San Diego’s accessory dwelling bonus density program isn’t going anywhere, yet.
After hours of public comment and back and forth discussions, San Diego’s City Council stopped short of killing the program on Tuesday. Instead, the Council plans to reform it to stop developers from using it on lots of certain sizes.
What’s at stake: San Diego’s ADU bonus density program received national praise for driving an “affordable ADU building boom.” But it also drew backlash from people who argued it was negatively impacting neighborhoods.
The program allows builders to build an extra ADU for every unit set aside for low-or-middle-income tenants, up to the development limit for an area of land. The bigger the lot size, the more units an owner could build.
How it got here: Councilmember Henry Foster III, who kicked-off the conversation about reforms last month, proposed the Council kill the program all together. His colleagues couldn’t get behind his motion on Tuesday.
Instead, they voted 6-3 to have city staff return with a plan to remove certain zones from the ADU density bonus program. That tend to have larger lot sizes that lend themselves to large-scale ADU developments that fueled neighborhood frustration.
Still, they left the door open to more changes to address community concerns.
Hear him this week: Foster will be the guest on this week’s Voice of San Diego podcast, which goes into feeds Friday.
Another vote: The Council voted again to repeal a controversial footnote that reduced lot sizes in Encanto. (City News Service)
County Supes Review Hoped-For Addiction Treatment Expansion Plan
County behavioral health officials presented a five-year vision to expand county-funded addiction treatment – if Congress doesn’t swiftly scuttle it with major Medicaid cuts.
In a special meeting called by Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, county bureaucrats said projections on treatment needs call for a 78 percent increase in access to residential treatment beds, a 97 percent increase in outpatient treatment availability and a 92 percent increase in housing options such as sober living beds. The county blueprint also calls for creating a new level of care: step-down support and beds for people grappling with addiction who need safe temporary places to continue their recovery.
Nicole Esposito of the county’s behavioral health department said the plan also aims to improve the region’s addiction treatment system so connections to follow-up and ongoing care are more seamless after patients land in local hospital emergency rooms, enter treatment programs or prepare to graduate from them.
“This is about more than just adding beds or treatment slots,” Esposito said. “It is about creating a system that works for people who need it, meeting them where they are and supporting them throughout their journey.”
Plans already in the works: The county expects to open recuperative care beds for behavioral health patients in coming weeks and to deliver about 70 new residential treatment beds at a former Volunteers of America facility in National City by July 2026. Officials said Tri-City Medical Center in North County is also slated to open 16 psychiatric beds later this year.
There’s a catch: It’s unclear how the county will fund these new services, particularly as it stares down the possibility of massive cuts to Medicaid, known as Medi-Cal in California.
Luke Bergmann, the county’s behavioral health services director, said Medicaid now funds 70 percent of the county’s substance use treatment costs. If Congress proceeds with major cuts, he said they would impact all existing behavioral health programs in the county – and halt future expansion plans.
“The road ahead will indeed be very challenging if federal policy changes make the vast reductions to Medicaid that they promise,” Bergmann.
Lawson-Remer and fellow Supervisor Monica Montgomery-Steppe, both Democrats, emphasized the need to bat back attempts to slash Medicaid.
“This would mean treatment programs being shut down, crisis response teams being cut and fewer people getting the care that they need,” Lawson-Remer said. “We cannot allow this to happen.”
Republican Supervisor Joel Anderson didn’t wade into the possible cuts but cheered the county plan. Fellow Republican Supervisor Jim Desmond was absent.
What’s next: Supervisors expect an update from county staff in August on their next steps on the hoped-for expansion plan.
San Diego Loses a Trailblazer
Leon L. Williams has passed away.
Williams’ family told NBC 7 that San Diego’s first Black city councilmember and county supervisor passed away Saturday. He was 102.
As the Union-Tribune reported in 2022 when the county honored Williams with a lifetime achievement award, Williams was also the first Black homeowner when he bought his Golden Hill home – then considered in a Whites-only area – in 1947. Williams went on to become a politician, serve as a longtime chair of the Metropolitan Transit District and as president of the California State Association of Counties for a time. He later became the namesake of the county Human Relations Commission he created when he was a supervisor.
“Leon Williams means that this city is freer and fairer because of his public service,” San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said in 2022.
Catch up: Voice of San Diego sat down with Williams back in 2011 to review his remarkable career and the region’s political history.
Song of the Week
KAN KAN, “Around the Bend”: One of the best things about KAN KAN is the band’s ability to conjure delicate, tender melodies amid messiness. “Around the Bend,” highlights that knack with a gentle picking pattern that radiates a folky melancholic nostalgia. Read more about the Song of the Week here.
Like what you hear? Catch Kan Kan tonight at the Brown Building.
Do you have a “Song of the Week” suggestion? Shoot us an email and a sentence or two about why you’ve been bumping this song lately. Friendly reminder: all songs should be by local artists.
In Other News
- The City Council voted earlier this week to increase a slew of city fees by an average of about 20 percent to help address a more than $250 million budget deficit. (Union-Tribune; Warning: This story is only for subscribers.)
- inewsource dug into the state’s sexually violent predator placements and found one in three SVPs released via the state’s conditional release program have landed in San Diego County.
- The state awarded $8.4 million to the city of Lemon Grove to move more than 100 unsheltered residents out of encampments along State Route 94 and into homes. (Times of San Diego)
- Del Mar wants to restart talks about a potential affordable housing project at the fairgrounds. (Union-Tribune)
- The New York Times reported that China blacklisted imports from San Diego-based biotech company Illumina in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The news came a day after the Union-Tribune revealed that the company expects to lay off 96 workers.
- The city of San Diego jumped aboard a federal lawsuit opposing Trump administration threats that it won’t deploy federal grant funds to cities and counties that won’t cooperate with federal authorities enforcing immigration laws. (City News Service)
The Morning Report was written by Andrea Lopez-Villafaña, Lisa Halverstadt and Jakob McWhinney. It was edited by Scott Lewis.
Clarification: This post has been updated to clarify that the City Council voted to have staff return with a plan to remove certain zones from the ADU density bonus program.
For more transparency regarding the ADU bonus program that allows many more units to built at much greater density, it’s important to note that the low-income and moderate-income bonus ADU units are only rent-restricted to be affordable for 10 years and 15 years, respectively. At that point, these high-density ADUs located in the backyards of neighborhoods across the city revert to unrestricted rental properties, like an regular apartment complex–without any parking spaces.
As such, this entire ADU bonus model is really a boon to investment companies with long-term profit goals and merely offer a short-term improvement in affordable housing availability with perpetual negative impacts to the neighborhoods in which they are built.