San Diego, CA
Opinion: More apartments eased rents. Townhomes could aid buyers.
San Diego’s most beloved neighborhoods, like North Park, Golden Hill and Sherman Heights, were built by people who needed a place to live and found one. But the bungalows, fourplexes and cottages that gave working San Diegans a foothold in those neighborhoods can hardly be built anywhere else in the city.
Rules written decades ago banned them. For 70 years, San Diego has been paying for that mistake in the form of a city its own workforce can no longer afford to live in.
Neighborhood Homes for All of Us is the city’s plan to fix that: family-sized townhomes, rowhouses and small duplexes built in the neighborhoods where San Diegans most want to live.
While San Diego rents are softening as new apartments are built, the cost of buying a home is not moving, and it won’t, because the rental and ownership markets run on entirely separate tracks. Renters benefit when more rentals are built, forcing landlords to compete for them.
However, a family trying to buy a home benefits only if more homes are available for sale. San Diego home prices now exceed nine times the median household income, among the worst ratios in the nation, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Building rental housing is important, but it does not change the math for a buyer.
The homes that would change it — family-sized, on the ownership track, in the neighborhoods where people most want to raise children — have been illegal to build for decades. San Diego produced roughly 7,000 condos and townhomes a year in 2005. By 2022, that number had collapsed below 500. Part of that drop is because of litigation rules that drove up insurance costs for builders, caps on pre-sales that finance these projects and high fees. Another major reason is that we simply do not allow starter homes on smaller lots. So, instead, builders default to rentals because that’s what current rules allow them to build profitably.
London Moeder Advisors, a San Diego real estate economics firm, finds that eliminating the city’s large-lot-size mandates could produce new townhomes at 42% less cost than surrounding single-family homes without taxpayer subsidies. While this price point is still high for many, it’s more attainable for young families starting out. And importantly, the price could drop further if the state advances reforms to address litigation rules and pre-sale caps that drive up costs.
The city’s program is also focused on adding homes in San Diego’s neighborhoods with the best-performing schools and most accessible jobs. These are also the neighborhoods with the most restrictive regulations on smaller starter homes. A teacher whose classroom is in La Jolla cannot afford to live there. A firefighter stationed in Mission Hills commutes from Santee. The homes that would let them stay are currently illegal to build in much of these areas. Neighborhood Homes changes that.
While critics may say San Diego already has the tools for adding homes to neighborhoods, why add another program? Because each of those tools was for a different purpose. None were designed to add more for-sale housing.
ADUs, the backyard homes now common across the city, typically top out at 750 square feet (because of fee cliffs) and entail intricacies when selling to own. Other tools, like Senate Bill 9, have been layered with requirements that make it far too complicated and expensive for many homeowners to split their lots to add homes. Laws like Senate Bill 79 are important for adding more housing near transit. But none of these tools focuses on family-sized, ownership-track townhomes in an established neighborhood.
The Neighborhood Homes initiative asks a simple question: Where do the families who can’t afford a million-dollar home but don’t want an apartment go? We can continue to say certain neighborhoods are off-limits to the teachers, trades workers and young families who want to live there, or San Diego can set its own terms for how they grow, with local standards in a form the city controls.
San Diego’s most beloved streets were not preserved into existence. They were built — a duplex here, a rowhouse there — by people who needed a place to live in the city they loved and found one. That is what Neighborhood Homes makes possible again.
Asad is a former board member of the YIMBY Democrats of San Diego County. He resides in Mid-City.
On the California water front, the news always seems to be bad. On July 31, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced the state would receive 12% less water from the Colorado River over the next two years. Given that the river supplies about one-third of the water used in Southern California, this looks like a huge headache. The severity of the problem was underlined Thursday when the water level at Lake Mead — the massive reservoir created by the construction of the Hoover Dam across the river in the 1930s — reached an all-time low.
But a straightforward policy change could sharply limit the severity of a water crisis — one that would negatively affect a relative handful of Californians. It’s banning the use of state water supplies to grow alfalfa and other types of hay that are exported for use as animal feed. While a majority of these crops stay here to feed the state’s massive domestic livestock industry, about 30% are exported, in particular to Asian nations. In effect, alfalfa growers are now exporting as much as 70 billion gallons of water a year from drought-ridden California to the rest of the world in the form of alfalfa. That’s about 214,000 acre-feet of water — nearly half of the 440,000 acre-feet of water that the state stands to lose the next two years under the new Colorado River allocation formula.
An alfalfa export ban is not a new idea. National Geographic explored it in a 2014 report that focused on the incredulity of water-policy experts that the hot, dry U.S. Southwest exported so many water-intensive crops to nations without water shortages. That same year, a commentary in The New York Times pointedly noted that “a single plant is leading California’s water consumption. Unfortunately, it’s a plant that’s not generally cultivated for humans: alfalfa. Grown on over a million acres in California, alfalfa sucks up more water than any other crop in the state.”
But this advocacy has never translated into federal and state efforts to curb exports from the state’s 2,600-plus alfalfa farms. The 12% cut in Colorado River supplies should at least get the debate going.
And one fact may make selling this policy much easier than expected: Alfalfa is used to feed methane-belching cows, who are a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Making alfalfa farmers use some of their land for other crops wouldn’t just ease the California water crunch. It would be good for the climate.
Seidler family: Sale of Padres could be complete later this month after vote by MLB owners
by Barry M. Bloom | Special for Times of San Diego
The pending sale of the Padres should close sometime this month, John Seidler, the team’s control person, told Times of San Diego on Wednesday night before they lost to the Arizona Diamondbacks, 10-4, at Chase Field.
Seidler said approval from the 30 owners will be conducted by call or electronically. An MLB spokesman for commissioner Rob Manfred’s office said Thursday in response to a text message that the action had not yet been scheduled.
The Seidler family announced May 2 they had decided to sell the team to Jose Feliciano, co-founder of Clearlake Capital Group, a private equity firm, and co-owner of the English soccer club Chelsea FC, and his wife, Kwanza Jones, a singer and songwriter. The team will be sold at a record valuation of $3.9 billion.
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Del Mar Wants AG Bonta, Fairgrounds Official Investigated
by Tigyst Lane| Voice of San Diego
Del Mar City Councilmembers interrupted their summer vacation this week to call for an investigation into two state officials – a member of the Del Mar Fairgrounds board and California’s attorney general.
The Monday special City Council meeting lasted about 10 minutes. There was one public comment and no discussion among the councilmembers, leaving some with questions about what prompted the vote.
But to those who have been following City Hall, this is the latest in a long series of dustups between the city, a housing developer and the state.
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Viasat demonstrates first integrated automotive satellite voice call capability with BMW Group
by Newsroom | ViaSat
Viasat, Inc. (NASDAQ: VSAT), a global leader in satellite communications, today announced a landmark technology demonstration showcasing the first automotive satellite voice call demonstration fully integrated into a BMW Group vehicle’s platform.
It marks a significant step forward as Viasat brings Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) communications into the connected vehicle ecosystem: enabling drivers and passengers to stay connected in remote or underserved areas where cellular coverage may be limited or unavailable.
Building on an earlier demonstration with eSIM capabilities from Cubic³, a leading provider of software-defined vehicle (SDV) solutions, Viasat experts in Munich utilized advanced technology including Qualcomm Technologies Inc.’s Snapdragon® Auto 5G Modem-RF Gen 2 solution, and the Fraunhofer IIS NESC AI voice codec. This enables voice communications to be sent using the NB-IoT communications protocol over Viasat’s highly reliable, L-band satellite network.
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San Diego, CA
Event to be held to celebrate the life of tennis legend Charlie Pasarell and his autobiography launch
On Wednesday, Aug. 19, the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club and Southern California Tennis Association Foundation are co-hosting a special night to celebrate the life and times of long-time San Diego and Rancho Santa Fe resident Charlie Pasarell, and the launch of his autobiography “Serving First: Dreams Realized and Lessons Learned from Family, Friends, and a Life in Tennis”, a news release stated.
Spanning over six decades, Pasarell is recognized as one of the most influential players, organizers, and promoters in tennis history. America’s number one-ranked player in 1967 and one of the best in the world over the course of a 15-year world career, Pasarell was both well-liked and highly respected by his peers, the news release stated.
In the late ‘60s, as the world of tennis transformed itself from the old school amateur days into a full-fledged professional sport, Pasarell was front and center at all stages. In addition to his on-court success, his early off-court activities included a leading role in the formation of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and co-founding the National Junior Tennis League (NJTL).
After hanging up his racquet in the late ‘70s, Pasarell took over an endangered ATP event in the Palm Springs area, which he transformed into the hugely popular Indian Wells BNPs Paribas Open. This event is unofficially considered tennis’ fifth most important tournament, ranking only behind the four majors. In recognition of his accomplishments both on and off the court, Pasarell was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2013.
Richard Evans, a well respected long-time tennis journalist and author of 23 books, will join Pasarell for this special evening to trade behind-the-scenes stories and tennis history from the 1960s to the present day. Evans is a fellow inductee in the International Tennis Hall of Fame and a long-time friend of Pasarell. Finally, Joel Drucker, a historian-at-large for the Hall of Fame and co-author of Serving First, will moderate what is sure to be a lively and engaging conversation, according to the news release.
This special evening starts at 6:30 p.m. at the La Jolla Beach Club’s Spindrift Pavilion and will run through 9 p.m. A full bar, four stations of hors d’oeuvres, great stories, and autographed copies of Pasarell’s book for all attendees are included at a cost of $125 per person. All proceeds after costs will be donated to the Southern California Tennis Association Foundation (SCTA Foundation).
To reserve a spot for this special evening, go to the SCTA Foundation website atwww.sctafoundation.org or contact Linda Milan, executive director of the SCTA Foundation at lmilan@sctafoundation.org or 310-824-5139 (call or text).
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