By Francine Maxwell
Here we go again.
Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera has found another headline to chase — this time with a proposed ballot measure targeting homeowners who’ve managed to hang onto a second property in the very neighborhoods they grew up in.
He’s calling it “housing reform.” Let’s call it what it is: a grab for generational wealth.
Because here’s the truth — the families he’s coming for aren’t developers sitting on luxury condos in La Jolla. They’re working-class San Diegans — teachers, retirees, veterans — who bought a modest home decades ago, stayed connected to their roots, and are holding onto it as a legacy for their kids.
But now, because they can’t afford to live in it full-time, he’s labeling them part of the “housing problem.”
Make it make sense.
Instead of addressing the real drivers of our housing crisis — corporate speculation, short-term rentals, and the City’s failure to build truly affordable units — he’s coming for locals. The same locals who built the communities this city is now trying to rebrand.
And this isn’t new behavior. Elo-Rivera’s grocery policy already backfired spectacularly — stores pulled coupons, prices went up, and the very people he claimed to be helping are now paying more at the register.
Didn’t he chair the Cost of Living Committee? Because San Diegans are feeling the “cost” part loud and clear — but the “living” part? Not so much.
Now, he’s at it again — floating another idea that sounds good in a press release but falls apart in real life.
His proposal punishes families who have built generational wealth the right way — by saving, by staying, and by holding onto their slice of San Diego.
Here’s what this policy really says: if you can’t afford to live here full-time, you don’t deserve to belong here at all.
That’s not equity. That’s eviction with paperwork.
And for what? So developers can swoop in, buy up those properties, slap on density bonuses, and call it “progress”? Or so one of the 10,000 unhoused individuals can supposedly “move in” — as if the City has a plan, funding, or infrastructure to actually make that happen?
Let’s stop pretending this is about compassion or policy innovation. It’s about headlines, revenue, and political convenience.
San Diegans are tired of being the experiment.
Tired of watching half-baked policies drive up costs, destabilize neighborhoods, and chip away at what little generational security Black, Brown, and working families have left.
If Sean Elo-Rivera really wants to fight for affordability, he can start by addressing the root causes:
- Speculative buying and investor-owned housing.
- A lack of middle-income options.
- City projects that push property values up without delivering local benefits.
But that would require hard, unglamorous work — not another ballot measure designed to make headlines.
Here’s the bottom line: leave local families alone.
Stop reaching into our pockets, our pantries, and our property deeds.
We’ve played by the rules. We’ve invested in our neighborhoods. We’ve built community wealth despite every obstacle.
The least our elected officials can do is stop trying to legislate it away.
It does not seem fair to me that a long-time owner of a 2nd home in San Diego gets protected by prop 13 while a young family buying their first home (and actually living in it full time) has to pay 5 or even 8 times as much in property taxes.
This proposed measure is not about demonizing families or confiscating property, but rather making sure that homes are used as full time homes, not as passive investments subsidized by unfair tax structure. If someone can’t afford to live in or rent out their second home they can sell it, free up a home for another San Diegan, and likely walk away with a profit in today’s market.
I find it performative to pretend that empty 2nd homes don’t hurt our housing supply, or that taxing them fairly is somehow an attack on community.
So, will there be a way to police the homes you’d like to have sold to “families”? Most likely, these homes could be purchased by foreign interests, flippers or those looking to tear them down, make it an STVR or blow through local zoning codes with out of character developments technicality mandated by Sacramento.
This proposal is more about SD making $135 million of revenue they need since they can’t run this city without going into massive debt. There are just too many reasons this regime has spent money in the wrong places and over hired.
If this continues, anyone with an empty bedroom or two might get a visit from Elo-Rivera or future henchmen if he were to become mayor. You can see the massive numbers of market rate housing going up – I hear stories of vacancy rates going up and landlords having to incentivize people to move in. It looks to me that the drive for more revenue, higher taxes/fees and cash will have many leaving SD, which could explode the housing supply and reduce taxes revenues.
That is private property, and this new policy is an attempt at encroachment, on the right’s of private property owners. What people decide to do with their private property, is their business. And should NOT be dictated by the government. If the economic headwinds are telling you, you cannot afford to live here, then simple logic dictates to leave and find a place you can afford. It’s that simple.
The idea that a property owner can do whatever they want to with their property went out of fashion a century ago. Zoning laws, set-backs, height limits are all ways we require property owners to comply with laws that the rest of us (usually) enact via our elected reps. Can you construct a massive chicken farm on your residential lot? Or a toxic waste dump? Even you, me thinks, would agree to those restrictions, yes?
Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty, 1926. “No pig in the parlor.”
I’m fairly sure I read that case in law school.
Not an attorney, but every urban planner learns about this one!
The issue here is not about restrictions, it is about unfairly taxing people who own a second home, just because they are able to afford a second home and who are somehow to blame for people who cant afford to buy or rent a home in San Diego. Those are two different things …….
That someone own the property does not mean they have an unfettered right to do anything they want with it. Also that simple.
Again we have a mess that’s hard to decipher. To me it comes down to our present government’s policy of “one size fits all. Yet I’ve always believed that there is nothing quite so inequitable as treating unequal people equally and that seems to apply here. And that’s what’s happened with Prob 13 as well. But we should not just through the baby out with the bathwater we should spend a little time thinking about what our real problems are and what a real solution may look like. We haven’t been doing that from trash, to parking to taxes to much of anything and everything is getting to be an inequitable mess.
Elo-Rivera’s supposed motivation for this revenue grab:
“We have neighborhoods that are not neighborhoods because speculators and investors see every home in them with dollar signs and have detached themselves from the impacts of what they’re doing to them,” he said.
If Elo-Rivera truly cared about the impact of speculators and investors on San Diego neighborhoods, he never would have supported the Bonus ADU program over the last 4 plus years. The hypocrisy here is so transparent that it is laughable. This is yet another attempt to extract revenue from the tourism industry and the council member is insensitive to or unwilling to recognize that many, if not most of the STVR owners in this case are locals.
Let me be clear. I don’t love that STVRs are disrupting neighborhoods.
Still, I would appreciate it if our council member would be honest about his motives and not have a double standard when it comes to which investors are or are not allowed to alter San Diego’s neighborhoods such that they “are not neighborhoods because speculators and investors see every home in them with dollar signs and have detached themselves from the impacts of what they’re doing to them.” It is not okay for Bonus ADU developers to have this impact, and that is exactly what the Bonus ADU Program Elo-Rivera has whole-heartedly supported for four years has done to so many neighborhoods. And those neighborhoods cannot be returned to their former state because the damage is done – the apartment complexes are built – and more are still being built under the old code.
I appreciate Francine Maxwell’s honest appraisal. The negative fallout from Elo-Rivera’s coupon scheme is real and unfortunate. Before this legislation, Von’s always honored the digital coupon’s at the register for non-smartphone users. Now, those coupons are gone. Everyone just pays more.
This City and this administration need more honesty and less grandstanding.
The real issue here is that the City Council/Mayor have caused San Diego’s budget deficit. They are using any excuse to generate money from the residents in lue of generating good policy.
The policy “Connected Communities” generated by the Council/Mayor is being exploited by developers and others. And developers are rewarding the Council/Mayor with money for it. Suggesting that extra taxes on second homes and extra $5,000.00 per bedroom of vacation homes is/are a bad idea.
If you want to know how our city is in such a mess, review Richard Bailey’s financial analysis of the City’s budget at CommonGoodSD.com. He shares nonpartisan solutions for balancing the budget by prioritizing core responsibilities.
We need to see what’s really happening to San Diego and do something about it. It’s such a shame that it takes many lawsuits to rectify the situation when maybe a recall is another idea.
At issue here is the fact that the existing city council have completely mismanaged the budget, and are now trying everything they can to fill a gap in funding that they created. Trash collection fees were never charged before, and were funded through already exorbitant property taxes that go up every year as the value of property in San Diego goes up. New parking fees for areas that did not previously charge for parking and huge increases to parking fees for areas that already charged for parking. Now this latest scheme to extort money from hard-working people and using the homeless problem and lack of affordable housing issues to justify it. We are not yet a socialist city ……… why are we going after a certain group of people to solve these problems on the basis that they have been successful and have too much and must therefore be punished!
People who purchase second homes in San Diego, do so for a variety of reasons – not always because they want to rent them out on a short term basis. This notion that big corporations buy up all the property and turn them into STVR’s is no longer true, as the city’s Short Term Rental Ordinance has effectively stopped that. If for example you live in Tierrasanta but want to have a condo at the beach where you can spend your weekends or have your family use from time to time, why must you be taxed over and above what you already pay in property taxes for both homes. Elo Rivera’s rationale is that you must be punished because you are taking a home away from another San Diegan, which makes absolutely no sense, and will have no impact on solving the problem that he is supposedly trying to solve. There are properties on the market all the time but many cannot afford to buy them or rent them long-term (and with coastal property pricing being so high, that makes the problem worse). San Diego is one of the most expensive cities in the entire country to live in. People who cannot afford to live here have the option to leave and find a lower cost part of the country to live in, where there is more affordable housing available. My own children who were born and raised in San Diego, and who absolutely love San Diego, were faced with their own realization that they could not afford to live in San Diego, and so they moved to a different state where they can afford to live very comfortably in comparison. As Jay Coffman correctly points out, ‘there is nothing quite so inequitable as treating unequal people equally’.
I love the idea of taxing 2nd homes and stvrs. Never really saw that clearly stated in the article but i figured that was what this angry rant was about. This is the type of hysteria I would expect from Newsmax.
Why does the Rag include this level of angry and incoherent journalism on their site when they generally have great local news? It discredits a great public place to access info and have public discourse. Or you know, Elo-Rivera wants to eat your babies!