The city will need to almost triple the rate at which it produces homes in order to fulfill its 2029 housing target.
In order to satisfy the state target, which it hasn’t even remotely approached lately, the city will now need to increase the quantity of housing permits it grants in each of the next seven years.
The city only issued permits for 5,033 dwellings last year; it is required to build 13,505 homes annually to meet the total amount allotted to it under the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, a statewide housing program.
San Diego now needs to nearly triple its annual production to 14,715 new homes per year in order to meet the state target of 108,036 homes. The city hasn’t even come close to reaching this level recently. To do this, it will need to issue three times as many housing permits in each of the next seven years.
For a period of eight years, the state housing program distributes housing needs to each region of the state, and then each region divides up its needs among its cities.
For San Diego or anyplace else in the state, not meeting the housing objective is nothing new. As the Los Angeles Times revealed in an investigation five years ago, the program has been in effect for more than 50 years and has never succeeded in encouraging homebuilding. According to city data, the state awarded San Diego 88,096 new dwellings throughout the course of the previous eight-year cycle, but only 44,531 of those residences received permits.
The latter problem is especially important, according to real estate industry analyst London, because in its haste to build as many houses as possible, the city isn’t making enough homes to accommodate families as they grow.
