The Learning Curve: San Diego Unified’s Housing Journey

It’s hard to overstate just how big the slate of affordable education workforce housing projects San Diego Unified’s board is considering approving tonight. The proposals would comprise not only the biggest portfolio of affordable housing, but well over double the units that have been built by K-12 districts in California. 

You can read more about the effort and the brewing controversy over which project the board should approve here. 

For some district officials, this is only the beginning of a larger project meant to transform housing affordability in the region. But to understand where San Diego Unified officials want to go, you have to understand the district’s rocky relationship with land.  

Its current era began back in the early aughts, when the district was grappling with a massive $92 million budget deficit. In order to shore up the deficit and reduce layoffs, the board turned to selling underutilized or vacant district-owned properties.  

Between 2012 and 2013 alone, the board approved the sale of half a dozen properties. They included some incredibly valuable real estate – like a primo site a block away from the shore in Mission Beach. 

Those sales pissed a lot of people off. Even then-Mayor Bob Filner pleaded with the board to sell the city of San Diego the land instead. Former Trustee Scott Barnett, the only board member to vote “no” on some of the sales, likened them to a family selling their furniture to pay the rent. 

“Selling valuable real estate assets, to pay for ongoing expenditures is bad policy,” Barnett wrote at the time. 

In longtime Trustee Richard Barrera’s telling, this was the district’s reactionary period, wherein officials desperately scrambled to fill budgetary gaps with shortsighted sales of valuable public land. What came next, he said, was the district’s opportunistic period.  

The land sales had been panned but district officials had gotten a taste of the dough the land they owned could bring in. Naturally, they wanted more. So, the board took a new tack and began to offer under-utilized land for joint occupancy leases. This allowed the district to retain ownership and collect rent from developers who would build things like housing and, importantly, facilities the district could use. 
 
The one existing project that really exemplifies that strategy is Livia – a 264-unit development on district land in Scripps Ranch. Not only does the lease net the district $40 million over its 66-year run, the project also included 53 affordable units for which district employees were given priority and a STEAM lab for students.  

Last year, the board approved its second such agreement. This one will bring 270 affordable units to the former site of Central Elementary, along with a new campus for TRACE, a district school that provides support for students with disabilities. It will also bring in about $108 million over the lease’s 99-year span.  

Along the way, Barrera said the district shifted to its proactive era of housing production. That included setting a new goal to build enough affordable units to house 10 percent of their staff. It also meant focusing more on housing projects that produced as many affordable units as possible rather than projects that made them money. Those moves set the stage for tonight’s vote. 

Exactly how this era will pan out isn’t entirely clear. No California district has taken this big of a leap into housing production. San Diego Unified is also pioneering the public-private partnership model they’re using to get these projects done.  

But leaders are confident. 

“I think we can really become a model for affordable workforce housing,” Trustee Shana Hazan said. “Our shared goal is, ‘How do we develop a model that the state can look at as an exemplar and that can be used in in other districts?’” 

For Barrera – who moonlights as an adviser to State Superintendent Tony Thurmond on issues like workforce housing – the long-term vision is much larger than just a couple housing complexes scattered around the district. He’d like to see the district one day providing housing to families of students. He also hopes public agencies of all stripes begin to pitch in to construct affordable housing on underutilized land they own. 

That’s where things like the district’s recently created Regional Housing Finance Authority comes in. The organization was cofounded by the San Diego Community College District, which itself is working to build student housing. It’s meant to help municipalities collaborate on housing projects throughout the region by doing things like putting bond measures on the ballot.  

The goal, he said, should be to develop a “housing market for public servants.” In his view, that would look something like Vienna, Austria, where 60 percent of all residents live in subsidized housing. Vienna’s model, though, includes a significant number of municipally owned units, something verboten in modern American politics. But he said the public-private partnership model the district has pioneered may be an avenue to accomplish something similar. 

“We need to be more ambitious,” Barrera said. “We should be aspiring to have a high percentage of our population in the region living in affordable housing that’s built by public agencies on public property.” 

What We’re Writing 

Last week, leadership at Albert Einstein Academies abruptly fired the beloved principal of the charter network’s elementary school. The firing sparked a fierce backlash, exacerbating tensions that have been simmering for months.