SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — Sen. Catherine Blakespear (D-Encinitas) announced a new bill last week that would amend the state’s Density Bonus Law and require mixed-use developments that use the law to devote two-thirds of floor space to residential housing to qualify.
This would align with the Housing Accountability Act, which already includes this condition. The HAA requires local governments to approve projects that meet zoning codes in a timely manner, while the Density Bonus Law allows developments to exceed local zoning.
Sen. Blakespear says a controversial development in Pacific Beach subverts the Density Bonus Law’s intent.
“The vast majority of it is a luxury hotel project,” Sen Blakespear said in an interview with ABC 10News. “We don’t have a luxury hotel room shortage in the state of California, we have a housing, and particularly lower cost or affordable housing shortage.”
But this project is not a hotel, according to the developer Kalonymous.
Along with market-rate and low-income homes, they say the project includes “visitor accommodation units” that are more like single room occupancy units, or SROs, than hotel rooms.
The confusion comes from a joint letter Mayor Todd Gloria and City Council President Joe LaCava sent to California’s Department of Housing and Community Development in Oct. 2024, saying that the Pacific Beach project doesn’t meet the “spirit” of the density bonus law.
In that letter, the mayor and city council president wrote that the 139 visitor accommodation units included in the project, “…are permitted as commercial uses typically operating as a hotel.”
But Kalonymous tells 10News that the city’s zoning regulations only permit visitor accommodation units to be rented for stays of more than 30 days, and they’ll include amenities like kitchens that will allow them to operate on long-term leases.
“There are hundreds of visitor accommodation units throughout the city that are rented on annual leases,” Kalonymous says. “So there is a long-standing precedent for this.”
City policy says these units can only be considered commercial use and can’t be counted as housing. This distinction is part of why the project is so big.
City zoning only allows for 31 units on this parcel; state bonuses increase that number to 74, thanks to the inclusion of 10 affordable homes. The 139 visitor accommodation units don't count toward either of those limits.
If the city reclassified visitor accommodation units for residential use, the development would easily clear the proposed two-thirds residential requirement.
As it stands, the Density Bonus Law lets the developer include more homes than allowed under city zoning and exceed the area’s 30-foot height limit.
But residents are unhappy with the proposed 22-story building they say will tower over Pacific Beach.
“We want to maintain that small beach community feels," Pamela Martin, a lifelong resident, told 10News last November.
Kalonymous says the goal is to make that beach community accessible to San Diegans who otherwise wouldn’t get to live there. The developer says it will bring affordable and market-rate homes to a neighborhood that doesn’t see a lot of construction.
According to the City of San Diego, only five affordable homes were permitted in Pacific Beach from 2021-2023. The proposed development would include twice that number.
In a December letter in response to LaCava and Gloria’s concerns, HCD said, “The intent [of the Density Bonus Law] is to cover at least some of the financing gap of affordable housing with regulatory incentives, rather than additional public subsidy.”
They said it was up to the city to prove that the 10 affordable homes could be built without the concessions in the Density Bonus Law and without public subsidies.
A recent 59-home affordable housing development that was proposed in Pacific Beach will require over $36 million in public funding and tax credits, including loans from the City of San Diego, the San Diego Housing Commission and a State HCD Infill infrastructure grant.
Council President LaCava also voiced his opposition to this project.
“Council may not have the authority to interfere with the permitting of this [height limit] busting project, but we are under no obligation to use taxpayer dollars to support it,” LaCava told the Times of San Diego.
The city also punted on a proposal to liberalize zoning in low-density neighborhoods like Pacific Beach back in 2023. Other than some creative ADU projects, current zoning limits most housing developments to commercial corridors where mixed-use buildings are most common.
Many of these commercial corridors are also along the most dangerous roads in San Diego.
“If you box yourselves in so much that you’re not creating any opportunities for new housing because you can’t build in fire areas, and you can’t go up in dense areas, and you can’t build next to the sea because we have, you know, coastal erosion, coastal sea level rise issues,” Sen. Blakespear said, “You end up with this reality that the box where you can build is so little.”
SB 92 was introduced in the California State Senate on Jan. 23, and is awaiting further action.
