Neighbors For A Better San Diego offers the following response to Mayor Todd Gloria’s “State of the City” Address:
While we agree that building more housing – especially more truly affordable housing – must be top priority, the facts confirm that Mayor Gloria’s administration has failed to make any significant progress towards that goal.
The city’s ‘Bonus ADU’ ordinance was not designed to create “middle-class housing”. To the contrary, it was promoted as an incentive that promised more affordable housing by allowing developers to build apartment complexes in the backyards of single-family homes.
But the Mayor sits silently while those builders game the system and reap financial rewards for building small, one-bedroom apartments that rent for more than $2570 per month. This is the same rent the Mayor quoted for a typical one-bedroom apartment in San Diego, and it’s neither “affordable” nor “middle class housing.”
Also, the Mayor’s office has not — and cannot — rebut the city’s own data showing that not one very-low or low-income ADU has been built under the its “Bonus ADU” program.
We also note that the Mayor’s ‘Housing Action Plan’ lacks the framework needed to increase our supply of truly affordable housing.
Worse, it contradicts the Mayor’s supposed commitment to “equity and inclusion” by allowing developers to build the required Complete Communities affordable units ‘off-site,’ in lower resource neighborhoods than the primary development.
Community leaders and activists join Neighbors For A Better San Diego in vigorously rejecting this giveaway to the building industry and its creation of “separate and unequal” low-income housing.
Regarding the City’s $5 billion infrastructure deficit, the Mayor’s policies have in fact worsened that massive deficit.
Allowing the building industry to avoid paying Development Impact Fees for market- and near-market rate housing increases that massive deficit, deprives neighborhoods of the street and road repairs they desperately need, and leaves them without the schools, parks, and water/sewage infrastructure required for livable neighborhoods.
And it does nothing to increase our supply of transitional, very-low and low-income housing.
Even the near to finished dorm off 55th being built for SDSU students has prices of $2600 for a single student down to $1800 per student, for a group of 4.
Walmart in El Cajon is shuttering.
Seems like a huge opportunity for low income/affordable living development.
Arnele Avenue Transit Station is walking distance.
Closer to home: Big Lots.
Or Navwar.
Todd Gloria, the current mayor, was elected on two promises: he would solve the homeless problem and; bring down the cost of government.
During his three years in office the homeless population has grown by 10% and the cost of government has increased by one billion dollars.
His developer friends keep building low income housing and the price of real estate in San Diego continues to rise as does the homeless.
The solution to housing the homeless, reducing rents and making San Diego home ownership affordable is to remove the sale of land from the cost of housing.
Approximately 25% of the price of every real estate sale in San Diego is the land cost.
Today the price of housing is spiraling out of control because City Hall is owned by the developers. The solution to bringing down housing costs is a Mayor who will not sell City owned land.
Gloria is the problem, Smiechowski is the solution.
Vote for Dan Smiechowski a Mayor who will not sell out to the developers.