Housing Affordability Not Housing Shortage Is San Diego’s Reality
The myth of the “housing shortage” is giving rise to many bad proposals, including the “vacant home tax,” giveaways to developers, and upzoning communities to higher densities while ignoring infrastructure.
Some of our neighbors have made the following statements to reiterate this point:
James H from Mission Hills North states:
I am trying to figure out why our city council believe there is a housing crisis. Zillow shows over 2,200 homes and condos for sale and over 12,000 homes and apartments for rent within San Diego city limits. It costs a lot to live in paradise and that isn’t going to change.
Eric Law responded:
It’s about the money. AirBnB bussed in paid protesters, so Elo-Rivera took short term vacations rentals (STVRs) off the tax bill. Individual vacation homeowners don’t have a highly paid lobby group on tap to fight back, so regular people get screwed. Affordable housing has nothing to do with it. The city just wants to extract more tax money from us so they don’t have to make difficult budget decisions.
If the city wanted to put more housing back on the market, they would eliminate all STVR’s. STVR’s account for 17,000 units not on the market. Vacation homes only count for about 5,000. There is hard data that confirms that the presence of STVR’s in a market increase local rental prices by one to five percent.
No such data exists for vacation homes, largely because vacation homes are not priced with rentals. The data from other municipalities that imposed a vacation home tax indicates that while a small percentage of homes were returned to the market, the price of rentals never went down. Moreover, a vacant home tax is illegal and has been ruled as such in California Superior Court.
Tanja Kropf responded:
The problem isn’t inventory. It’s that we keep overbuilding real estate people can’t afford. From Costar data: San Diego’s apartment vacancy rate has climbed to its highest level in over 15 years, as supply surges. In 2025, deliveries came in at a 25-year high, outpacing demand by 40 percent, according to CoStar Group data. https://www.globest.com/2026/02/24/san-diego-apartment-vacancy-hits-15-year-high-as-renters-feel-financial-burden/
Tom Mullaney wrote:
If you read the studies by independent researchers, you’ll learn the following:
1. Housing is expensive in San Diego because it’s a nice place to live (market demand).
2. The large number of vacant units is evidence that there is not a “housing shortage”.
3. The proposed tax on vacant homes and second homes will not lower prices.
It’s understandable that we look for someone to blame, but it’s not productive. The most desirable cities in the U.S. are all expensive.
Even Vancouver’s high-profile professor, planner and author, Patrick Condon is now stating that “upzoning” of neighborhoods drives up housing costs and cannot create affordable housing.
Vancouver is one of North America’s most expensive cities. The 2019 UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index calls it the sixth-most-concerning housing bubble risk in the world.
Condon, a professor at the University of British Columbia School of Architecture, landscape architect, author, and former city planner, was for years a supporter of widespread upzoning of Vancouver — a theory embraced to reduce housing costs long before the California legislature started doing the same thing. But upzoning in Vancouver backfired.
Condon now says, “We have incrementally quadrupled the density of Vancouver, but we haven’t seen any decrease in per square foot costs. That evidence is indisputable. We can conclude there is a problem beyond restrictive zoning. … No amount of opening zoning or allowing for development will cause prices to go down. We’ve seen no evidence of that at all. It’s not the NIMBYs that are the problem – it’s the global increase in land value in urban areas that is the problem.”
Category: Featured Articles, Housing, Local News, National News
