By Chase Wilson / Op-Ed San Diego U-T / December 11, 2025
If you want to understand San Diego’s housing crisis, forget the jargon for a moment. Forget the zoning charts, the staff reports, the alphabet soup of agencies. Start with something simple anyone can picture: a house. Now imagine it being knocked down. Imagine a demolition. Now imagine that happening 10,600 times.
That’s the number of San Diego homes now functioning as short-term rentals — Airbnbs, VRBOs, vacation bungalows dressed up as houses. Charming little demolitions, each one. They stand upright, freshly painted, Instagram-ready, but in housing terms they might as well be a pile of rubble. Some are empty second homes, rented only occasionally. Many are investments, rented constantly. But however often they’re booked, the effect is the same. Once a home becomes a short-term rental, it undergoes a quiet demolition — not with a wrecking ball, but with a booking link.
Once demolished, a family cannot live in it, a nurse cannot rent it, a young couple cannot begin their lives in it. That unit vanishes from the fragile ecosystem of available housing stock, and the disappearance doesn’t happen in isolation. A would-be renter stays where they are. Their home doesn’t open up for someone else. The chain reaction continues — down the market, across neighborhoods, through generations.
Housing does not behave like other markets. It isn’t elastic. It cannot be wished, willed or appified into existence. Remove a single home from San Diego’s housing stock, and you remove not just a unit but a possibility — the possibility that a teacher might live near her school, that a grown child might live near her parents, that a young family might put down roots here rather than in Austin or Phoenix or Boise.
In a city where housing is scarce, every demolished home matters. San Diego is not merely tight on housing, it is chronically, painfully short. Vacancy rates hover around 3% — so low they serve as a warning siren. Meanwhile, the state-mandated Regional Housing Needs Assessment has assigned San Diego a target of 108,036 new homes from 2021 to 2029 just to keep pace with projected population growth.
But every time we demolish a home by converting it into a short-term rental, we move backward.
We dig the hole deeper. The math is unforgiving: Take 108,036, subtract 10,600, and keep subtracting the new demolitions happening each month. We’re on a treadmill.
Supporters of short-term rentals argue that a few vacation homes can’t possibly affect a city this large. But this isn’t a few. 10,600 homes is a city within a city — a mid-sized American town’s worth of roofs and rooms and kitchens that San Diego families never get to touch. Housing does not replenish itself. It does not reappear after demolition.
This is the backdrop for the city’s proposed vacation home operation tax, intended to slow the propagation of short-term rentals and reclaim some of the housing we’ve effectively erased.
Reasonable people can debate whether the tax is the perfect tool. But the problem it seeks to address is unmistakable. It’s visible in our rent prices, our overcrowded apartments, our teachers commuting from Temecula, our adult children priced out of the communities that raised them, and our homelessness crisis intensified by every demolished unit.
None of this is complicated. When a scarce thing becomes scarcer, the people who need it suffer.
And in San Diego, housing is as precious as water in a drought. We should treat it as such.
An Airbnb is a demolition. No dust, no bulldozer, but a demolition all the same. And until we stop tearing down homes this way, we’ll never build enough to catch up.
Wilson is a housing advocate and asset manager who lives in Point Loma.
While most of us won’t disagree that San Diego needs more housing, there are several incorrect statements in the op-ed.
The vacancy rate county-wide is not 3%, it’s almost 6%. Within the city, the vacancy rate is above 6%. Those are low relative to other cities, but it’s still well north of the long-time vacancy rate, which is around 4.5%.
The Regional Housing Needs Assessment has also not been updated to reflect the fact that San Diego’s population has been flat over the past five years.
We can do this with the ADU policy that took inventory from families or senior downsizing and turned that into investor driven properties. It’s not just one facet to focus on.
Op-Ed relies on a hysterical metaphor to mask a basic economic illiteracy. He wants you to believe that a renovated, tax-generating, well-maintained asset is equivalent to a “pile of rubble” simply because it hosts a tourist instead of a long-term tenant. This is emotional manipulation, not serious policy analysis. To claim a house “vanishes” because a family on vacation sleeps in it rather than a permanent resident is absurd. The property is still standing, it is still providing shelter, and it is fueling the tourism economy that pays for the very city services, police, and infrastructure Wilson relies on.
The author conveniently fixates on 10,600 units as if they are the apocalypse, ignoring the math that ruins his argument. Short-term rentals represent barely two percent of San Diego’s total housing stock. Blaming the region’s massive housing shortage on Airbnb is a cheap parlor trick designed to distract from the real culprit: the government. We aren’t short 100,000 homes because of a “booking link.” We are in this hole because the California Coastal Commission, CEQA lawsuits, restrictive zoning, and our own City Council have spent decades strangling new development. The government spent thirty years making it illegal or unaffordable to build, and now that the predictable shortage is here, they want to scapegoat the few property owners enterprising enough to make a profit.
The core of Wilson’s argument is the dangerous entitlement of the collective over the individual. He laments that a home is removed from the “ecosystem,” but here is the reality check: I did not buy my property to serve a “housing ecosystem.” I bought it to build wealth for my family. Private property is not a public utility to be commandeered just because the city failed to plan properly. When you dictate who I must rent to and for how long, you have effectively seized the utility of the property without compensating me for it. That isn’t housing advocacy; that is a regulatory taking.
Wilson’s proposed solution (more taxes) is just as flawed as his premise. Taxing short-term rentals won’t magically conjure affordable housing. It will simply make San Diego more expensive for visitors, crush small-time investors who use rental income to pay their mortgages, and hand more money to the same bureaucratic machine that created this mess in the first place. Housing cannot be wished into existence, but it can be blocked by red tape. An Airbnb isn’t a demolition; it’s a lifeboat for owners trying to survive in a state with the highest cost of living in the nation. If you want to see a real wrecking ball, don’t look at a vacation rental; look at the San Diego Planning Department.
Well, there is the other side. It’s all the government’s fault. Nothing to do with profit making and selling our coast out.
Huh? Profit making and selling our coast out. Please explain where that differs from the corporate entities who want to put high rises on the coast? Like Midway Rising. Anyone knows that investing in property is profiting due to appreciation, as opposed to renting and paying for someone else to profit. Income and appreciation. That’s investing. Rich enough for one property, poor enough for two? Is that the limit? It should be that for corporations. Many shades of grey in this example. Maybe I misread your reply. Mom and pop are the easy targets accumulating to pass on to kids. Some AirBnB could be corporate owned. Using numbers is easy. And circling back to all vacation rentals as the villain is questionable. Why not empty market rate apartments then?
We’re not talking about mom and pop entities. I was responding to the commenter who was blaming government …
Thanks, Frank.
The claim that regulating rentals is a “commandeering” of private property rests on a convenient myth: that housing is private until the state intrudes. In fact, real estate wealth is inseparable from government action, titles, courts, policing, infrastructure, zoning, and subsidies that make ownership profitable in the first place (including tax advantages like the mortgage interest deduction). Property rights are not pre-political treasures the public occasionally steals from; they are legal privileges continuously defined by public rules. In a housing shortage, it is not radical to ask whether converting homes into quasi-hotel inventory should be governed differently than long-term housing. That isn’t a “taking.” It’s the ordinary work of setting boundaries so one person’s wealth strategy doesn’t offload costs onto neighbors, workers, and renters who also live inside the same publicly constructed market.
Great comment.
Airbnbs are just one of many issues causing the housing crunch. I think the city has managed the different interests decently by capping the number of rentals around 10,000. That’s significant but less than about 1% of total housing stock in the city. Chase, Are you proposing a complete ban on short term rentals? What would be an acceptable number of short term rentals for you?
The current housing stock in City of San Diego (as of Mar 2025 parcel data):
Single-family: 211,100
Non-condo multifamily units (incl mixed use): 227,600
Condo units: 114,700
TOTAL: 553,400
10,000 cap is 1.8% of housing stock.
Thanks for checking my numbers. So under 2%. Seems reasonable to me that 2% are short term rentals.
Agree! There should be common sense regulations like a cap in each town not city wide-this is what OB planning board wanted and the city did not listen. Fix the loop hole where hosts can own multiple whole home rentals. The majority of AIRBNB’s are in the coastal area and we have way too many. Keep owner on site with no cap and cap whole home rentals in each town low in order to put more housing for residents. BOOM! SIMPLE and easy. No over building needed.
Short-term rental properties should only be those that could not house a long-term tenant. My neighbors have a tiny AirBnb unit that has no kitchen, for instance. All the rest should be taken off the short-term rental market and offered as rental opportunities for permanent residents. This would instantly free up thousands of units of housing for San Diegans. Tourists can stay in hotels, as they have since time immemorial. I used to live in a carriage house in Golden Hill that housed 3 of us. It is now a short-term rental.
And on the subject of regulation. We should ban private equity companies and foreign nationals from buying up residential properties.
Amen. Thank you, Ron. This makes sense.
I am concerned that the con artists alleging that the new high rise apartment complexes, so-called ADUS, and granny flats being built in residential neighborhoods all over the City of San Diego will NEVER be affordable for poor working class, elderly, wounded veterans or students because NO LAWS EXIST to mandate inexpensive housing so the owners will charge the maximum they can get. Back in the 1960s, both here in the United States and in England, governments built high density housing projects for the poor but did nothing to ensure the safety of the impoverished renters. After working in government for 28-years, it is my opinion that City government must acquire the “affordable” housing units and then the Housing Authority could rent said units at truly affordable rent, water, trash, and sewer expenses. By integrating the low income people we avoid the catastrophic failures of the 1960s housing projects, and actually do something constructive for citizens on the low end of our economic spectrum. I declare this in the spirit of the December holidays.
Short term rentals should not be allowed in a residential neighborhood. They are hotels and should be regulated as such. And no amount of building for profit will get the homeless off the streets. Some form of public housing is needed, whether it is city owned and subsidized houses or larger housing projects, but if we have any compassion for others, we should do something. As to the right-wing-nut tirade by Rob B he seems to think that common sense regulation is “a dangerous entitlement of the collective over the individual”. No dude, it’s called responsibility. Yes, you heard that right. You actually have a responsibility to behave in a way that doesn’t harm your neighbors. You sound like a Trumper to me. And if you are proud of yourself, use your full name.
Any renter has a responsibility to act responsible, long term, short term, hotel, house, apartment, even homeowners. It’s really not a point. The need is affordable housing and nothing in the coastal area is affordable, so those houses, if they were available, won’t make a difference. You might be angry on how short term rentals operate, but their operation doesn’t cause an affordable housing need that would be fixed if the houses were available. If you can afford the coast, there you go. If not, then your in El Cajon. Been that way for-ever.
I’m not talking about housing affordability. I’m talking about homeowner’s rights. If you buy a house in a residential neighborhood, you should be able to live there in peace and security. This is not possible with a rental party house next door, or even down the street. That is why we have zoning laws. When people try to bend or ignore the rules we have to tighten the regulations. That is what is needed now.