20 Years of Voice: For our 20th anniversary, we asked community members, local leaders and thinkers to share their vision for the next 20 years of the San Diego region, and what we can do today to make that vision a reality. You can read all of our anniversary content here.
Saad Asad is the Advocacy and Communications Lead for the YIMBY Dems of San Diego.
In San Diego, housing nightmares unfold daily.
A 12-year-old boy sleeps in a sleeping bag atop his father’s SUV each night in a church parking lot. They are one of many families living in vehicles as affordable housing becomes scarce.
Border commuters rise at 3 a.m., spending five hours a day crossing from Tijuana to keep jobs they can’t afford to live near.
Meanwhile, federal and state housing support for San Diego dropped 13 percent last year despite growing needs. With less help from Washington and Sacramento, the region must find its own solutions.
Why San Diego Faces Housing Affordability Challenges
Our housing challenges stem from two critical factors: severe underbuilding and decreasing government support. The region failed to keep up with population growth for many years, creating a severe housing shortage. That shortage leads to competition, driving up prices. Housing costs have surged 84 percent since 2020, while paychecks grew only 22 percent. Despite this shortage, cities in San Diego County consistently build fewer than the 21,000 new homes needed each year.
Federal housing assistance has decreased significantly since the 1990s, serving just one-in-four eligible households nationwide. Local housing agencies haven’t issued new rental assistance vouchers since August 2022, leaving nearly 58,000 families on waitlists. Rising rents have further diminished the effectiveness of existing vouchers.
Federal funding may decrease even further under the Trump administration, but California’s investments in affordable housing also plummeted. Between 2013 and 2018, funding fell from $1.3 billion annually to less than $500 million before finally ramping back up in 2019.
Three Practical Solutions to San Diego’s Housing Affordability Crisis
With two-in-five families spending over a third of their income on housing, we simply cannot wait for another president or governor to fix this. San Diego must build its housing safety net through three practical strategies that address immediate needs while creating long-term solutions:
1. Expand Rental Assistance Programs
First, our region’s cities must increase rental assistance to prevent families from losing homes. The City of San Diego’s existing homelessness prevention program of $250- to $750 monthly payments helped families stay housed during tough times. This “shallow subsidy” approach helps more people than traditional programs by targeting those needing a little boost.
While this doesn’t fix the real problem, it’s like treating the bleeding while working on the cure. Keeping a family housed with rental assistance costs less than $6,000 yearly versus the nearly $14,000 annually for supportive housing. And this is far cheaper than the annual cost of a chronically homeless person cycling out of shelters, hospitals and jails.
2. Reform Restrictive Zoning and Permitting Processes
Current zoning rules ban smaller, affordable homes in over 80 percent of residential neighborhoods, contributing to San Diego’s nearly $1 million median home price. Evidence shows that reform works: after San Diego made it easier to build accessory dwelling units, permit applications skyrocketed from 266 in 2018 to 1,909 in 2024. Building on this success, we should allow more affordable housing types like duplexes, townhomes and small apartment buildings in all neighborhoods.
We must also streamline the permit process that adds months or years of delays to housing projects. Duplicative requirements, outdated systems and understaffing can create costly delays that inflate housing costs
By allowing more housing types and speeding up permits, we create dual benefits: increased affordability for everyone and the ability for nonprofit homebuilders to build affordable housing in neighborhoods with good schools and jobs. Lowering these costs is especially critical; considering the cost can rise to $911,000 per home.
3. Launch a Self-Sustaining Social Housing Fund
Lastly, San Diego should establish a social housing fund modeled after Montgomery County, Maryland’s successful program. Their Housing Production Fund, launched in 2021 with $50 million, accelerates affordable housing development using loans for mixed-income projects where at least 30 percent of units remain affordable to low-income residents.
This innovative model costs the county just $600,000 annually while creating hundreds of affordable homes. Market-rate homes help cover costs, making the program self-sustaining without complex tax credits or undependable housing voucher funding. Loans are repaid within five years and reinvested, making the program self-sustaining without complex tax credits or undependable voucher funding. Following this success, Montgomery County doubled its investment, with 4,000 new homes in development.
Building a Future for All San Diegans
These three strategies work together as a system, creating a San Diego where teachers live near schools, nurses near hospitals and young families can afford homes in their neighborhoods.
While these approaches aren’t a complete solution — San Diego still needs tenant protections, increased for-sale inventory and dedicated local affordable housing funding — they represent achievable solutions. The region’s housing affordability crisis came from policy choices, and different choices can create a different future.
The YIMBY narrative is largely false and only benefits developers and the politicians that take their donations. Densification is demonstrably a contributor to rising housing costs and should be avoided at all costs. Restrictive zoning and permitting have also been shown to have no correlation — let alone causation — for rising housing prices.
Affordable housing — especially low income housing — can best be funded by removing all affordable housing incentives for developers. The incentives have not lowered overall housing costs or created a significant supply of low and very low income housing, and had removed millions of dollars of infrastructure development fees from the city’s coffers at a time in which we cannot afford it. The city should instead reimpose all development fees and use these fees to underwrite the building and maintenance of permanently rent restricted housing. There is still sufficient profit in permanently restricted housing to get it built, and the cost will be borne by the developers and not the people. Where this practice has been adopted, it has produced a significant increase in available low income housing while keeping management of housing out of the city’s hands.
https://www.sohosandiego.org/enews/0924gentrification.htm