improves pedestrian access to the Bus Rapid Transit line. The Keystone team has also committed to partnering with the City to finally fix the dangerous Park & Normal intersection.