San Diego to Put 70% of Affordable Housing in Higher-Income Areas
A lawsuit that accused San Diego of using its housing policy to concentrate low-income housing in certain neighborhoods has been settled. The city has committed to adopting a new policy directing at least 70% of affordable housing to moderate and higher-income areas by 2028.
The city also has agreed to prioritize and increase housing density in more affluent areas of the Pacific coast of California and to promote city-funded affordable housing in higher-income communities, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
Under the agreement, which was approved by the City Council last week in an 8-0 vote, officials pledged to offer a sales-tax rebate to promote new grocery stores in lower-income neighborhoods and to allocate up to $500,000 to a first-time homebuyers program run by the San Diego Housing Commission.
Additionally, the settlement requires the metro to pay $650,000 to the plaintiffs to cover attorney fees and other costs associated with the federal lawsuit, which was filed in 2019 by a group of residents from southeastern San Diego.
Michael Aguirre, a lawyer and former elected San Diego city attorney who represented the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement that the settlement “will put in place a moderate process in which lower-income families will have an opportunity to live in the higher-resource areas of our city.”
“There will be an effort to locate areas where lower-income housing can be integrated across the city seamlessly,” Aguirre said.
In their lawsuit, plaintiffs Patrice Baker, Gloria Cooper, Leslie Dudley, Letitia Flynn, Kathleen Macleod, Eileen Osborne and Khalida Salaam-Alaji accused officials of violating state fair housing laws in Mt. Hope, Encanto, Jamacha and other neighborhoods.
“The city has a pattern and practice of either waiving or deferring (development fees) for the additional housing units in these affected communities,” the lawsuit stated. “The non-collection of these fees will negatively influence the quality of life and creates unsafe living conditions.”
“No legitimate purpose is served by concentrating poverty in these low-income areas. Rather, keeping the low-income housing out of the non-affected communities feeds the will of those with higher incomes and the resulting ability to influence politics through their wealth,” the complaint said.
The federal court will retain jurisdiction over the case and enforce the agreement, according to a staff report presented to the council before its vote. The city did not acknowledge any liability in the settlement.
“While the city denied any discriminatory impact caused by its housing policies, settling the litigation provides certainty and avoids years of protracted litigation and avoids a potential injunction on affordable housing if plaintiffs were to prevail at trial,” the report said.
The lawsuit originally included San Diego County as a defendant. After county lawyers argued that the area should be excluded from the complaint, a federal judge agreed in 2020 to remove it from the suit.
Earlier this year, San Diego’s Economic Development Department pulled out of talks with Carlsbad, CA-based Chelsea Investment Corp. to redevelop a city-owned block downtown at Seventh Avenue and Market Street into a 100% affordable multifamily campus.
In January, economic development director Christina Bibler notified Chelsea of the city’s decision to terminate all negotiations with the developer on the project, which was announced last May and envisioned 402 units of low-income housing on the East Village site.
Bibler characterized the decision to pull out of the project as “a mutual agreement” that the project as conceived would not be financially possible. Among the reasons cited for the project’s collapse were a “scarcity of funding for multifamily affordable housing” and the San Diego's payment terms for the parcel, which at one time was valued at $20M.
Rachel Laing, a spokesperson for Mayor Todd Gloria, told the Union-Tribune that the parcel at Seventh and Market is too valuable an asset to make any concessions on price.
“It wasn’t contentious,” Laing said. “We demanded fair market value for the land, and that wasn’t going to happen under current conditions. They said they wouldn’t be able to make it pencil out, and we’re not in a position to be giving land away.”
“There’s just not enough money out there in today’s cycle to bring together enough of the sources we would use to generate what the city needs for the site,” Charles Schmid, Chelsea’s CEO, said in a statement. “It’s unfortunate but it’s the hand we’ve all been dealt right now.”
Facing projected budget deficits of nearly $1.5B over the next five years, San Diego now has scrapped two redevelopment projects it had planned for city-owned tracts downtown.
Source: GlobeSt/ALM