How San Diego’s Housing Commission Continues to Fast-Track the Concentration of Poverty

By Robert Campbell

On August 28, 2026, the San Diego Housing Commission held a special meeting, a quick under-the-radar addition. In this meeting the Commission unanimously passed massive, 100% deed-restricted affordable housing projects, two of which are in the city’s Chollas View and Encanto neighborhood area. A 244-unit prefabricated development at 4970 Market Street and a 64-unit project at 6601 Imperial Avenue on the corner of Woodman.

Rather than marking a triumph for housing equity, the hearing revealed a profound institutional disdain for vulnerable communities, exposing how municipal leaders and outside developers continue to weaponize low-income housing policy to entrench structural segregation.

In urban planning and fair housing, the single greatest factor in breaking generational cycles of poverty is opportunity area placement. Ensuring that subsidized housing is built in high resource neighborhoods with access to high performing schools, low environmental toxicity, high paying job centers, and robust community infrastructure.

Yet, throughout the entire August 28 Housing Commission discussion, opportunity area and resource metrics were given no discussion.

The conversation was restricted to narrow technical checkboxes, does the project have solar integration (no, but “solar ready”), cost-per-unit metrics ($442k for the prefab per unit on Market, $848k per unit for the traditional build on Imperial), transit access (.5 and 1.2 miles for Imperial to the Trolley), and drastically reduced parking minimums (such as providing a meager 15 parking spots for 64 units on Imperial of which 17 units are 3 bedroom). There was no discussion whatsoever regarding physical unit sizes, the prefab on Market appears to have units little bigger than parking stalls, ignoring whether these spaces are functionally adequate for families as you can see in the picture provided.

Worse still, both the Market Street and Imperial/Woodman sites are situated directly within historically redlined neighborhoods. Decades ago, federal housing maps and discriminatory lending practices drew red lines around much of southeastern San Diego, cordoning off our communities from investment, generational wealth-building, and equitable municipal resources. Today, rather than correcting these historical sins through proactive regional integration, the city uses these very maps as a blueprint for where to place new concentrations of deep poverty, treating legacy disinvestment not as a wrong to be righted, but as a permanent beacon for compounding poverty destiny.

At minute 56, second 26 of the meeting, Housing Commission CEO Lisa Jones, who is paid somewhere around $400,000 per year, openly defended building new extremely low income family housing in these historically redlined corridors. Jones remarked that affordable housing is “…on a site that nobody else will do.” “…especially when we do infill projects, there was a reason they weren’t built [in these areas] before.”

Rather than viewing our historical barriers, such as environmental toxicity, lack of infrastructure, and systemic neglect as a mandate to invest equitably or demand better, Jones rationale was made clear, “We don’t want to limit what is coming down the pipeline because that would be less housing overall.” Under this cynical framework, protecting developer pipelines in low resource areas takes precedence over Affirmatively Further Fair Housing (AFFH), civil rights, environmental justice, and human dignity.

As sociologist Matthew Desmond observes in his 2023 book, Poverty, By America, we remain “very separate and very unequal.” Desmond notes that this corruption of opportunity can only end when we stop embracing segregation through exclusionary zoning and its quieter, localized policy counterparts. As Desmond writes:

“The most important thing we can do is to replace exclusionary zoning policies with inclusionary ordinances, tearing down our walls and using the rubble to build bridges… While exclusionary zoning makes it illegal to develop affordable housing, inclusionary zoning makes it illegal not to.” (pp. 165–166)

By packing low-income housing exclusively into low resource areas while high-opportunity neighborhoods remain exclusive and immune to affordable housing, San Diego does the exact opposite of deconcentrating poverty. Desmond underscores that “by deconcentrating poverty in schools and communities, integration blunts its sting. Simply moving poor families to high-opportunity neighborhoods, without doing anything to increase their incomes, improves their lives tremendously” (p. 161).

When cities fail to integrate communities, the human cost is severe, particularly for children. Research highlighted by Desmond demonstrates that growing up in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood carries developmental consequences equivalent to missing an entire year of school in verbal ability, while achievement gaps between rich and poor children harden well before kindergarten (p. 117; drawing on Douglas Downey’s How Schools Really Matter and statewide SES achievement studies). Channeling vulnerable families into low resource areas which sends them to schools with chronic performance deficits locks children and the school into a system that is deeply disadvantaged.

This targeted placement of poverty populations directly violates the spirit and letter of California’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) requirements which legally bind public agencies to dismantle, rather than reinforce, patterns of segregation and poverty. By funneling households ranging from 30% to 70% AMI, alongside permanent supportive housing for unhoused individuals, exclusively into historically redlined zones that are low resource, the city deepens cumulative environmental injustices and widens the regional equity gap.

Furthermore, this dynamic sits in direct tension with the legal shadow of the Baker v. San Diego litigation settlement from last year, which historically challenged how the city’s housing strategies disproportionately impact minority and low resource neighborhoods through the over concentration of low-income housing. Pushing through massive, unprecedented prefabricated complexes such as the 244 unit Market Street build without any AFFH opportunity evaluation, environmental justice evaluation or genuine public engagement signals that the city has learned nothing from its ugly past.

San Diego cannot build its way out of a housing crisis by doubling down on segregation. When the housing commission rushes special meetings, writes off historically redlined, low resource neighborhoods as places “nobody else will do,” and excludes local communities with rushed meetings to appease outside developers, it ceases to serve the public trust. True housing justice demands that high-resource neighborhoods finally shoulder their fair share of affordable housing, rather than continuing the old policy of out-of-sight, out-of-mind confinement.

Below you’ll find the estimated dates of the project’s milestones as they march along an accelerated timeline.

Placing hundreds of low-income families into new income restricted projects funneled to neighborhood schools that are already grappling with concentrations of poverty exceeding 90% is a profound structural failure and a disservice to our communities. At Lincoln High School, 90.8% of students are identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged. Instead of fulfilling the promise of AFFH through economic mobility, this localized isolation channels vulnerable children straight into educational pipelines where chronic performance deficits, facility strains, and systemic disadvantages are already entrenched.

Together we must demand equitable, high opportunity, resource rich areas in the placement of affordable housing, especially the 30%-60% AMI levels across the city. Attend upcoming city hearings, hold the city and housing commission accountable, and let us demand that San Diego’s housing policy serve every resident. Together we must work to stop the concentration of poverty for us all.

I’ll close with one of my favorite quotes, “We must be the change we want to see in this world” – Gandhi.