By Richard T. Carlson/ Times of San Diego / April 30, 2024
Has San Diego County already built enough new housing to accommodate all the currently projected population growth through the year 2050?
This is a stunning question to ask given the frenzied rhetoric about needing to build large numbers of new units of every type, everywhere to deal with what is widely perceived as a massive housing shortage by politicians, housing advocacy groups, and the public.
But the answer, surprisingly, is “yes.”
A new demographic reality has become firmly established with each successive update of the 2050 population forecast for the county. The increase in population between 2010 and 2050 was originally forecast by SANDAG to be about 30% to almost 4.5 million people. But over time, the forecast for 2050 has steadily fallen as fertility rates continued to decline, increases in life expectancy stalled, and net migration into California turned negative starting in 2015.
The 2024 SANDAG forecast for 2050 calls for under 3.5 million people — not much more than the current population of San Diego County. In fact, San Diego County could see only another 125,000 new residents between now and 2050.
How many housing units need to be built for these new residents? To make that calculation, consider the average number of persons-per-housing-unit, which is 2.92 based on SANDAG’s figures. Divide 125,000 by 2.92 and you get 42,800. Surprisingly, that’s almost exactly the 40,000 permits issued in the county since 2020.
Thus in San Diego County the state’s legal mandate to provide housing units to accommodate projected growth has already been met — all the way through 2050.
A frequently heard contention is there is a need to catch up on building because San Diego systematically underbuilt during the Great Recession. San Diego has caught up from that deficit because the county’s population has declined by almost 30,000 people since 2018, while construction continued at a brisk pace with building permits pulled for over 50,000 housing units.
The absurdity of planning for the massive number of new San Diego residents envisioned by earlier forecasts is nowhere more evident than in the controversial new plan for University City. It envisions building 29,000 more housing units and supporting infrastructure by 2050.
Think about that. University City is being asked to undertake a comprehensive planning effort to accommodate almost the entire population growth now anticipated for the whole county between 2024 and 2050. It is a useless and socially destructive exercise that pits housing advocates against long-time community residents.
This is not to say there are not real housing issues causing many in the region considerable pain. But there is no serious academic research showing that building sizable numbers of housing units, almost exclusively at the high end of the market, makes housing more affordable over a time period relevant for current residents. That is because the process of housing filtering down to a level affordable to lower income households is quite slow.
Further, while the homeless population is concentrated in major West Coast cities with high housing costs, that population is not very responsive to changes in housing costs. These are issues that have to be tackled directly rather than hoping they will mysteriously go away by encouraging developers to engage in a large-scale build out of existing communities to accommodate population growth that is no longer coming.
San Diego County and its constituent cities need to put updates to community plans on hold until the deep implications of a long-term future with a sharply smaller population is fully understood. It is important to plan for the region’s likely future, not one that is no longer reflected by demographics.
Richard T. Carson is a distinguished professor of economics at UC San Diego.
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
SANDAG does not set housing unit targets for the San Diego Region. It merely allocates the region target passed down by the State to the jurisdictions, and really they do that themselves since they constitute the board of SANDAG.
The issue here is that the State of California HCD issues housing unit allocations on 8-year cycles via the RHNA process. The data for the most recent 6th cycle covering 2021-2029 was all pre-COVID but the State won’t be making any update until the 7th cycle covering 2030-2038.
SANDAG understands the ridiculousness of 8-year cycles so they update their forecasts on 4-year cycles leading to situations like this where the data seems misaligned with the State of California.
Golly G, we should always trust the integrity and honor of SANDAG right?
What you have written, is not altogether accurate, and omits some things that are critical to how we got here.
Yes, the State sets the housing unit targets you mentioned, but not in a vacuum.
SANDAG’s hand-selected industry consulting firms devise studies annually that are regularly submitted to the State to reference.
Then the State sets the housing unit targets you mentioned, but only after considering all the housing reports received from the county’s cities and unincorporated towns.
Of particular importance is the SANDAG report that has been redundantly over parroted, repeatedly cited, but never sourced. The SANDAG report from I believe 2014, if I am not mistaken. That SANDAG outsourced, consulting firm(s) provided report projected a nearly 40% defecit of housing units.
Our population didn’t increase 40% in such a short period of time Yet according to the SANDAG consulting firm metric, this mind-bending shortage had some how, just kinda snuck up on us, outta nowhere!
Politicians from Crescent City to El Centro fueled hysteria by exploiting homelessness and repeatedly cited a 40% housing deficit. They’ve made a killing and so has the Party.
“California’s 40% housing deficit” term lacked punch. It was not as dramatic, so it got makeover and became “the housing shortage”. More recently revamped to “the housing crisis”. Now loved the world over from website to weekly’s the made to order construct for the consolidated corporate media giants began fetching $100 million ad Real Estate related ad campaigns by the bakers dozen thanks to the Politico – Wall Street Takeover of Housing. And all, the result of the original twisted SANDAG report.
Not one journalist has ever asked any state, county, or city politicians or officials where this inflated housing deficit figure came from.
In ten plus years.
No journalists though to question “the housing shortage” themselves?
No corporate media giant tv newsrooms. cable news networks, no periodicals, newspapers, radio station ever bothered to fact check these 40% deficit housing claims let alone source them? No one wrote a book? No one even tweeted?
There are 58 counties in this state. Individual municipalities conduct their own studies of vacant residential units, like the Mayors hand-selected consulting firms Evari GIS and Circulate San Diego Study provided to the Housing Commission, that in turn provided to the City Council in 2022.
Somehow consultants Circulate San Diego and Evari GIS reported a staggering, and frankly preposterous, 0.9% residential vacancy rate. Because they were using a tremendously flawed, at best if not deliberately deceitful, overly complex metric to evaluate a nonsensical data set. (as I have detailed within this thread)
Trust SANDAG you say. Because as you put it, “SANDAG understands the ridiculousness of it.” Slap that on a bumpersticker G.
If you think HCD is being controlled or heavily influenced by something a local MPO says or does, especially some report from 2014, you are gravely mistaken. SANDAG is not some boogie man pulling strings at the state level.
I never declared SANDAG a puppet-master on the state level. It is intriguing, if not possibly telling, that you’ve taken a defensive posture, as the federal investigation SANDAG continues.
In summary:
A buls#!t metric was devised by consultant(s) contracted by SANDAG to manipulate data and it was this inaccurate data that became the 3 word talking point that has been incessantly repeated, falsely, as “the housing shortage.” A term that had been accepted, unchallenged by journalists and politicians as Gospel Truth from the day the SANDAG report came out, until recently.
If you think HCD is being controlled or heavily influenced by something a local MPO says or does, especially some report from 2014, you are gravely mistaken. SANDAG is not some boogie man pulling strings at the state level.
No mention of a boogeyman anywhere in my post G.
SANDAG consultants provided the report that was disseminated amongst state county and local candidates backed by the California Democratic Party in 2018 to be used as platform talking points and I can prove it.
You can throw as many acronyms around as you like, you will never will SANDAG to be trustworthy, nor benevolent. The people know better, and learning more daily.
Mateo – Can you kindly provide a link or links to the SANDAG reports you are referencing from 2014 and 2018? I am unclear as to which reports you are referring to as being written by SANDAG consultants. I worked at SANDAG on housing issues for over 20 years and am still involved in planning advocacy and am genuinely interested in the reports you are referring to. Thank you.
Susan – We worked on an CA Assembly candidate’s campaign in 2018 that had received the backing of the Democratic Central Committee. The CA DEM on-boarding packet (for lack of a better term) that Democratic candidates received, contained lists of talking points derived from a SANDAG report I believe was dated 2014.
As I remember, reading through that report, that I believe it was dated 2014 fiscal year, and most likely released in 2015. That SANDAG report:
“Forecast the required construction of 500,000 additional housing units in California for FY 2019 ‘just to keep up with job creation’. ”
The 500,000 unit deficiency reflects about a 40% deficit in housing statewide, became truncated to the “housing shortage” and served as the blood and chum in the water that became our incestuous politico-corporate real estate complex feeding frenzy.
It’s been 6 years, but I can check with the candidate to see if they still have the copy of the report and/or the on-boarding package replete with prefabricated housing shortage talking points.
Democratic Central Committee believed they could exploit homelessness by using the corporate media to falsely imply that homelessness was the result of a shortage of housing, which we now know it was not.
The City recently admitted they were using Series 14 for Blueprint San Diego. As you can see by this chart, Series 15 is the most current and accurate numbers for our region.
Circulate San Diego admits in their reports that the numbers-in not so many words-are skewed toward the people who paid for the report. As stated below, the DOF is also involved in the numbers.
Every four years, the SANDAG Data Science team works with local jurisdictions, the California State Department of Finance, demographic and economic experts, and other stakeholders to create a long-term forecast that predicts what the region will look like in terms of population, housing units, and number of jobs.
IMO, to use outdated numbers to ruin our neighborhoods and shove this density down our throats is unacceptable.
Thank you Korla.
I’ll gladly volunteer my time to team up with the cerebral crowd of capable investigative activists that contribute to the OB Rag. Combine all the investigative research compiled individually, into one”big picture” scenario & flush everything out from the shadows once and for all. I am convinced that we have compiled more than enough evidence to merit a grand jury investigation or initiate a DOJ investigation.
And/or submit the collection of all researched evidence to the currently ongoing SANDAG federal investigation.
CPC formed a subcommittee to submit a Grand Jury Complaint. All info is at https://normalheightscpg.org/grandjury
Thank you! What is the CPC Subcomittee called that have submited the complaint to the Grand Jury scpg? I am assuming the Normal Heights (S?) Subcommittee Planning Group?
CPC Subcommittee to submit a Grand Jury complaint. Normal Heights PG is the info source. I don’t believe it is submitted yet. Please visit website for complete info.
https://normalheightscpg.org/grandjury
Metrics, we’ve posted about the BS metrics scheme hatched up by consultants Circulate San Diego, and another consultant Evari GIS that were paid to measure residential vacancies for the City Housing Commission in 2022.
The City paid consulting firms Evari GIS (Proprietary Big Brother “Smart” streetlights software provider) and Circulate San Diego (Kick San Diegans out of their rentals) to evaluate SDGE gas/electric and water usage data to establish vacancies/unoccupied units in San Diego.
Evari GIS and Circulate San Diego used ridiculous, overly complex metrics to determine vacant residential units. That do not align at all with metrics that cities like Sydney and Vancouver, BC use.
The Housing Commission Residential Vacancies Report released in January of 2022 stated that there was less than a 1% vacancy rate in San Diego. A 0.9% vacancy to be exact.
Please fast forward to today and contents of this article above, published a little over just 19 months later.
Impossible to figure out how miraculously, we’ve somehow gone from less than a 1% vacancy; to permit and construct 26 years worth of housing inventory. In 19 months…
The City Housing Commission study relied much more heavily on electricity usage, not gas usage and only partially relied on water usage. The propensity for inaccuracy is kind of obvious.
Evari GIS was used to evaluate (86 million pieces) of data from 2015-2019 to establish less than a 0.9% vacancy rate?
First off, why did the consultants only examine data from 2015 through 2019 for a report dated 2021 and released in 2022 to reflect current vacant residences?
Dozens and dozens of high density luxury apartment buildings that had been constructed from 2019 through Sept of 2021, as construction was a “essential service” during the shutdown. And any reasonable fool can discern there is no way possible that a city the size of San Diego had a 0.9% vacancy rate!
Simple to Acquire Accurate Metrics:
All municipalities in this country can utilize information that can be made available through the United States Post Master General. The U.S. Post Office at any given time can provide almost real-time occupancy data for an accurate accounting of vacant units.
We’ve confirmed the viability of this through our friendly neighborhood mailman that spoke with supervisors, and they independently confirmed this from the top as a very real possibility. There would be some paperwork and permission hurdles but for all intents and purposes any municipality would have to do in essence is request this information.
Apparently, “cooking the books”, to suit the politicians has gone out of control in hidden agendas at least in San Diego City, and SANDAG.