San Diego requiring housing projects be reviewed within 30 days

California Construction News staff writer

A new executive order on housing announced in San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria’s State of the City address last week is expected to speed up permits for affordable housing projects.

All relevant city departments are now required to review new housing projects within 30 days – a process that currently takes up to 12 months.

Complete Communities is a transit-oriented incentive program that allows home builders to expand projects in exchange for building a specified number of affordable homes.

“We are stronger than yesterday, and we’ll be even stronger tomorrow. We have more work to do, but we have proven that, together, we are up to the task,” Gloria said in his address. “We will keep making progress, we will keep getting things done until the job is done.”

The mayor also announced:

• A major expansion of homeless shelter options, increasing the number of shelter beds for people experiencing homelessness by at least 1,000 by the beginning of 2025.
• Plan to turn abandoned library into housing – San Diego will embark on a proposal to redevelop the site of the old Central Library Downtown to create additional shelter space as well as hundreds of new affordable, permanent homes for low-income and formerly homeless San Diegans.
• Citywide Project Labor Agreement reached with the San Diego County Building Trades Council on a citywide project labor agreement that will apply to all major construction projects. City council will consider the agreement in the coming month.

To help build out the infrastructure needed to provide the treatment required by these reforms, Mayor Gloria confirmed his strong support for Proposition 1, the ballot measure that could generate funding needed to add more than 11,000 new behavioral health treatment beds  statewide.

Housing

A preliminary analysis shows San Diego permitted about 8,000 homes in 2023 – a 51 percent increase over 2022. One third of the homes permitted in 2023 were deed-restricted affordable housing.

Also 2,063 – were permitted under Housing Permit Now, requiring permit applications for 100 percent affordable housing projects to be reviewed in 30 days or less a requirement been exceeded with projects being approved within nine days, on average.

Infrastructure

The city repaired or resurfaced 252 miles of roadway in 2023. That’s nearly a 20 percent increase over 2022 and a 57 percent increase over 2021. About 627 miles of city streets – 17 percent of the total road network were repaired or resurfaced in the past three years.