By Eric Law
In response to Nicole Capretz’s commentary (SDUT August 28, 2025, Housing policies are sabotaging family budgets and climate goals), the housing densification policies in force across California make our state the least affordable in the nation. Senate Bill 79 (SB 79) would make this even worse.
SB 79 incentivizes very dense development of up to 8-story apartment buildings in areas that are purportedly close to transit. Large-scale development could occur anywhere within ½ mile of designated transit stops, regardless of local zoning, neighborhood type, or even the city’s development plans. Any local say in building these enormous structures would be eliminated.
SB 79 relies on the premise that we need more affordable housing, and it needs to be close to transit so that low-income people can easily access public transportation. This is where SB 79 and other dense housing “initiatives” completely fail. Dense urban building does not create affordable housing. It makes housing more expensive.
Densification advocates argue that simply building more housing will lower the cost of housing. If this was true, California would logically have the cheapest housing in the country. California is the most densely urbanized state in the nation: 95% of Californians live on just 5% of the land. But California is the least affordable state for housing. This pattern is repeated across United States and the world: cities like Seattle, Vancouver, and Sydney all embarked on very dense urban development programs and it just made housing more unaffordable.
The problem is the price of land. Densification advocates ignore that the price of housing is the sum of the cost of the structure AND the cost of the land it’s built on. The construction costs of building up increase dramatically the higher you go; over 3 stories in height building costs can exponentially increase. Moreover, in a city, land is in short supply. The more densely you develop a land plot, the more the land value increases. That holds true not just for the redeveloped parcel, but for every parcel that was upzoned and not redeveloped, driving prices up for everyone.
Historically, we kept the price of housing low by horizontal development — the creation of suburbs. This development pattern is how San Diego grew after World War II.
However, starting in the 1970s, California cities implemented Urban Growth Boundaries (UGBs) to limit horizontal development, euphemistically referred to as suburban sprawl. What’s ignored is that UGBs create an artificial shortage of buildable land.
So building more densely on a decreasing number of increasingly more expensive land plots will never make housing affordable. Density advocates ignore the fact that developers will not build excess urban housing simply to reduce housing prices. Where developers cannot make a profit, they will not build.
SB 79 advocates insist that local zoning rules that preserve single family homes and neighborhoods cause a housing shortage and make housing more expensive. This is
completely false. There is no correlation between restrictive zoning and a shortage of housing. Instead, UGBs are entirely to blame.
Climate activists will never admit that their anti-sprawl Urban Growth Boundaries are the root cause of our housing affordability problem. Let’s be clear here: climate activists want to force you out of your car and onto public transit. That’s the premise behind Transit Oriented Development (TOD). But TOD is largely a pipe dream. The California Air Resources Board acknowledges that even huge increases in densification only yield a minute reduction in vehicle miles traveled. And even when developers get TOD-based building incentives, little actual building occurs until housing prices rise to a level at which the developer can make a decent profit.
Moreover, MTS is in a death spiral. Ridership remains down and costs have increased. While transit is never a money-maker, MTS needs an injection of millions of dollars just to continue current service levels, which it is unlikely to get. MTS wants to raise our taxes even more to compensate for their inability to adequately deliver a service within their allocated funding. San Diegans have voted and choose not to use MTS.
SB 79 is simply atrocious. It will assuredly make housing more expensive and further exclude working families from much needed affordable housing. Doubling down on bad policy, Capretz wants us to pay more taxes to underwrite a failing transit enterprise, while ignoring the fact that there is no climate gain to be made.
Call your legislators and tell them to vote NO on SB 79.
David Moty contributed to this article.
SB 79 would allow so-called “transit-oriented development” of dense apartment buildings over a mile walking distance from non-existent transit (unfunded transit projects in Regional Transportation Plans 20 or more years in the future) because it is based on 1/2 mile “as the crow flies” across canyons and freeways. But SANDAG’s 2023 On-Board Transit Study tells us that San Diego’s bus riders on average walk less than 1/3 mile to catch a bus, and 75% of San Diego’s bus riders walk 0.36 miles or less to take the bus.
To zone for dense apartment buildings a mile or more walking distance from transit that may never be built is not climate-friendly and won’t lead to greater transit adoption. Instead, the residents of those buildings will rely on cars to get them where they need to go. This won’t increase transit usage or decrease vehicle miles traveled – definitely if the transit is never built – but the apartments will have been permitted and built regardless. A law that allows that to happen is just bad legislation.
Experience in San Diego has already shown us that the upzoned areas further from transit are where developers are most likely to purchase and develop land because it is less expensive than property closer to transit.
For these reasons and those cited by Eric Law above, SB 79 is bad legislation and it should not be passed by our legislators. SB 79 will make housing in California more expensive; it is not climate-friendly; it is not truly “transit-oriented;” and it will not result in significant increases in transit usage.
I know some housing opponents genuinely misunderstand basic economics or facts, and that’s one thing. But giving this author the benefit of the doubt as being semi-logical, stop making things up. If you don’t want new neighbors, then just say that. Hiding behind fictional narratives and mental gymnastics is cowardly. At least then we could have an honest conversation about whether your comfort matters more than giving people a place to live.
Good god, this is just Republican talking points. Nobody wants more fires. That’s what will happen if we do what this author suggests and we build out in East County instead of just building up like normal cities.
Eric, I will make sure to travel back in time to tell people to never build skyscrapers ever, and instead to just keeping build out and out and out and out, because the land costs too much. That way Manhattan can stretch to Ohio, and we’ll finally achieve affordable horse stables.
Eric-
You are right that Urban Growth Boundaries limited the supply of cheap land. They also limited the need for more freeway construction, sewer and water treatment plants, electrical utility plant the distribution construction, gas system construction, cable TV extensions, etc. and air pollution from all the driving generated by further growth far away from basis of employment. By changing residential planning policy to limit urban growth outward cities stopped this. The next logical step is to build with density within existing cities that already have this infrastructure.
When a developer is estimating the cost of a mid- or high rise residential project, the cost of the land is spread over the number of units that can be built on it. Same for the cost of construction. Land zoned for density does cost a lot more per acre, but not more per unit of housing constructed on the site. Same for construction costs.
Finally, all we need to do is look at Austin, Texas to see the impact of more dense housing construction in an urban area. Both the cost of purchasing a home and rents declined when the volume of new homes brought to market increased within a relatively short period. That is how the law of supply and demand works.
Edward, people who push back against overdensity are not “housing opponents.” Ted and Terry, skyscrapers-vs.-sprawl is a false dichotomy. John, Austin is not a coastal city where wealthy people from around the world pay top dollar for vacation and retirement homes.
Kate, housing markets are driven by supply and demand, not by proximity to an ocean.
Take Eureka on California’s northern coast. It’s literally on the water, but home prices are far lower than in San Diego or the Bay Area. The difference isn’t the coastline, it’s demand. Fewer people want to live and work there, so prices stay modest. Coastal geography doesn’t drive costs, supply and demand does. The laws of economics don’t suddenly stop at the beach. If a city like Austin can lower housing costs by allowing more homes to be built, then so can San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or any other coastal city. It’s whether you let supply keep pace with demand.
When demand is high and supply is artificially constrained, prices skyrocket. This is exactly what has happened in San Diego: restrictive zoning, endless permitting bottlenecks, and political resistance to density have strangled supply. The result? One of the most expensive housing markets in the country, pricing out working families while handing windfalls to people who already own property.
The “austin is not on the coast” argument ignores the basic fact that every growing city in history that builds housing that MEETS DEMAND, (so adding only 10 units per year when so many people want to live there doesnt count)—whether on a coast, on a plain, or in the middle of a desert—saw moderation in price pressure. Tokyo, a coastal city, is one of the most affordable mega-cities precisely because they build enough homes. Austin’s example isn’t unique. It’s just the most recent, clear-cut demonstration of supply and demand at work in the U.S. Kate, how does your argument explain Tokyo then?
Claiming that being a “coastal city” makes San Diego immune to economics is like claiming gravity works differently at the beach. If you prevent more housing supply from being built, prices rise. If you allow supply to rise, prices stabilize or fall. It’s that simple.
15 years ago, when I became involved with the PCPB, I attended meetings presented but the AIA about housing the next million!
The problem is the way the City went about increasing housing. First the grand jury report pulled the rug out from under planning groups thus eliminating public input! Then totally prevent public input by approving projects within 30 days! Eliminate CEQA and further erode protections.
Someone will always take advantage and find loopholes. Planning Groups and their subcommittees that review projects find all kinds of errors in what developers present. DSD reviewers are not perfect.
Let’s talk infrastructure. Building near transit that exists or is planned in the next 50 years! OMG! And no one is going to walk a mile to transit especially when it is measured as the crow flies. What happened to common sense? How do we support seniors and disabled?
Where are we going to get the water? How about evacuation? And certainly foremost in everyones minds is fire prevention. Allowing such dense building on lot lines does NOT make anyone safe as there is no access for fire fighting.
How about coming up with all these from outdated data? How about that San Diego has met their housing goals? How about step back and take a look at the actual Impact of NO public input and virtually NO regulations and make some meaningful changes.
Zoning existed for a reason. A home is the biggest investment most of us ever make. When purchased, there was a contract about what the neighborhood would look like. Therefore, NO ONE should have an apartment, which will decrease there property value and diminish their quality of life, in their back yard.