Housing costs in San Diego will be going down, right?
San Diego has embarked on a massive housing experiment and the region’s future may be riding on how it turns out.
The city has approved plans to vastly increase the number of homes in the coming years, using almost every tool at its disposal:
Lifting height limits, clustering development along transit lines, adding density bonuses, requiring subsidized units, relaxing zoning restrictions, eliminating parking requirements, streamlining regulations and adopting an expedited “by right” process that allows many projects to go forward without the traditional public hearings.
The long list of relatively new local and state housing policies reads like a YIMBY wish list. The overarching goal of the California and San Diego chapters of “Yes In My Back Yard” and other pro-housing advocates is to create more affordable homes in a state that desperately needs them.
“We work with housing policy experts, elected officials, and grassroots organizations across California to craft and pass legislation at the state and local level that will help accelerate home building, solve the affordable housing crisis, and reduce climate pollution,” California YIMBY says on its website.
There’s little question the organization and its allies — including corporate backers — have been successful on the political end. What no one really knows, yet, is whether that will achieve the housing and climate goals.
It’s hard to imagine the region isn’t going to see at least some moderation in housing prices in the coming years, if developers actually build what is being allowed, encouraged and envisioned.
A lot of housing advocates and economists believe the superheated homesales market and high rents in large part are the result of a short supply. But critics insist that simply opening the spigot isn’t the answer to creating lower-priced homes, but that greater public subsidies are needed for middle- and lower-income residents to own and rent. Others say what’s being proposed doesn’t match where housing market demand is headed.
Expectations are high that the UC San Diego Blue Line Trolley Extension not only will transform transportation in San Diego, but housing as well. The line, which officially opens Sunday, will connect job centers from downtown up through La Jolla and University City.
The city has raised height limits for developments near stations along the way — up to 100 feet at the new Tecolote Road station — and boosted density dramatically.
For example, in one area of Linda Vista the plans “would increase the number of housing units allowed in the area from 1,386 to 7,016,” David Garrick of The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote when the blueprint was approved by the City Council in 2019.
“That’s about five times what current zoning allows, and seven times the 996 housing units already there.”
The hope is that big, compact “transit-oriented” residential developments will be populated by people who rely on the trolley instead of cars, potentially relieving congestion on Interstate 5, or at least not exacerbating it.
There’s discussion about building apartments, condominiums and tiny “microhousing” units along the trolley route. The aim is to attract middle- or higherincome residents and turn them into transit riders, while providing some units for lower-income people who more typically ride trolleys and buses.
Yet, riding regularly on public transportation remains a foreign experience for the vast majority of San Diegans. Much of the city’s population lives in suburban-style communities built for automobiles. That can change over time, perhaps, if an efficient transit system can be integrated into this car country.
But along with the uncertainty over whether a new mindset comes about, or a lot more transit funding materializes, there’s another wild card: remote working.
That growing phenomenon necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic is here to stay, though to what degree is a matter of debate.
Last week, Politico wrote about a debate in New York City over how to adjust to the likelihood of fewer workers riding transit, filling office space and patronizing businesses because they will be working from home. If a transit-centric city like New York is concerned about that, surely a place like San Diego should be.
The Blue Line has its skeptics and Gary London is one of them, even if he sounds like he doesn’t want to be. A senior San Diego housing analyst with London
Moeder Advisors, London has doubts the new line will be the catalyst for housing or transit use as planners envision.
“I hope I’m wrong,” he said, adding that if there were ever a local transit project to change the equation, “it’s going to be that one.”
One of London’s major criticisms of all the governmental changes is that they encourage mostly rental housing — from bulking up transit corridors to allowing multiple units on current single-family lots.
“I don’t think the changes in policy affect the home-sale market in significant ways,” he said, adding that demographics will demand more family housing.
But he noted the rental market could be positively affected if enough apartments are built.
“If that happens, that will flatten, or in some places reduce prices,” he said.
He firmly believes undeveloped land under the county’s jurisdiction is needed to build housing in numbers that would truly make a difference. At least for now, political, legal and fire-safety hurdles keep that property off limits.
One theme of the supplyside argument is that if enough new houses are built, that will ease the price of existing housing. Howard Wayne doesn’t buy it. Wayne, a former state Assembly member, is the chair of the Linda Vista Planning Group’s subcommittee on the Morena Corridor Specific Plan.
He said houses tend to appreciate. “These are not like used cars,” Wayne said.
The planning group disagreed with the city’s development plans for Linda Vista and had proposed a compromise including higher density, but less than what the city ultimately approved.
Overall, Wayne contends the market-based solutions being offered up to incentivize developers to build more affordable housing don’t work.
“Developers are rational economic players and their goal is to maximize profit,” he said. “They are not social service entities.”
Borre Winckel, former head of the Building Industry Association of San Diego County, seemed to agree with the last part of that statement.
“... building affordable housing should be a societal obligation shouldered by the community writ large,” he wrote in a commentary published by the UnionTribune in 2019, when he was still president of the BIA.
His main concern was that requiring projects to have lower-priced units adds to the cost of the market-rate housing. Then there are the costs of regulations, land and building materials, he noted.
There are divergent views about what’s causing the affordable-housing crisis and what should be done about it.
But there’s broad agreement that if it isn’t resolved, San Diego is headed toward a split society of haves and have-nots — with increasing numbers of the latter having to commute from farther away.