{"id":99002,"date":"2025-07-28T09:25:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T09:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/99002\/"},"modified":"2025-07-28T09:25:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T09:25:13","slug":"in-whose-backyard-where-homes-are-being-built-in-san-diego","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/99002\/","title":{"rendered":"In Whose Backyard? Where Homes Are Being Built in San Diego"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Whose Backyard <\/strong>looks at where homes are being built, what kinds of homes are popping up and how that impacts the surrounding communities. Read more stories in the series here.<\/a><\/p>\n

The construction of new homes is not being distributed equally across San Diego\u2019s cities, a new analysis by Voice of San Diego and KPBS finds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Our analysis looked at the number of new homes \u2014 from apartments and accessory dwelling units to single-family homes \u2014 permitted across San Diego County between 2018 and the end of 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From a pure volume standpoint, the city of San Diego, the largest city by far, unsurprisingly permitted the most homes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But on a per capita basis, Chula Vista permitted the most \u2014 38 new homes for every thousand residents over the six-year window. El Cajon permitted the least, just 9.9 homes per thousand residents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The reasons why cities permit more or less homes depend on a variety of complicated factors, including desirability, open space and zoning laws.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chula Vista<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chula Vista, for instance, is unique among San Diego cities: It actually has some large swaths of open land, particularly in its southeastern corner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chula Vista, unlike most other cities, also had a large diversity of different types of housing. Roughly, 56 percent of homes were part of apartment buildings with five or more units. Roughly 9 percent were ADU\u2019s and 24 percent were single-family homes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Saad Assad, who is on the board of YIMBY Democrats of San Diego, said Chula Vista deserves credit, because it has achieved development beyond just single-family homes in its open spaces.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey also want to convert some of their shopping centers to add housing there. So I think they\u2019re kind of trying to find the path that will allow them to build housing for their residents,\u201d Asad said. \u201cAnd they\u2019re gonna see a lot of growth just because their location has a lot of transit stops near downtown as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

The NIMBY Capitals<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"View of homes and a section of the Encinitas Ranch Golf Course off Quail Gardens Drive in Encinitas on Jan. 29, 2025. \/ Ariana Drehsler for Voice of San Diego<\/p>\n

The cities which permitted the third and fourth most homes per capita, Del Mar and Encinitas, are especially interesting \u2014 because they have so fiercely opposed new homes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Encinitas has been sued multiple times for not following state housing laws and officials with the Attorney General\u2019s Office have also gone after the city.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Encinitas, we\u2019re actually building the housing,\u201d said Mayor Bruce Ehlers. \u201cIt is ironic that the state likes to point out Encinitas is this rogue city. [But] we\u2019re well ahead of most other cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though Encinitas is ahead of most other cities, Ehlers and many other residents aren\u2019t happy about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey hate it,\u201d Ehlers said of the new construction.<\/p>\n

In 2024, Encinitas issued more than twice as many permits for new homes than it had in each of the previous five years. That\u2019s because state officials, essentially, forced Encinitas to \u201cupzone\u201d part of the city in recent years. (Upzoning is when a city changes zoning laws in particular areas to allow for more dense housing.)<\/p>\n

Once the upzoning was complete, builders could come in and apply to build housing that conformed to the new zoning rules. City officials were basically forced to approve it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ehlers believes prior city officials should have fought that forced upzoning harder. Because they didn\u2019t, the character of Encinitas has already been irrevocably changed for the worse, Ehlers said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAll around Encinitas, we have thousands, and it\u2019s thousands, of units coming online. Just on Quail Gardens Drive alone, we have 1,045 in process right now that\u2019ll generate an extra 3000 people in town,\u201d Ehlers said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Building the Least<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"People walk past shops on Main Street in El Cajon on June 3, 2025. \/ Ariana Drehsler for Voice of San Diego<\/p>\n

El Cajon, Imperial Beach, Lemon Grove and Poway, respectively, were among those building the least.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Three of those communities are densely populated and have very little vacant land. Poway, however, is the least densely-populated city in the county. The city is a sea of single-family homes placed on large lots.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That Poway has built very little isn\u2019t surprising. Roughly 98 percent of the city is zoned for single-family homes, according to an analysis<\/a> by the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s more than any other city in San Diego County.\u00a0<\/p>\n

El Cajon produced the least housing per capita countywide. Like Chula Vista, El Cajon also has a lot of shopping centers that are aging and ripe to be converted into housing, but so far owners have been holding onto those buildings, as Voice previously reported<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bill Wells, El Cajon\u2019s mayor, said he isn\u2019t hostile to development. The lack of home building, he said, is merely a product of market conditions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou bring me somebody who wants to tear down an old strip mall and build a nice condo project and we\u2019ll treat \u2019em really well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But Wells also criticized the state\u2019s housing laws \u2014 which try to encourage denser housing in urban cores and take zoning power away from cities. Wells said he and the residents of El Cajon, in general, don\u2019t want massively increased density.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The state should not have the power to force cities to increase density or upzone single-family home neighborhoods, Wells said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Affordable Housing<\/strong><\/p>\n

Voice\u2019s analysis also counted the number of affordable homes that were built between 2018 and 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Roughly 78 percent of all new homes were priced for people with \u201cabove moderate\u201d income, as defined by state officials.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Roughly 7 percent were for people with \u201cvery low\u201d income. Another 9 percent were for people with \u201clow\u201d income and 7 percent were for people with \u201cbelow moderate\u201d income.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nearly 60 percent of those affordable units were \u201cdeed-restricted,\u201d which means they typically receive government subsidies and can only be purchased or rented by people who meet income requirements. The others are considered \u201cnaturally-occurring\u201d affordable housing and most of them fell in the \u201cbelow moderate\u201d category.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Coronado and Imperial Beach did not permit a single unit of affordable housing, of either kind, between 2018 and 2024, as Voice previously reported<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Whose Backyard looks at where homes are being built, what kinds of homes are popping up and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":99003,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,16216,3549,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-99002","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-public-matters","12":"tag-san-diego","13":"tag-sandiego","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-united-states-of-america","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","18":"tag-us","19":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99002","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=99002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99002\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}