Since he joined the San Diego Planning Commission in 2019, Matthew Boomhower has been one of the city’s loudest supporters for new housing. An architect and lawyer who works for a development consultant, Boomhower has often urged city staff to do more to make it easier to build more homes, and openly opposed neighbors who asked the commission to reject housing proposals.
His term on the Planning Commission is scheduled to end next week, and the City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera and Councilman Kent Lee signed a memo urging the mayor to appoint him for a second term. Some of the city’s most pro-development groups – Circulate San Diego, the Climate Action Campaign, the Downtown San Diego Partnership, the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Building Industry Association, and the YIMBY Democrats of San Diego among them – sent their own memo to the mayor urging Boomhower’s reappointment.
That’s because Mayor Todd Gloria is, at least for now, expected instead to appoint Farah Mahzari, the director of government affairs for San Diego Land Lawyers, a prominent law firm for land-use issues in town.
“In his first term as a commissioner, he demonstrated the ability to be fair and impartial while providing invaluable insight for smart development,” Elo-Rivera and Lee wrote in their memo. “We are grateful for his service thus far and for his continued willingness to serve.”
The joint memo from 12 business and development groups said he was uniquely experienced in land use, architecture and the law.
“He has been a leading voice in supporting both housing and policy development that helps our city embrace more density,” they wrote.
It’s unusual for a planning commissioner not to receive a second term, without something arising that would cause the city to change direction. The Planning Commission is an advisory body to the city, offering feedback to city staff on development-related policies, and taking votes on large development proposals before the City Council gives final approval. There hasn’t been any suggestion that something like that occurred here. But the push from the City Council members and the development industry on Boomhower’s behalf shows the concern that Gloria won’t take the usual path and give him another term.
SB 9’s Big Whiff in Year One
There was one thing that both supporters and opponents of SB 9 agreed on: it was a really big deal.
The law, proposed by San Diego state Sen. Toni Atkins and signed by the governor in 2021, was indeed described in lofty terms. The bill “ended single-family zoning,” issued as either a promise or a warning, depending on who was talking. The New York Times described how significant the change was in California, given its history of suburban growth and the dominance of single-family homes that came with it.
The law did this in two ways. It gave owners of single-family properties the right to split their lots, regardless of local zoning rules. And it allowed property owners to build a duplex on any single-family lot. In practice, property owners can now put four homes on a lot previously zoned for just one.
On the day Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it, two Twitter users captured the spectrum of opinions on the new law.
“Have either of you even read the contents of this bill?” wrote Jeff Safire, in response to a Tweet announcing the bill signing. “It’s a shameful contract for developers and speculators to take over CA land, while doing absolutely nothing for affordable housing. Despicable piece of legislation.”
“Truly meaningful legislation and a watershed moment in expanding home opportunities to more Californians,” wrote Patrick Santana. “Congrats to you and all who worked so hard to make this a reality. I hope other Western states will use SB9 as a model for addressing their own housing shortages.”
Compared to those dire and hopeful predictions, the first year of the law was quite a bit more boring.
The city of San Diego granted zero lot splits under SB 9 during the first year of the law, according to a new analysis by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. Likewise, local governments issued permits for zero new housing units during the law’s first year, according to the same analysis.
Good news! It has not yet proven to be a contract for speculators to take over the state!
Bad news! It has not yet become a model for addressing housing shortages across the Western United States!
So why has this big-deal law been such a nothing burger in its first year? Well, for one, maybe one year wasn’t enough time for homeowners and developers to figure out how to use it, so maybe the results (or catastrophes) its supporters and opponents claimed are on the horizon.
But the Terner Center has two other ideas, based on its interviews with city staff. One is that in places like San Diego, which has issued permits for 871 accessory dwelling units, through permissive rules for building those homes, homeowners are taking for the very similar ADU option if they’re interested in adding more homes on their property.
The other is that a provision in the bill requiring the property owner to live in one of the SB 9 units – effectively reserving the option for regular homeowners and keeping it away from the private development industry – has limited its uptake. Atkins amended her bill to include the owner occupancy requirement, in a bid to get it through a crucial committee vote, before it eventually passed.
This isn’t the first time that a big housing bill from Atkins hasn’t delivered the grand results promised during its passage. In 2017, the legislature passed SB 2, which levied a $75 fee on certain real estate transactions to create a new source, split evenly between affordable housing, and as grants to cities to re-write their plans to accommodate more homes.
Two years later, the state had collected about $590 million from the fee — $56 million from San Diego alone – and yet had disbursed just $35 million.
By the end of 2021, the state had collected $1.6 billion, of which it disbursed just under 18 percent, $145 million went to subsidized housing projects across the state, and $139 million went to help cities re-write development plans.
Jacobs on the Navy Building Too Many Ships
For a special podcast this week, we sat down with U.S. Rep. Sara Jacobs. In just two years, Jacobs has positioned herself to move into congressional leadership roles. What’s more interesting, though, is she has regularly criticized, if not voted against, defense spending bills – it’s not a typical tact for a San Diego congressional representative. She has been able to secure more family assistance but there’s a deeper disagreement happening.
A couple weeks ago, the magazine Foreign Policy quoted Jacobs saying she thought we were essentially building too many Navy ships. We asked her to explain in more depth.
She cited the number of service members who are waiting for food assistance or being served by the San Diego Food Bank and how much trouble many of them have finding housing in San Diego.
“To me, it makes no sense to spend tons of money on airplanes and ships beyond what the Pentagon even says they need when we’re not investing in what we need to do to actually be able to man those ships, to actually take care of the people who are going to be prosecuting that fight. And so, to me, it’s very clear if we were spending $800 billion on making sure every military family had housing and, you know, food on the table and childcare then it would be a different story,” she said.
She said the number of ships itself is not what we should be aiming for.
“There are many in the national security community who believe that we need an X-number-ship Navy, and that if we have that amount of ships, that’s what we’ll need to deter China. And don’t think about sort of the quality-of-life issues that are affecting our recruitment and our retention and our military personnel,” she said.
You can listen to the full conversation here.
A New Gig for Former Council President
Georgette Gómez, who ascended to San Diego Council President and chair of the Metropolitan Transit System, before losing those seats to pursue an unsuccessful Congressional bid (against Jacobs), and then lost an assembly election earlier this year, has a new job.
Gómez posted on Facebook that she is now the community development and strategy officer at Casa Familiar, a community development nonprofit in San Ysidro.
“I look forward to contributing to CASA’s bold strategies in advancing social, economic, and environmental justice in this vibrant and visionary border region,” wrote Gómez, who before winning a City Council race was an advocate and organizer with the Environmental Health Coalition.
We can’t help but notice that Gómez now lives in Barrio Logan – where she made her professional reputation while at EHC, fighting for development regulations to separate industrial and residential uses — a community in the northern portion of the City Council’s Eighth District, and that she will now work in San Ysidro, the southernmost portion of the City Council’s Eighth District. Councilwoman Vivian Moreno just won re-election in the district, and will be termed out at the end of 2026.
Notes
The show Late Night With Seth Meyers ran a joke about Janessa Goldbeck, a San Diego political activist and Marine veteran, who ran for the seat in Congress Jacobs won. Goldbeck has been running a “Lumberjack Lesbian” promotion to take people’s Christmas trees away for small donations to the San Diego LGBT Center. The punchline? We’re going to let the lesbian who told on TV tell it.
Cookin with gas: We knew people would go nuts about our reminder that, amid a nationwide discussion about banning gas stoves, San Diego has been planning to get rid of gas appliances of all types for a while now. We broke down the status of that effort on this week’s podcast. In short, the city adopted an plan to get rid of them by 2035. The city has since committed to present an implementation plan in coming weeks for its Climate Action Plan. For the Climate Action Plan to be successful, a number of things will have to happen to reach its greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, including, probably, electrifying all buildings. So now we have even more reason to see if the implementation plan for the Climate Action Plan includes getting rid of gas stoves along with all gas appliances and how and when that may happen.