By Laura Henson
As San Diego considers the future of Mid-City through its Community Plan Update, we should ask a fundamental question: What kinds of neighborhoods does a healthy city need?
Mid-City already offers an extraordinary range of housing choices—from apartments, condominiums and duplexes to small cottages, historic neighborhoods and single-family homes. Its underdeveloped commercial corridors also offer significant opportunities for additional housing. The lack of development on the transit corridors is a deficiency that needs to be corrected. All this diversity should be considered an asset, not a planning problem that needs to be corrected.
Cities need apartments. They need condominiums, townhomes, affordable housing, senior housing and homes near transit. But healthy cities also need something increasingly dismissed in today’s housing debate: stable single-family neighborhoods.
Housing is not simply a matter of how many units can be placed on an acre of land. It is also about how people live, and how their housing needs change at different stages of life.
A young adult leaving home may want a small apartment near work, restaurants and transit. A couple may later need more space. Then children arrive. Suddenly a second or third bedroom, a yard, storage, a quiet street and room for grandparents to visit can become far more important.
This is the housing life cycle.
For generations, cities accommodated it. Condominiums and smaller homes provided entry points into the housing market. As careers and families grew, many households moved into single-family neighborhoods. Later in life, some downsized into condominiums, apartments or senior communities, freeing homes for the next generation.
A well-planned city should offer all of these choices.
Yet today’s housing debate too often treats single-family neighborhoods, despite allowances for low-density multi-family and multi-generational development through accessory dwelling units and small-scale housing types, as an inappropriate land use. The assumption seems to be that because more housing is needed, every neighborhood should accommodate substantially more density.
That ignores why these neighborhoods exist and whom they serve.
Consider the young teacher, firefighter, nurse, police officer, engineer, construction worker or small-business owner starting a family. If San Diego wants these workers to put down roots here, it needs neighborhoods where they can imagine raising children, not simply an ever-expanding supply of market-rate apartments.
These neighborhoods are part of a city’s social infrastructure.
A modest house with a backyard is not an extravagant lifestyle. For many families, it provides room for children to play, pets, gardening, family gatherings and the ordinary activities of family life. In a park-deficient community with few realistic opportunities to add new parks, backyards also serve an increasingly important role as private outdoor space for families.
Established neighborhoods provide another kind of value: continuity. Children grow up together, neighbors remain long enough to know one another, and families become invested in their communities.
Protecting them does not mean San Diego should stop building housing. Quite the opposite. Mid-City has tremendous opportunities to add housing along commercial corridors such as El Cajon Boulevard, where vacant parcels, underutilized commercial properties, surface parking lots and one-story buildings can accommodate substantial new housing. Thoughtful infill and adaptive reuse can create more homes and stronger, walkable neighborhoods while supporting businesses and transit.
The choice should not be between building housing and preserving single-family neighborhoods. A sophisticated city can and should do both.
We should also consider what happens when the traditional progression from apartment to starter home disappears. When modest single-family properties are increasingly valued for their redevelopment potential, families seeking their first home may find themselves competing with investors who value the property for what zoning allows them to build.
The starter home then ceases to be a starter home.
Families who might have moved from renting into homeownership will remain renters longer, because modest houses and their land become increasingly expensive and therefore unaffordable.
Cities are ecosystems. They function best when they provide different places for different people at different stages of life.
San Diego should build apartments, affordable housing and more homes along Mid-City’s transit and commercial corridors. But it should also preserve stable neighborhoods where working families can raise children, establish roots and build a life.
Housing choice should mean more choices— not eliminating one of them.
Laura Henson is a resident of Talmadge within Mid-City.
Laura – You make many excellent points, thank you for a reasonable and well thought out take on the subject. I just hope somebody is reading/listening somewhere (especially in the City Council)
Very well said and so true. All the pricey apts. the Mayor thinks is a great idea, totally forgets about families and kids. Very few of those apts. have 3 bdrms, and they start at a little over $4,000.00 per month. In SD there is no such reality as the magical word “affordable”. They are not “affordable on the backs of people who work in MidCity, North Park, South Park, Golden Hill and other older parts of SD, because most of the jobs in those areas are food and/or bar related. And now the mayor and city clowncil have San Diegans in a deep hole talking about the deficit they’ve got the residents into. Another article has the Clowns slamming the mayor, and I guess the speakers for that group have forgotten about the fact they went along to get along and said not a darn thing for the past 6 yrs. and voted for far too many thing directly opposite of what the people wanted. And by the way the residents/voters/people tried to get the clowns to listen to the people but they didn’t, they did what they wanted TO the residents and not FOR the residents.
The median single family home price in the author’s Mid-City Talmadge neighborhood is $1.2 million dollars (the least expensive single family home currently for sale there is $929K). This is *four times* the median since the 1998 Mid-City Plan Update, which continued to prevent multi-family housing in much of Kensington and Talmadge.
If we “consider the young teacher, firefighter, nurse, police officer, engineer, construction worker or small-business owner starting a family”, how do any of them afford the $8K/month for PITI and mortgage insurance on a 7% 30-year mortgage? Ideally housing costs should be around 30% of income – that means earning $300K/year. Yet the average San Diego starting teacher salary is $60K/year, so a teaching couple would be making just a third of that.
We do need a mix of both new rentals and for-sale units, but not allowing any of either to be added to Talmadge isn’t the answer. Talmadge is also where the author led the successful effort to federally denote much of the neighborhood as historic – making it even harder to build needed housing there.
If single family neighborhoods permit “low-density multi-family housing”, where exactly have these units been built? I’m unaware of any in Kensington, where the only new units since 2000 are on Adams Ave in the business district. And Talmadge residents led the effort to overturn the city’s ADU policy, after just one ADU project there resulted in the exact “low-density multi-family housing” the author describes. Instead, Talmadge residents attacked them as “Granny Towers”.
Lastly, limiting new housing to just El Cajon Blvd (~1% of all land in Talmadge and Kensington?) makes little sense, when nearby residents can easily walk or bike to transit there. Yet for the Mid-City Plan Update, this is exactly what hundreds of Talmadge and Kensington single family homeowners demanded the city do with their postcard campaign.
Paul, I agree with you on one important point: a $1.2 million median home price puts homeownership beyond the reach of many of the teachers, firefighters, nurses and other working families we are talking about. Where we differ is on the solution. I think we need to examine carefully what our zoning policies can do to the cost of land.
Upzoning does not magically turn a $1 million house into an affordable home. When additional development rights are attached to a parcel, developers can value that property based on what can be built there rather than simply on the existing house. That can put a young family seeking an entry-level home in competition with developers seeking land for redevelopment. Increasing housing capacity and increasing access to homeownership are not necessarily the same thing.
Nor have I argued that Talmadge should accept “no new housing.” My argument has consistently been for a range of housing types, including apartments, condominiums, senior housing and mixed-use development, particularly on underutilized commercial corridors such as El Cajon Boulevard.
It is also inaccurate to portray Kensington-Talmadge as a community that has simply refused affordable housing. Based on the City’s deed-restricted affordable housing data, Kensington-Talmadge already has 32% more deed-restricted affordable housing as a share of its housing stock than the citywide average and ranks 8th among San Diego’s 41 community planning areas in deed-restricted affordable units per 1,000 residents. Talmadge Gateway alone provides 59 affordable apartments dedicated to formerly homeless seniors.
The characterization of the Talmadge Park Estates Historic District is also misleading. Historic preservation in Talmadge did not suddenly begin as a response to today’s housing debate. The community successfully pursued local historic designation of the Talmadge Gates Historic Corridor in 2000, nearly a quarter-century before the Talmadge Park Estates Historic District was listed on the National Register in 2024. That earlier corridor, encompassing the historic gates and streetlights along the original non-canyon subdivision boundaries, which subsequently helped define the structure of the National Register district. Preservation has been a longstanding community priority, not a recently invented strategy for preventing housing.
There is also a misconception that historic districts are inherently affluent or exclusive. They are not. Islenair, in City Heights, was historically developed as a small working-class neighborhood and today is located within an area classified as Low Resource on California’s Tax Credit Allocation Committee Opportunity Map.
Islenair is especially relevant to the affordability discussion because contributing homeowners in a locally designated historic district may qualify for Mills Act contracts, providing meaningful property-tax savings in exchange for maintaining their historic homes. That is one way preservation can help existing homeowners remain in their communities.
This is why I believe the Mid-City Plan Update missed an opportunity in City Heights. We should have explored whether additional historic districts could qualify for designation and give qualifying homeowners access to Mills Act incentives. Preservation and affordability can reinforce one another.
Finally, the argument that El Cajon Boulevard represents only “1% of the land” misses the basic purpose of planning. The relevant question isn’t how much land the Boulevard occupies; it is how much housing it can accommodate. Higher-density mixed-use development on a commercial corridor can produce many more homes per acre while placing residents near transit, new jobs, businesses and services.
The question is not whether Mid-City should grow, but how. We can add substantial housing while preserving historic resources and attainable ownership opportunities. Those goals can coexist.
“Later in life, some downsized into condominiums, apartments or senior communities, freeing homes for the next generation.”
This salient point often goes unaddressed. Yes, think of the young professionals – as one, I assure you, we would love to buy! – but also think about the end of the homeowner life cycle. With the incentive structure created by Prop 13 and the ever-increasing tendencies towards neolocal residence, driven by markets and often geographically distant from where they were raised (plainly – your kids and grandkids probably won’t live where you do at all, let alone in your house they one day inherit), and the concentrations of wealth in some older single-family neighborhoods – how do we address that step in the homeowner life cycle?
I agree that this is an important part of the housing conversation. But older homeowners will only downsize if there are appealing alternatives worth moving to. We also need to consider what happens when single-family neighborhoods are upzoned: the added development potential increases the value of the land beneath existing homes, making those properties more valuable as development sites.
That means young families seeking entry-level homes in low- and moderate-resource communities may increasingly find themselves competing with developers who can pay based on a property’s redevelopment potential. That can make the path to homeownership harder, not easier. This is one reason I am advocating for preserving single-family zoning.
Mid-City needs a wider range of housing choices—well-designed condos, apartments and senior housing along our commercial corridors—while preserving modest homes as an attainable path to homeownership. A healthy housing market should provide choices at every stage of life, not inadvertently turn our remaining entry-level homes into development opportunities and market rate appartments.
The unanswered question is – why is a median house considered to be worth over $1 million ?
Of course no one can afford that price, it is patently absurd !
Yet, it is the going rate.
Why ?
Answer that question and you have the beginnings of the solution to the “affordable housing crisis”
HINT: It’s no supply and demand
I think one part of the answer is hiding in plain sight: upzoning can change what a property is worth because it changes what can be built on the land.
When a modest single-family property can suddenly accommodate multiple units, a developer may value it not as one home, but according to its redevelopment potential. The house itself can become almost incidental—the land and its new zoning capacity are what matter.
That has an unintended consequence we should be talking about. Young families looking for an entry-level home can find themselves competing with developers who are bidding on the same property for an entirely different reason. Upzoning may create the potential for more housing units, but it can also increase development pressure on the very modest homes that once provided a pathway into homeownership.
If we are serious about affordability, we need to talk about the price of land—and how our zoning decisions can affect it—not simply the number of units we can theoretically build.
There are plenty of for-sale properties in San Diego County under $500,000. If people think every for-sale home is a million dollars and they whine that they can’t afford to buy a house, they aren’t trying very hard. In 5 min. I saw a few 2-bedrm condos in Mission Valley for $299,000. Start there. If you can’t qualify for a loan or don’t have a down payment, figure something out – work with a realtor and a bank. “neolocal” residence? Plenty of 1 bedrooms for the “professionals”. If people aren’t willing to sacrifice to meet their goals, then they’re their own enemy in “that step in the homeowner life cycle”. Forego fancy vacations, $100 concert tickets, Starbucks, the new car payment (vs. used car), wardrobe to impress, etc. As for “concentrations of wealth in older SFR neighborhoods” – this is an oft-touted misconception. A retiree living on Soc Sec and a pension may have equity in their SFR they’ve lived in for 25 years, but equity does not pay the bills. A young couple who bought a home for $800,000 and is sacrificing now for the future of their family has a hefty property tax bill and all the rest — certainly not wealthy. Ridiculous premise to ask how a young couple starting out can afford a million dollar SFR.
Agreed! People have to look around, and as you said cut out some of their extravagant hobbies. If they can find a vacant lot reasonably priced/affordable just outside of SD, they can then put a manufactured 3+2 home on that property for $145K, just like a friend of mine is in the process right now. They’re built to HUD standards, and actually built better than stick built homes AND your property taxes would be 1% of the actual cost of the lot + 1% of the actual cost of the house. Talk to PJ at Ideal Mfg. homes in El Cajon.
Great points made here by the author and commenters: people have different housing needs at different stages of life and having appropriate choices are what everyone wants and needs. And when you’re starting out, it’s vital to have “starter homes” available without having to compete with developers.