Walk east along University Avenue in the late afternoon and the call to prayer threads through the noise of buses and barbers. Women in bright hijabs carry bags of sambusas home, a banner for halal goat hangs in a market window, and three flags fly over a storefront that doubles as a community office. This is City Heights, the San Diego neighbourhood where the Somalis in San Diego built a second Mogadishu, half a world from the first.
The Place
City Heights sits in the geographic centre of San Diego, a dense grid of apartments and small shops wedged between Interstate 805 and the eastern hills. It is one of the most diverse square miles in California, a city that already held communities as varied as the Lebanese of San Diego. It is a place where more than 30 languages are spoken within a few blocks and the commercial spine runs along University Avenue and El Cajon Boulevard.
By 2015 its population had reached roughly 74,843, layered over decades of refugee arrivals: Vietnamese and Cambodian, Laotian and Karen, Latino and East African. The same Central Valley resettlement currents that built the Cambodian community in Stockton and the Cambodians in Modesto ran south to San Diego too. Affordable rents and an established web of resettlement agencies turned it into a first home for newcomers to America.
Among them, the East Africans gave one corner of City Heights a name that stuck. Locals call it Little Mogadishu.
How It Became Somali
The story does not begin with Somalia. It begins with Vietnam.
The refugee machine, 1975
When the United States withdrew from Saigon in 1975, tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees were flown to American military bases, and a temporary camp went up at Camp Pendleton, an hour north of San Diego. To process them, the International Rescue Committee opened a San Diego office that same year.
That office, and the affordable housing of City Heights, became the machinery onto which every later wave of refugees was bolted. The infrastructure was already there when the first Somalis arrived.
Ogaden and the early 1980s
By the early 1980s, San Diego was resettling Ethiopian refugees who had fled the war between Ethiopia and Somalia. Many were not Ethiopian in any meaningful sense. They were ethnic Somalis from the Ogaden, a contested, Somali-speaking region inside Ethiopia’s borders.
At the same time, a small group of Somali military personnel was already in the area, training alongside American troops at Camp Pendleton. When Somalia collapsed into civil war, some of those soldiers simply stayed.
The civil war and the 1990s
In 1991 the Somali central government collapsed and the country dissolved into clan warfare and famine. Hundreds of thousands fled. Through the 1990s, the United Nations and American resettlement agencies began moving Somali refugees to the cities best equipped to receive them, and San Diego, with its IRC office and its cheap City Heights apartments, was near the top of the list.
What pulled families to San Diego specifically was not the climate. It was each other. Refugee resettlement in America is built around family reunification, and once a handful of Somali families had landed in City Heights, the chain pulled relatives toward the same blocks year after year.
Bob Montgomery, who long ran the IRC office in San Diego, put it plainly: the cornerstone of refugee immigration, he said, is family unity. New arrivals typically received around 1,100 dollars from the government to begin a life, and almost nothing else. The rest came from the people who had arrived before them.
The Somali Bantu
The later arrivals were different again. The Somali Bantu, descendants of people brought to East Africa generations earlier and long marginalised within Somalia, made up a large share of the refugees who came after 2000.
Many had spent a decade or more in the sprawling Kenyan camps of Dadaab and Kakuma before resettlement. They arrived in City Heights having been farmers in the old country, and they would soon reshape a patch of San Diego soil to prove it.
From handful to thousands
By the 2010s, estimates put the Somali population of San Diego at somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000, the second largest concentration of Somalis in the United States after the Somali community of Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis. Counting the wider East African community of Ethiopians, Eritreans, Sudanese and others, the figure rises toward 30,000.
Almost all of them live, shop, and pray within reach of City Heights. As one restaurateur described it, the elders here are united elders, a single community where back home there had been clan and division.
The Landmarks
Masjid Al-Ansar, 4011 Fairmount Avenue. Established in 1997, this is the spiritual anchor of Little Mogadishu, a working neighbourhood mosque rather than a grand campus. It runs daily and Friday prayers, Quran classes for children and adults, and the quiet social work that keeps a refugee community stitched together. For more than two decades it has marked the rhythm of the week for City Heights Muslims.
Minnehaha Food Market, 4990 University Avenue. Founder Abdikadir Osman, who arrived in the United States in 1990 with about 19 dollars to his name, built this African grocery into a one-stop shop for the Somali and New American communities. The shelves run from halal meat and East African staples to home goods and personal care, the things a homesick family cannot find at a chain supermarket.
Faridas East African Cuisine, 1754 Euclid Avenue. A modest Somali kitchen serving sambusas, generous chicken and rice plates, and the sweet, cardamom-laced milk tea that ends every proper Somali meal. Regulars know to ask for the house green sauce when they want the heat turned up.
Mid East Market, 4595 El Cajon Boulevard. A no-frills grocer of bulk spices, fresh produce and halal meat that has served City Heights for decades. Customers drive in from across San Diego County for locally raised halal chicken, lamb, goat and beef, brought from the owner’s ranch outside the city. It sits at the crossroads of the boulevard, where the East African and Middle Eastern communities overlap.
New Roots Community Farm, near 54th Street and Chollas Parkway. The idea began with a group of Somali Bantu refugees who simply wanted to grow their own food. With the IRC’s help a 2.3-acre micro-farm opened in 2009 on city land near Oak Park, and today it is worked by farmers from more than 20 countries. The IRC handed the farm to the City Heights Community Development Corporation in 2020. For people who farmed before they fled, it is a way to put their hands back in the earth.
United Women of East Africa Support Team, City Heights. Founded in 2008 by a small group of East African women, UWEAST grew from a grassroots circle into a 501(c)3 running culturally fluent health services, education and advocacy from a cultural centre in the heart of the neighbourhood. It is one of the few organisations in San Diego built by Somali and East African women, for them.
Somali Family Service of San Diego. Established in 2000, this is the older institutional backbone of the community, offering case management, health navigation, youth programmes and a voice for refugees in a city that does not always notice them. Where the markets feed the body and the mosque the soul, Somali Family Service handles the paperwork of becoming American.
Where They Came From
The Somalis of San Diego do not trace to one village. They arrived in distinct waves, each from a different fracture in the Horn of Africa.
The earliest came from the Ogaden, the Somali-speaking region inside Ethiopia, displaced by the Ethiopian-Somali war of the late 1970s and resettled, on paper, as Ethiopians. A handful of former soldiers came directly, by way of Camp Pendleton.
The largest group fled the collapse of the Somali state after 1991, from Mogadishu and the south, scattered first into refugee camps and then routed to America through the resettlement system, some toward the older Midwestern hub of the Somalis in Columbus, Ohio and the mill town that became home to the Somalis in Lewiston, Maine. The Somali Bantu, long pushed to the margins of Somali society, came later still, after years in the Kenyan camps of Dadaab and Kakuma.
What they shared was not region or clan but the experience of waiting: in camps, in queues, in the long bureaucratic limbo of resettlement. City Heights was where the waiting finally stopped.
San Diego Today
Little Mogadishu is no longer just a settlement. It is a place with institutions, a second generation, and a stake in the city.
Walk University Avenue and you can eat goat and rice, buy a bolt of cloth for a dirac, send money to relatives still in Nairobi, and pray, all within a few blocks. Children who were born in Kakuma now graduate from San Diego high schools, and the elders who arrived with nothing have become the people newer refugees turn to first.
It is not untroubled. Rents in City Heights have climbed, some beloved storefronts have closed their doors, and the New Roots farm that meant so much to the Somali Bantu farmers became the subject of a painful land dispute that pulled the community into city politics. The pressures of gentrification press on a neighbourhood that was always meant to be a first home, not a forever one.
Still, the call to prayer rises over University Avenue five times a day, and the markets fill on Fridays. For thousands of Somalis, this stretch of central San Diego is simply where the family is now. That, in the end, is what made them come.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do the Somalis in San Diego live?
The great majority of the Somalis in San Diego live, shop and worship in City Heights, a dense, diverse neighbourhood in the centre of the city. The area along University Avenue and El Cajon Boulevard is widely known as Little Mogadishu.
How many Somalis live in San Diego?
Estimates of the Somalis in San Diego range from about 10,000 to more than 20,000, making it the second largest Somali community in the United States after Minneapolis. Counting the wider East African community of Ethiopians, Eritreans and Sudanese, the figure approaches 30,000.
Why did Somalis settle in San Diego?
San Diego had a refugee resettlement infrastructure dating to 1975, when the International Rescue Committee opened an office for Vietnamese arrivals, plus affordable housing in City Heights. Once early Somali families settled there, family reunification drew relatives to the same blocks year after year.
What is Little Mogadishu in San Diego?
Little Mogadishu is the informal name for the East African commercial and residential core of City Heights, centred on University Avenue. It is home to Somali restaurants, halal markets, the Masjid Al-Ansar mosque and community organisations serving refugees.
Where can you eat Somali food in City Heights?
City Heights has a cluster of Somali and East African kitchens, including Faridas East African Cuisine on Euclid Avenue, serving sambusas, goat and chicken plates and traditional spiced milk tea. Several halal markets along El Cajon Boulevard and University Avenue supply the goat, lamb and spices central to Somali cooking.
When did Somalis first come to San Diego?
The first significant Somali arrivals came in the early 1980s as ethnic Somalis from Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, alongside a small group of soldiers who had trained at Camp Pendleton. The largest wave followed the collapse of the Somali state in 1991, with Somali Bantu refugees arriving after 2000.
If your family’s story passed through City Heights, or any of the places Somalis have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the camps of Dadaab and the streets of Mogadishu, to a market on University Avenue, to wherever you are now.