Building Bridges in High-Opportunity Neighborhoods
High-opportunity neighborhood engagement.
PROBLEM
San Diego's highest-resource neighborhoods resist new housing through procedural tools: design review, environmental appeals, and zoning challenges that are race-neutral on their face and exclusionary in effect. The result shows up in the production record. Coastal San Diego permits housing at 36.5 homes per thousand existing homes against 62.4 citywide, and Pacific Beach and La Jolla at about a third of the citywide rate.
IMPACT
Families locked out of high-opportunity neighborhoods lose access to the schools, parks, transit, and environmental quality those neighborhoods offer. In San Diego's Highest Resource tracts, 71.0 percent of students are proficient in math. In Low Resource tracts, 28.4 percent are. Highest Resource tracts are cleaner than roughly 89 percent of California census tracts. Low Resource tracts are more burdened than roughly 70 percent of them.
OPPORTUNITY
Neighborhood-level engagement that starts with listening rather than lobbying. Build relationships with residents, faith communities, and local institutions in high-opportunity areas before any specific project arrives. Shift the conversation from what a neighborhood is losing to who it is welcoming.
Organizing Across Communities of Shared Experience
Citywide coalition organizing.
PROBLEM
Housing advocacy in San Diego is fragmented by geography, issue area, and funding source. Environmental justice organizations, tenant unions, civil rights groups, and planning reform advocates often work in parallel without coordination, which reduces collective leverage at City Hall and in Sacramento.
IMPACT
Without a unified coalition, the communities most affected by housing scarcity, renters and families of color and lower-income households, stay underrepresented in the planning decisions that shape their neighborhoods. Renters are a majority of San Diego households, and the meetings that decide what gets built are dominated by the city's most tenured, least mobile owners.
OPPORTUNITY
A citywide coalition organized around shared experience rather than shared geography. Connect communities across San Diego facing the same barriers, displacement pressure and exclusionary zoning and permitting delay, regardless of neighborhood. Build durable political power that outlasts any single campaign.
Making Ownership Possible Again
Starter homes + shared equity.
PROBLEM
Black owner-occupied households in San Diego fell from 11,124 to 7,948 since 2000, a decline of 28.6 percent, while owner-occupied households citywide grew 13.3 percent. Starter home production has effectively disappeared from the market.
IMPACT
Homeownership remains the primary wealth-building mechanism for working families. When ownership is structurally unavailable to entire communities, the racial wealth gap compounds across generations. Families renting in Low Resource neighborhoods have no equity pathway and no buffer against displacement.
OPPORTUNITY
Shared-equity models, including community land trusts, deed-restricted starter homes, and cooperative ownership, that create permanently affordable pathways into ownership. Modest homes designed to stay affordable across resales. Partner with Community Development Financial Institutions to build financing pipelines.
Clearing the Path to Build
Permitting and delivery.
PROBLEM
Even when housing is approved and funded, San Diego's permitting and inspection process adds months or years of delay and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost. Small and nonprofit developers are disproportionately affected, because they cannot absorb carrying costs the way institutional developers can.
IMPACT
Every month of delay adds cost that reaches renters and buyers. Affordable projects that pencil out at approval may not pencil out eighteen months later. Citywide, 4,207 of 35,482 permitted homes have been completed so far, and the city's own Regional Housing Needs Assessment targets cannot be met at current delivery speeds.
OPPORTUNITY
Streamlined permitting for mission-aligned housing. By-right approval of permanently affordable projects in high-resource areas, reduced fees for nonprofit developers, and a dedicated affordable housing permitting track. Measure and publish average permit timelines by project type.
Measuring What Matters
Public scorecard + accountability.
PROBLEM
San Diego produces housing data across the Housing Commission, the Planning Department, SANDAG, and HCD, but no single public dashboard tracks whether new housing is reaching high-opportunity neighborhoods. Without measurement there is no accountability.
IMPACT
Under the 2025 Baker settlement the City agreed to show that by 2028 at least 70 percent of affordable housing projects are permitted in moderate, high or highest resource areas. It currently stands at 52.6 percent, and the public has no easy way to track it. Citywide totals can be reported as progress while affordable housing stays concentrated in low-resource areas.
OPPORTUNITY
A public scorecard tracking housing production, affordability, and access at the neighborhood level, updated quarterly and readable by journalists, advocates, and residents rather than only planners. Hold the city to its own commitments, starting with Baker.