Developers Are Lining Up to Build Housing on San Diego Unified Property

In March, San Diego Unified’s board issued a request for proposals from developers to turn five sites across the district into affordable housing. It was the latest, and largest, step toward fulfilling leaders’ pledge to build affordable housing for 10 percent of district staff.  

Board President Cody Petterson estimated that if all five sites were developed, it could yield as many as 1,500 units of new affordable workforce housing.  

The submission period ended last week, and district officials say they received a total of 15 proposals, including proposals for all five sites.  

The submissions aren’t public, yet. San Diego Unified spokesperson James Canning wrote in an email that officials will put together a committee of “district staff and district real estate experts.” By December, the committee will determine which proposals “best respond to the district’s needs, workforce housing goals, and community requests,” and recommend them to the board, Canning said. 

What’s been cooking: The district’s moves are part of a broader effort by school leaders to respond to California’s housing crisis by building homes on district-owned land.  

And there’s no shortage of land. A 2022 study found that K-12 districts alone owned about 75,000 acres of developable land, upon which an eye-popping 2.3 million housing units could be built. Those units could zero out the approximately 2.5 million homes the state has sought to  build by 2030. So, it’s no surprise that state lawmakers in recent years have passed, or proposed, multiple laws aimed at encouraging school leaders to build housing on district-owned property. 

San Diego Unified has a head start. In 2018, district officials inked a deal with a developer to build a housing complex in Scripps Ranch. 

When the development, Livia, opened last year, more than 50 district employees moved into the complex’s low-income units, which account for 53 of the building’s 264 units. Earlier this year, a promised STEAM lab for local students also opened at the building.  

The district last year also approved a bid from a developer to turn the now-vacant former site of City Heights’ Central Elementary into a purely affordable housing complex. The development will include 327 affordable units – 57 of which will be for seniors. San Diego Unified employees will be given priority.  

The development will also include classrooms for TRACE, the district school for students with disabilities, and a number of neighborhood amenities, like space for a farmers market. Work on this development, though, could still be as much as a year away. 

In the meantime, the Central Elementary campus has been the site of a messy back and forth between city and district officials regarding a proposed safe parking lot. According to officials from both organizations, that project may finally get off the ground later this month. 

What’s to come: These new projects will look a lot like the old ones. To start, they’ll follow the same pattern as their predecessors, wherein the district will continue to own the land, which the developer will lease. 

The request for proposals also included some required amenities at each of the five locations.  

At the most promising site, the district’s aging and much maligned central office in University Heights, for example, developers must make improvements to the neighboring Birney Elementary and preserve two historical buildings on the property. At the Commercial Street site in Logan Heights, meanwhile, developers must build a “child development center and/or homeless student outreach center and/or student/community garden.”  

Petterson, the district’s board president, said the surrounding communities have been “understandably nervous,” about some of these projects. But he said he’s confident that some of the community-focused amenities, which were developed in part at public workshops, will win them over.  

San Diego’s crushing cost of living has driven working families out of the region, contributing to the trend of enrollment decline that has buffeted the region, and likely will continue to in coming years. To Petterson, this “transformative” housing strategy could work for every local agency, and in the process potentially play a role in combatting that bleed. 

“This is a sound model that has substantial benefits for the agency, substantial benefits for the partners and employees and substantial benefits for the public,” Petterson said. “This is part of welcoming working families, young families and children back into our community.”