Avanzando: Border thinking and the future of architecture at AIA26

Katie Swenson, Assoc. AIA, will lead ArchiTalks conversations at AIA26 in San Diego, exploring architecture's evolving role and responsibility in society. 

In San Ysidro, California, uncertainty is persistent, not theoretical.

It shapes the housing market, the air, the border crossing, and daily calculations families make about work, safety, and belonging.

And yet, across this landscape, Casa Familiar is building anyway.

Avanzando.

Advancing.

I first came to know San Ysidro over 20 years ago, when Casa Familiar’s work was already beginning to challenge conventional ideas about community development at the border. This 53-year-old community organization has become one of California’s most compelling models for community-led development. 

Visitors to San Ysidro during AIA26 will encounter an interconnected set of projects unfolding within walking distance of one another: the Avanzando San Ysidro Community Land Trust, the new Climate Resiliency Center, cultural spaces, transit-oriented housing, and a broader vision for the San Ysidro Boulevard corridor still taking shape. Together, they represent nearly $150 million in community-centered investment led by Casa Familiar.  

One of the people who shaped my understanding of the place was David Flores, former director of development at Casa Familiar and current director of the Environmental Justice Partnership at the San Diego Air Pollution Control District. Flores moved to San Ysidro nearly two decades ago through the Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellowship and never left. His work revealed something larger than architecture alone.

“Families are not governed by borders,” Flores said to me. “They are governed by love.”

That sentence contains an entire theory of the border. Not as an abstraction or line, but as a lived condition. A place where people move back and forth for work, school, caregiving, shopping, medical care, and family; where citizenship may be divided across a household, but belonging is not.

David understood architecture not as an object placed onto a community, but as part of the civic fabric that helps people endure instability with dignity. Affordable housing. Parks. Community centers. Public space. Border infrastructure that acknowledges the humanity of the people moving through it every day.

At a moment when the national conversation reduced the border to fear, enforcement, and spectacle, Casa Familiar insisted that people consider another framework: community abandonment. The question was not only how to secure the border, but what society owes the communities asked to live within its pressures.

That framing feels even more urgent now.

What is striking about Casa Familiar today is not simply the number of projects underway, though the scale is significant. It is the clarity that housing, climate resilience, economic mobility, public health, and belonging are all connected. Not separate problems. One civic project.

What makes the work notable is its integration. Housing is connected to workforce development. Environmental justice is shaping building systems and public space. Transit, health, ownership, climate resilience, and culture are being planned together rather than separately.

At the center of this effort is Avanzando San Ysidro, a 103-unit affordable housing development structured through a Community Land Trust model. The project separates ownership of the land from the housing itself in order to preserve long-term affordability and reduce displacement pressures. Residents will eventually have pathways toward shared ownership, long-term stability, and participation in community governance.

Casa Familiar began exploring the Community Land Trust model explicitly as an anti-displacement strategy: a way to remove land from speculation while creating long-term stability for residents. In a state where affordability protections often expire after a few decades, the project asks a deeper question: what would it mean to build permanence into the structure of development itself?

“Shit’s never been so scary,” said Lisa Cuestas, CEO of Casa Familiar, when I spoke with her in April. Cuestas has worked in San Ysidro for 25 years, leading the organization for the last decade. She spoke about the atmosphere of fear many residents experience, the anxieties surrounding immigration enforcement, and the emotional strain placed on families and workers living near the border.

At the same time, she described a community continuing to organize, build, and imagine a future beyond crisis.

That tension may be the most important thing architects visiting San Ysidro during AIA26 will encounter.

The projects underway are not abstract exercises in resilience; they are responses to lived conditions. San Ysidro faces severe housing burdens, persistent environmental justice challenges, and some of the region’s worst air quality due to its proximity to major freeways and one of the busiest border crossings in the world.

For Casa Familiar, those realities have fundamentally reshaped the way development is approached.

“You can’t know that, and then not change the way you do development as an organization,” Cuestas said, describing the organization’s growing focus on environmental justice and public health.

That shift is visible in the projects themselves. The Climate Resiliency Center, opening this year, emerged from years of community engagement around environmental justice and public health.

Housing developments incorporate solar infrastructure, electric vehicle systems, transit access, shared public spaces, and design strategies focused on long-term resident wellness rather than minimum compliance standards alone.

But the most striking aspect of the work may be cultural rather than technical.

Casa Familiar has spent decades building relationships, trust, and systems of participation strong enough to sustain long-term development without losing community legitimacy. The organization’s engagement process for Avanzando included culturally rooted formats such as lotería-inspired workshops that helped residents participate in planning conversations through storytelling.

That process mattered because the work underway in San Ysidro is about more than buildings. It is about creating the conditions for people to remain, belong, and advance within a rapidly changing city.

This may be why the word “Avanzando” feels so important.

Not escaping.

Not reacting.

Advancing.

Cuestas described the term as a way of connecting housing, jobs, generational wealth, climate resilience, and public space into a shared vision for the community’s future. Perhaps that is what gives the work its unusual sense of clarity.

Casa Familiar is not waiting for stability to arrive before planning for the future. 

It is building anyway.

Avanzando. 

AIA26 attendees can join the Casa Familiar Projects Tour in San Ysidro to learn more. 

Katie Swenson, Assoc. AIA, is senior principal at MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society). She is also the author of Design with Love: At Home in America and In Bohemia.