Poway’s historically low in-lieu fee — what developers pay to avoid including affordable housing in their projects — may be getting a second look.
City leaders recently agreed to study the fee, which is currently just $500 per unit for both single-family and multi-family homes. That’s the lowest in San Diego County (except for a few cities that don’t charge one at all).
Some Poway residents have begun to question whether the low fee is discouraging affordable housing production. And according to the data, most developers have chosen to pay the fee rather than build affordable units, according to records obtained by our Tigist Layne.
The City Council plans to bring in a consultant to review the fee and recommend whether it should go up, stay the same or be lowered. The Council will then decide whether to adopt the recommendation.
This isn’t the first time the Council has discussed raising the fee — past efforts stalled over concerns about limiting development.
San Diego Could Get Injection of After-School Money
Children play soccer after school at Chollas Mead Elementary School in the Diamond District neighborhood on Feb 19, 2025. / Ariana Drehsler for Voice of San Diego
The state budget is looking good for San Diego Unified School District.
It appears the district will get roughly $36 million in new money to fund before- and after-school programs. That could erase the district’s waiting list, which includes thousands of families.
After-school programs like PrimeTime can have a huge impact for working families, as our Jakob McWhinney reports.
McWhinney tells the story of a man who was unable to afford child care — but also unable to work regular hours because he needed to pick up his child from school. The dad was working piecemeal as a food delivery driver. When his child finally got into an after-school program, the dad was able to start a career with the U.S. Postal Service.
Roughly 4,200 people were on the district’s waiting list last year. District leaders say the money will go directly to after-school care providers and has the potential to end the waiting list.
Voice’s Reporting on the 2017 Hep A Outbreak
Workers power-wash a sidewalk near the Midway area amid a hepatitis A outbreak. / Photo by Adriana Heldiz
Back in 2017, when County officials declared a hepatitis A outbreak, Voice of San Diego’s Lisa Halverstadt noticed a lack of action from local officials. What she revealed led to a ramped-up response that most likely saved lives.
Two months after a plan of action was proposed, public health officials had only set up two hand-washing stations. Each of them miles away from downtown streets that were epicenters for the outbreak.
By that time the disease had already claimed 15 lives. This motivated Halverstadt to investigate why the response lacked urgency, which government officials blamed on bureaucratic red tape and vendor issues.
Halverstadt’s story on the sluggish response published on a Wednesday and by the end of the weekend county contractors had placed 40 hand-washing stations across the city.
In honor of our 20th anniversary, we’re looking back at the stories that changed San Diego. This story dramatically reshaped the public health response, which ultimately slowed the outbreak. It’s a Voice classic and the kind of reporting we will always aspire to do.
Read more about our impact here.
Min Wage Proposal Advances… For Real This Time!
You may have noticed a mistake in yesterday’s Morning Report.
We wrote on Tuesday evening that the San Diego City Council’s Select Committee on Cost of Living voted on Wednesday to advance a minimum wage proposal for hotels, event venues, zoos and amusement parks.
The post should have said that they were going to consider the item on Wednesday. We fixed it, and you can read the updated post with the correction here.
Still … we were right? Wednesday, they did vote to advance the proposal. Our editor Scott Lewis explained how the wage proposal has changed since leaders first floated it around and how businesses are already gearing up to fight it.
As someone smart once said: “I thought I was wrong once, but it turned out I was mistaken.”
You can read the full story here.
In Other News
- The California Attorney General’s Office is suing a San Diego-based nursing facility chain. The lawsuit claims that Sweetwater Care failed to adequately staff its facilities, which in-turn harmed patients. (NBC 7)
- KPBS reports that the Department of Education’s decision to halt funding for some mental health grants will impact the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District and students with behavioral challenges.
- Thanks to SeaWorld — or, at least. the significant stack of cash the theme park is forking over to the city of San Diego for a settlement on unpaid lease payments — several parks across San Diego will receive some renovations. The City Council announced Tuesday that nearly $7.9 million from the settlement will go toward parks. (ABC 10)
The Morning Report was written by Tigist Layne, Will Huntsberry, Andrea Sanchez-Villafaña and Tessa Balc. It was edited by Andrea Sanchez-Villafaña and Scott Lewis.