Did the County Truly Kill Housing Development? The County Won’t Say

San Diego’s homebuilding lobby is claiming that county rules meant to minimize driving and greenhouse gas emissions halted development in the region’s unincorporated areas. But the county won’t cough up data needed to assess the impact of a policy it says it’s still implementing. 

Regardless, uncertainty surrounding the rules seems to have led builders to pump the brakes since state law forced the county to start implementing them in 2020 – and the issue has recently gotten politicized. 

County action on a so-called vehicle miles traveled policy forced by state law has become a key point of contention in the race to represent many of the county’s coastal communities. The two candidates have vastly different views on how the county should approach development and the driving policy.  

Democratic Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer supports constraining growth to more urban areas. Former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer, her Republican challenger, argues the county should be doing all it can to encourage homebuilding throughout the county during a housing crisis.  

The winner of the District 3 supervisors’ race will decide which political party leads the board and the future of homebuilding in the county. 

The county oversees what developers can build in the more than 1,200 square miles of land outside city limits. Its 2011 general plan laid out where homes are allowed in those areas. The new driving rules for a time didn’t shield developments that followed the plan from them, drastically slashing the number of homes that could be built in unincorporated areas. In a reversal this summer, the county decided that builders that follow the general plan can – at least for now – bypass vehicle miles traveled rules.  

Even since that change, Faulconer has amplified builders’ concerns about a development slowdown as he tries to oust Lawson-Remer. 

But county staff won’t provide data that would fully clarify whether home building has slowed down. They also argue it would be premature to say the new rules designed to contain greenhouse gas emissions have led to a slowdown because they are still finalizing how to handle them.  

Data that the county did release shows development hasn’t entirely halted but it’s unclear how much it’s shifted in the years since the rollout of the driving policy. 

Meanwhile, the issue is getting more attention during the District 3 campaign. 

“We have a de facto moratorium,” Faulconer said during a debate last month hosted by multiple North County chambers and the Coast News Group. 

Faulconer’s comment came months after local Building Industry Association CEO Lori Holt Pfeiler declared that “the county is dead” to local developers.  

They were responding to plans county staff have worked on for years to force developers to pay fees or otherwise make up for the miles residents will have to drive to and from new homes for work and essential services.  

Lawson-Remer has dismissed that rhetoric and points to data showing that builders delivered hundreds of new homes in recent years, including more than 1,200 units last year. She argues the policy Faulconer criticizes only complicated matters for builders who favor sprawl development in far-flung areas and that the county should incentivize construction elsewhere.    

When Voice of San Diego tried to evaluate the state of development in unincorporated areas, county staff said they don’t publicly report new housing project application numbers. That makes it hard to evaluate the claims because housing projects can take years to manifest after developers propose them and many projects already in the pipeline haven’t been forced to confront the new standards so data on approved or newly constructed units offers an incomplete picture. A comparison of the number and size of proposed projects before and after 2020 would provide a broader view of development activity – or lack thereof.   

County spokesperson Donna Durckel eventually said the county plans to begin publicly reporting application data in future annual reports on housing production following requests, but not anytime soon.    

Earlier this month, Durckel wrote in an email that the county simply reports “on what housing is produced in a year, not what may, someday be produced” and argued factors beyond the new driving policy including financing and market forces also affect homebuilding activity. She also said the county couldn’t share the number of projects that met the county’s threshold to be directly subject to the new driving policy and potential mitigation, another data point that could shed light on how developers are reacting to the policy change.  

Durckel argued that Voice’s reporting on how the vehicle miles traveled policy had impacted development would be “incomplete and hypothetical” given that the county hasn’t finalized a mitigation program for builders that’s expected to have them pay fees to address driving impacts tied to their projects.  

“Implementing this state law (Senate Bill 743) is in process,” Durckel wrote. “The local outcomes remain to be seen.”   

Homebuilders and Faulconer, a longtime BIA ally whose bid for supervisor has been backed by developers, are adamant there’s already been an impact.  

Builders are focused on what’s happened since 2020 when a state law forced the county to change how it calculated the impact of planet-warming emissions from driving tied to new housing projects. The more miles new residents drove because of those projects, the more developers had to do to address emissions tied to mileage. That could mean building bicycle lanes, increasing transit access or paying a fee, among other options.   

In 2021, a county-commissioned study estimated the policy shift could cost developers $10,000 to $19,000 per mile of driving their project created.  

This spooked developers, especially after a key change in 2022 that increased the mileage calculation for potential projects in further-flung areas of the county.   

The BIA said builders weren’t eager to proceed with projects amid seemingly spiking costs though the county has yet to make a final call on mitigation fees.  

Absent that decision, developers who try to move forward with projects that trigger the mileage requirements under county policy must individually grapple with what they’ll need to do to address them. Again, the county’s not saying how many projects are in this boat – or if there were any. 

Things shifted again this summer when county staffers announced that projects that followed the overarching plan for development the county approved more than a decade ago wouldn’t need to follow the new vehicle mileage guidelines.   

Now, Durckel said, projects consistent with the general plan are “unlikely to encounter any major regulatory obstacles” tied to the new rules.   

The BIA claims the damage has already been done and that the change doesn’t address all their concerns.   

“We’ve already seen the results of these failed policies,” the organization wrote in a statement. “These costly mandates placed on new housing have led nearly all developers to stop attempting to build homes in the county.”  

To back up their claims about slowing housing development, they point to data that the county does share on types of permits that tend to be associated with larger projects.  

Their analysis of data on approved projects suggests that the number of larger-scale housing projects has fallen more dramatically than the overall number of projects. It also shows development hasn’t completely ground to a halt in recent years.  

Here’s an overview of the lobbying group’s analysis, which Voice verified.  

Again, the volume of units is what appears to have dropped most significantly, especially last year – and Faulconer has highlighted this data point. This may be a symptom of the county’s decision to exempt smaller projects with up to 11 units from the mileage policy, making smaller projects more appealing.  

But these numbers don’t represent all the applications the county received in 2023. For now, the BIA says it’s simply relying on data the county is reporting annually to draw its conclusions. 

The county spokesperson did tell Voice that developers last year applied for permits associated with 220 housing units, including 131 in categories often associated with larger projects. That’s more than the BIA tallied. 

Unfortunately, Durckel declined to release historical application data that would reveal how submissions compared in past years.  

The BIA said it wants more data too.  

“Moving forward, we think consistent monitoring and transparency of what projects are being submitted and how many permits are being processed will give the (Board of Supervisors) real-time information to help make decisions on the housing policies that will be before them very soon,” the lobbying group said.   

Among those upcoming decisions: potential fees for developers tied to driving associated with their projects, a proposed mandate to require developers to incorporate affordable housing into their projects, a review of the feasibility of development in some parts of the county and an overarching framework to guide countywide planning and development.   

MacKenzie Elmer contributed reporting.  

Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the number of square miles over which the county has land-use jurisdiction. It oversees more than 1,200 square miles outside city limits or about 772,239 acres.