By South OB Girl
Dear San Diego Planning Commission and City’s Development Services Department:
I would like to know how many of the new apartment buildings along highway 8 are full and have no vacancies. I am curious if construction is complete for all of the buildings being built to replace what was formerly the golf course in Mission Valley.
Is construction of those buildings complete and are all of the dwelling units now occupied? How many of those units are expected to facilitate solving the housing crisis? I recently saw some new apartment buildings off Clairemont Drive. Are they full to capacity? How many of all these new structures throughout the city – in Mission Valley, Clairemont, and elsewhere – qualify as affordable housing?
The City’s answer in response to most new plans for construction and ADUs these days is that there is a housing crisis. The City and developers believe they are creating housing solutions and promote the mission that their plans are providing housing solutions in response to the housing crisis. So in support of that mission, is there a status report somewhere? Some quantitative data?
Like any federal, state, or city project, there should be a status report or something that resembles a status report detailing how far along we are as a city in reaching the goals for housing. Maybe some graphs. A Tableau presentation. Something. I am asking for reliable and honest data. And for quantitative data. In the last five years:
- How many new dwelling units have been built throughout all of San Diego? How many studios, apartments, ADUs, and Junior ADUs have been built?
- additionally, how many condos rented to long term tenants have been built since 2020?
- How many dwelling units total built since 2020 are STVRs?
- How many dwelling units total built before 2020 are STVRs?
- What is the total number of occupied new dwelling units, for structures built since 2020?
- What is the total number of occupied dwelling units, for dwellings built prior to 2020?
- How many vacant dwelling units are there, built since 2020?
- How many vacant dwelling units are there, which existed before 2020?
- How many new dwelling units qualify as affordable housing?
- How many dwelling units which qualify as affordable housing existed before 2020?
- Total number of homeless individuals?
- Total number of people who qualify for affordable housing and are looking for housing?
- Total number of people looking for housing which is not affordable housing (according to the definition of affordable housing)?
- Total number of people expected to move to San Diego in 2026?
- Total number of people expected to move out of San Diego in 2026?
In short, the number of vacancies in San Diego and the number of people still looking for housing, with some wiggle room based on the number of people expected to move to San Diego and move out of San Diego.
Instead of rewriting municipal codes, turning communities upside down, and remodeling areas with Historical designation, perhaps some quantitative data should be obtained by the City and analyzed — assessing what the precise needs for housing currently are.
I have friends who prepare reports like this in their sleep. Many industries work with complex models that include various factors and more complex scenarios than a city’s population. Actuaries, statisticians, population scientists, and data scientists work with more complicated numbers, more complicated equations, more complex models, and more complex scenarios than the number of dwellings and the number of people living in a city.
Is it too much to ask for the City to obtain data and look at the data? To assess and evaluate the data and draw conclusions based on the data? It would be in the City’s best interest and in the best interest of many San Diegans to know where San Diego is at now with housing solutions and to evaluate what steps need to be taken moving forward, based on the existing data.
I’ve been watching Permits Applied For on the City’s DSD since 2018. The VAST majority of the new construction for ADU’s is “market rate”, not low, or even super/very/extremely low income housing. Therefore the City can build basically until hell freezes over and still they’re not coming up with the thousands mandated by Gav. Example is a multi building ADU on a single family lot near the college are, with 178 “market rate” units, and 18 very low income units. There are empty “market value units”, all over North Park, and other communities, but the “work around”, of very few low or very low ADU’s, is going to give plenty of special opportunities to the developers who don’t have to pay the same fees, the City forces the public to pay for Permits, so the quota for low & very low income units will take years to meet.