By David Garrick / San Diego Union-Tribune / May 29-30, 2024
Controversial proposals to double the populations of Hillcrest and University City by allowing more high-rise housing are being debated Thursday by San Diego’s Planning Commission.
The commission will also discuss a related proposal that would change San Diego’s citywide blueprint for growth to prioritize climate-friendly housing opportunities near jobs, schools and mass transit.
The proposals for Hillcrest and University City, which city officials have been discussing for years, could be finalized this summer by the City Council if planning commissioners express support.
The proposal for Hillcrest would add 17,000 new homes, some of them in buildings with 20 stories or more. It would swell the population of Uptown — a wider area that also includes University Heights, Mission Hills and Bankers Hill — from about 40,000 to more than 100,000 by 2050.
The proposal for University City would add more than 64,200 residents by 2050, nearly doubling the neighborhood’s current population of 65,400. It would do that by adding just over 30,000 housing units.
It would also add an estimated 72,000 new jobs by changing zoning in many places to allow developers to build 20 million more square feet of commercial projects.
Some community leaders in those neighborhoods have expressed concerns that the proposals could bring too much change, damage community character and significantly worsen traffic congestion.
They’ve also expressed concerns about gentrification, losing affordable housing and not having enough new parks to serve the new residents.
Other concerns include changes to roads. In Hillcrest, there’s opposition to plans to make Robinson and University avenues one-way streets. In University City, critics oppose shrinking Governor Drive from four lanes to two.
City planners say they are proposing such aggressive increases in housing density in those two neighborhoods because they have already-strong employment bases, and because housing demand there is strong enough to warrant high-rises.
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All this does is change the zoning. I’d be shocked if the population of either neighborhood doubles in the next 20-30 years
Norm, you must never go outside your house then.
Anyone who has eyes, has witnessed the unmitigated construction of soviet bloc style apartments in just the last 24 months. Take a drive through the city Norm, start with North Park, then Mission Valley, just for starters, then try and assure everyone that this could never happen…
I think you have not considered the older population. We are afraid to ride the trolley and bus do to the high volumne of phydicql attacks and they are unaccesible to mobility issues.
The commission will also discuss a related proposal that would change San Diego’s citywide blueprint for growth to prioritize climate-friendly housing opportunities near jobs, schools and mass transit.
Oh please, how convoluted can we get stirring muddy water?
The FBI this week conducted a dawn raid of corporate landlord giant Cortland Management over what’s called algorithmic price-fixing. This corporate real estate management firm, based in Atlanta, rents out 85,000 units across thirteen states. But Cortland is allegedly part of a much bigger conspiracy orchestrated by a software and consulting firm named RealPage to increase rents nationwide by coordinating landlord pricing decisions and holding apartments off the market. How much bigger? Well, there’s a civil antitrust action in Tennessee that’s been going on since 2023, where the argument is that RealPage has been working with at least 21 large landlords and institutional investors, encompassing 70% of multi-family apartment buildings and 16 million units nationwide, to systematically push up rents. And RealPage isn’t just some software company distorting rental markets, it’s also owned by Thoma Bravo, one of the biggest private equity firms in the U.S. So yeah, this scandal matters. (RealPage is also lobbying up, which politically connected firms do…)
How does the cartel allegedly work? Well large corporate landlords, who would normally compete with one another for tenants via price or quality, have since 2016 stopped doing so. Instead, they all share “detailed real-time data regarding pricing, inventory, occupancy rates, and unit types that are or will be coming available to rent” every day with one another through RealPage’s revenue management system, which in turn sends back recommendations on pricing.
Landlords adopt RealPage recommendations on pricing 80-90% of the time, which explicitly drives up revenue by holding apartments off the market. As the architect of RealPage once explained, “[i]f you have idiots undervaluing, it costs the whole system.” It’s not just an information-sharing and price recommendation engine. RealPage has ‘pricing advisors’ that monitor landlords and encourage them to accept suggested pricing, it works to get employees at landlord companies fired who try to move rents lower, and it even threatens to drop clients who don’t accept its high price recommendations. This one’s a very clear conspiracy. Allegedly.
Cortland is located in Atlanta, where 81% of multifamily rental unit prices are set via software. And rent in that city has exploded, up 80% since 2016. What’s odd about this price increase is that vacancy rates have been inching up, and when there’s more supply, prices should come down. But they aren’t. What seems to have happened in the period between 2015-2017 is that a bunch of landlords started using RealPage pricing recommendations. Then in 2017, RealPage bought its main rival, Lease Rent Option, giving it perfect information into the supply and demand for apartment rentals. Here’s a map of Atlanta properties using RealPage’s software.
The Department of Justice is clearly deep in an investigation of RealPage and its cartel. And this one looks criminal. It’s also fascinating that the FBI is involved. The FBI, though historically it had a big role in antitrust investigations for its first hundred years, hasn’t really done much in this area since the early 2000s.
Matt Stoller is doing some incredible reporting on unreported monopoly busting on substack.
Additionally, lawsuit was filed against RealPage in regards to their many corporate real estate clients in San Diego Superior Court a few months ago.