SAN DIEGO (KGTV) - The City of San Diego Tuesday released the first Housing Inventory Annual Report to show what it has accomplished toward the housing goals established by Mayor Kevin Faulconer and the City Council.
More than 70 percent of San Diegans can’t afford to buy a house at the county’s median home price of more than $500,000, city officials said.
Mayor Faulconer created his Housing SD plan in 2017 to address affordability. His proposals included increasing housing supply, lowering costs, and promoting smart growth.
Key findings in the Housing Inventory Annual Report include:
- The City of San Diego’s efforts to streamline the entitlement process has nearly tripled the number of units approved annually to 5,865 in 2017.
- The City is at 38 percent of its Regional Housing Needs Allocation goal of constructing 88,096 units by 2020.
- San Diego contributes 53 percent of the region’s affordable housing stock despite having 42 percent of the population.
- The housing ownership vacancy rate is 1.3 percent, and the rental vacancy rate is between 2 and 3 percent, well below healthy rates of 5 percent.
- Most of the city’s newly constructed housing units are for above-moderate income residents.
“The need to build more housing that people can actually afford has never been more critical as the dream of homeownership is becoming out of reach for more and more San Diegans,” Mayor Faulconer said. “The numbers in this report are a sobering reminder of the crisis we face to build housing and the importance of tracking the progress of the reforms we’ve implemented to spur new housing construction in the coming years. You can’t change what you don’t measure, so I believe sharing this information with the public is important as we push for civic action on permit streamlining and housing reforms.”
Diving Deeper
The report includes figures on the rising cost to rent or buy throughout the city. A chart included in the repot shows that, since 2013, the cost to own a single-family home, condo or townhouse has been on a steady increase.
Similarly, rent throughout the city has seen a steady increase from 2013 to 2017. The cost to rent a three-bedroom apartment appears to be increasing at a faster rate than other types of rental units. 
The report seems to tie the cost to rent or own together with the number of homes being built throughout the city, which has, unlike the cost to rent or own, seen a steady decrease in recent decades.
A chart included in the report shows that, from 2010 to 2016, the number of housing units constructed has dipped below 20,000.
Compare that to the decade between 1970 and 1979, in which the city saw more than 100,000 housing units constructed.
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Read the city's full report HERE.
