Lincoln Acres, CA

Lincoln Acres is an island of unincorporated San Diego County surrounded on every side by National City, in the South Bay a few miles southeast of downtown San Diego. It is home to roughly 2,100 people, and its edge brushes the interchange of Interstate 805 and State Route 54. Its story is a Depression-era one. Farmers from the Midwest arrived in the 1930s to farm small plots and named the settlement after Abraham Lincoln. Over the following decades the farms became homes, and by the mid-1970s the community had reached roughly the size it is today. A 1967 attempt to annex it into National City failed, and the community has stayed under county rule ever since, apart from a sliver beside the freeway that the city annexed in 2019. Much of the land inside the boundary is not houses at all. La Vista Cemetery is the largest single use, which leaves more open ground than the community's size suggests. The residential streets around it hold small single-family homes, and the farm-era allowance for livestock survives. The community has its own county park and its own county library, but for food and shopping it borrows from its neighbor. National City's commercial strip along Sweetwater Road starts at the community's edge, with Filipino street food at Toto's Grill and a run of Hawaiian, Vietnamese and Mexican counters. Westfield Plaza Bonita, the regional mall a short drive away, has a movie theater and a food court. For a park with more room to roam, National City's Las Palmas Park is just beyond the line. Getting around is a matter of picking a freeway. Interstate 805 runs the length of the South Bay and north into San Diego, and Route 54 heads east toward Bonita. Scale is the limit. With only a corner market and a couple of small food counters inside its lines, nearly every errand means crossing into National City or Chula Vista, and residents depend on the county for services a city hall would provide. For a place this small, Lincoln Acres has kept a firm sense of itself, with its own name on the park and the library nearly a century after the first farmers arrived.