San Diego

When we study a city, county, or town, we examine its zoning, its development review processes, and how often approvals face opposition through local administrative appeals or litigation. We also study the development approvals to understand how local governments apply their own law, and state law. We map the approvals to examine what the community is allowing to be built and where. The following reflects data on approvals issued in 2014-2017.

San Diego

Approvals
176 multi-family housing projects approved
13,957 units total
1,284 units (9%) were affordable units

Zoning (as a percentage of all zoned land)
3% all income levels
70% single-family

Prior Use (of land approved for new multi-family housing development)
35% already residential (136 units demolished, 614 market rate units created, 60 affordable units built)
32% commercial
0% agricultural
31% vacant
2% unknown

Median Timeframe for Approval (entitlement)
13.2 months for multi-family housing (urban area median: 10.8 months)
18.9 months for single-family homes (urban area median: 12.6 months)

Review Process
San Diego has a ministerial process to approve proposed development of five or more units of housing. Unlike Los Angeles, there is not a specific unit count threshold for ministerial review. San Diego's data management during our study years made it impossible to confirm whether San Diego approved any development of 5 or more units through a ministerial process (requiring no discretionary review). The majority of all approvals, however, went through a discretionary process.

Opposition to Development
Seven projects faced litigated. The median timeframe for the entitlement process plus lawsuit completion in San Diego was 55 months.
Nine projects faced local level administrative appeals.

Wildfire Hazard
31 projects (2,100 units) were approved in high-risk fire zones. This is 15% of the units approved.

San Diego's base zoning is the most restrictive among all of the urban cities we studied.

Among jurisdictions that we would expect to accommodate infill dense housing, San Diego has the least amount of land area zoned for all income levels (if measured as a percentage of all zoned land). 3% translates to about 9 square miles to accommodate all of the City's dense housing.

San Diego had a ministerial process and incentives to reduce discretionary timeframes for some development.

San Diego has a ministerial process for at least some code compliant development without a unit threshold. It also provides a staff-level only discretionary review process for sustainable and affordable development the City wants to encourage. On paper, San Diego is doing more to address procedural constraints to affordable and sustainable development compared to the other cities we studied.

Poor data management meant it was impossible to explore the benefits of these approval pathways.

For approvals issued during our 2014-2017 study period, the City failed to manage its data to track the use of either of these review pathways. That means that there is a group of approved development during our study period with insufficient information to determine if the development moved through a ministerial process or staff level discretionary review. Because the data on this group of development is so poor, it also means that the City cannot confirm whether the much development benefited from ministerial review, or whether the staff level discretionary process accelerated the discretionary approval processes.