approved 5-4<\/a> by the City Council last month and finalized Tuesday in a 5-1 vote. Three opponents at last month\u2019s meeting were absent from Tuesday\u2019s vote: Sean Elo-Rivera, Stephen Whitburn and Kent Lee.<\/p>\nIn addition to the cap, the rollback forces developers to pay infrastructure fees, mandates parking spaces for ADUs that aren\u2019t near transit and requires ADUs to be built farther away from property lines.<\/p>\n
Other changes will limit ADUs to two stories, prohibit them on cul-de-sacs in areas with high wildfire risk, set a maximum size of 1,200 square feet and allow the homes to be sold, not just rented.<\/p>\n
Councilmember Marni von Wilpert praised the rollback and the cap Tuesday but expressed concerns that it won\u2019t let the city block some proposed projects that would include more than 100 ADUs each.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan we prevent 120, 140 ADUs from going onto a lot?\u201d von Wilpert asked.<\/p>\n
Deputy City Attorney Lauren Hendrickson said that it would be a major challenge for the city to block those projects if their development applications are complete.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ordinance before you does not include a retroactive provision,\u201d said Hendrickson, citing state law. \u201cDevelopment applications deemed complete for housing and subdivision development are entitled to process under the laws and policies in effect at the time an application was deemed complete.\u201d<\/p>\n
While there are some exceptions, Hendrickson said those exceptions are not easy to use.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are very limited and narrowly tailored,\u201d she said. \u201cThere has to be a specific adverse impact, which means a significant and quantifiable direct and unavoidable impact based on objective, identified, written public health or state standards, policies or conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Von Wilpert suggested a possible strategy could be declaring that proposed large-scale ADU developments are fire safety hazards because they have limited evacuation routes.<\/p>\n
Hendrickson said that would be difficult but agreed to review any projects on a case-by-case basis.<\/p>\n
The new cap reins in a city ADU incentive that had gone beyond what state law allows by letting property owners build a potentially unlimited number of such units, provided a property was near transit and in an area with good jobs and other resources.<\/p>\n
For every ADU a property owner has been willing to build that is deed-restricted for low- or moderate-income tenants, they have been able to build one bonus ADU and charge market-rate rent for it.<\/p>\n
While in most cases this has led to property owners building between one and three ADUs, in some unusual cases property owners have used the program to build more than a dozen on a single lot.<\/p>\n
To prevent that, the rules finalized Tuesday set a maximum of four ADUs on lots smaller than 8,000 square feet, five ADUs on lots of 8,001 to 10,000 square feet and six ADUs on lots larger than 10,000 square feet.<\/p>\n
Councilmember Raul Campillo praised the cap but noted that he wanted a tighter one that would have set a limit of three ADUs per property.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had hoped for more \u2014 I voted for more,\u201d Campillo said. \u201cIt is nonetheless a good step forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hueter, the neighborhood group leader from Talmadge, said his group\u2019s next goal is getting the city to adopt ADU design standards that would make the units more architecturally compatible with their surrounding homes.<\/p>\n
Other residents harshly criticized the council Tuesday, saying they hadn\u2019t reined in the ADU incentive quickly enough.<\/p>\n
Scott Chipman, a Pacific Beach resident, said the incentive caused the formation of more than two dozen grassroots opposition groups that finally got the council to act.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat you have done slowly and poorly has allowed projects that will do major community damage to get in the pipeline that are going to be difficult or impossible to block,\u201d Chipman said.<\/p>\n
Becca Batista of Encanto predicted the cap wouldn\u2019t end up addressing critics\u2019 concerns.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe cap on the bonus ADU program is a tiny step in the right direction, but it\u2019s not enough,\u201d she said. \u201cThis cap will only increase and spread out the number of homes being swept up by developers that will never be available for first-time homebuyers and young families.\u201d<\/p>\n
Originally Published: July 22, 2025 at 5:39 PM PDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Diego leaders on Tuesday finalized a new city cap on the number of backyard apartments on single-family…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":85121,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,1370,728,8629,50,80,3549,7264,7289,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-85120","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-latest-headlines","12":"tag-local-news","13":"tag-local-politics","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-politics","16":"tag-san-diego","17":"tag-sandiego","18":"tag-top-stories-sdut","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-united-states-of-america","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114900912448108338","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}