If you want to understand San Diego\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the number of San Diego homes now functioning as short-term rentals \u2014 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\u2019re booked, the effect is the same. Once a home becomes a short-term rental, it undergoes a quiet demolition \u2014 not with a wrecking ball, but with a booking link.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t happen in isolation. A would-be renter stays where they are. Their home doesn\u2019t open up for someone else. The chain reaction continues \u2014 down the market, across neighborhoods, through generations.<\/p>\n
Housing does not behave like other markets. It isn\u2019t elastic. It cannot be wished, willed or app-ified into existence. Remove a single home from San Diego\u2019s housing stock, and you remove not just a unit but a possibility \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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% \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
But every time we demolish a home by converting it into a short-term rental, we move backward.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re on a treadmill.<\/p>\n
Supporters of short-term rentals argue that a few vacation homes can\u2019t possibly affect a city this large. But this isn\u2019t a few. 10,600 homes is a city within a city \u2014 a mid-sized American town\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n