This week, the San Diego City Council decided to curtail the controversial ADU density bonus program. If what Council requested sticks, the city will “reduce the ADU bonus Program applicability” in some of the neighborhoods with the biggest lot sizes. But it did not go far enough for some.
The vote came after Councilmember Henry Foster once again asked his colleagues to kill the whole program. They had supported him last month. On our podcast this week, he confirmed that he only sought that dramatic of a change because the mayor was unwilling to consider a pause.
For two months, he said, he asked the mayor and the mayor’s staff to help him.
“Even up until the point at the first Council meeting, we were still in conversation as I was on the dais — up until the point council President LaCava said, ‘I will now turn it over to Councilmember Foster,’” he said. “And that’s when I made my decision and said, well, ‘I guess he’s really not willing to have a discussion.’ And I went and made my motion.”
Foster told us he never wanted that extreme of an outcome.
“My intent was always to pause applications,” he said.
This week, he again moved to kill the whole program. However, this time, nobody seconded him.
The big question: Why didn’t anyone support him? All the City Councilmembers present last time supported his call to kill the ADU program and that was big news. The city had received national acclaim for the ADU program but it had also begun taking intense backlash from neighborhood groups opposed to the most egregious examples of landowners packing small lots with “backyard apartments.”
Councilmember Kent Lee ended up offering an amendment to Foster’s motion to kill the program. His suggestion was just to curtail it in the residential zones with the largest minimum lot sizes, the most spaced out residential areas of the city and the places, like Encanto where people could build the most units like this.
That passed but Councilmembers Marni von Wilpert, Raul Campillo and Jen Campbell were opposed.
“The final action that passed excluded so much of District 2, 5, and 7 that has been negatively impacted by this program, I had no choice but to vote ‘No’ in the hope that the Council would address the concerns of the entire City, including District 2,” wrote Campbell in an email to constituents.
So why not support the motion to kill the whole thing? Foster was also perplexed. When I told him I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t support his motion, they clearly want to kill or deeply gut the ADU program, he said he didn’t understand either.
“You’re as lost as I am. You’d have to ask those individuals,” he said.
I asked Campillo. He said he was concerned that getting rid of the program entirely would throw the city out of compliance with the state’s requirement that it allow for the construction of a certain number of housing or else builders would have much more latitude to force their projects through, the so-called “builder’s remedy.”
“That’s completely unacceptable to me,” Campillo said of the chance the city would end up risking a builder’s remedy status.
So why not tweak Foster’s motion like his colleague Lee ended up doing? A cynic would say they wanted to demonstrate their opposition to the program without actually killing it. Campillo just explained why he couldn’t support the final motion. It handled the big lot sizes that had concerned Foster and residents in Encanto but for the vast majority of the city, where minimum lot sizes are 5,000 square feet, it wouldn’t change anything.
“Bottom line, my district has a lot of big lots in RS-1-7 zones because I have Navajo Canyon, Adobe Falls, Ruffin Canyon, Tecolote Canyon, and a bunch more in Tierrasanta. All of those are significant fire zones, too. And now, it seems to me that because the motion stopped at RS-1-4, an enormous portion of my district won’t get that analysis and potential benefit.
Notes
The mailers are flying: Ballots have gone out to the voters in District 1 of the county Board of Supervisors for the special election. When ballots go out, so do the campaign mailers. We got one from labor unions supporting Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre.
Aguirre though is not wasting time promoting herself. She’s gone on the offensive immediately with an attack on San Diego City Councilmember Vivian Moreno for the January 2024 floods and city response.
Taxpayers tumult: I did not have “Haney Hong would abruptly resign and Rick Gentry (???) would become the CEO of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association” on my predictions sheet for early 2025. Our freelance reporter, Joe Hong (no relation), was investigating some claims he heard about the group and had interviewed Haney Hong last Friday. But Joe told me he didn’t have any indication this was coming.
Best quote: Haney Hong explained his reasoning for trying to force the Santee school district superintendent to oppose the city’s sales tax initiative as something of his Christian duty. As Joe Hong reported: “He said superintendents are ‘great educators, but they don’t have the kind of experience that God’s afforded me in how to message and communicate with ballot arguments.'”
Second best quote: Haney Hong told the U-T his conversion to Catholicism had led to the resignation. “There’s a beautiful line in the Catholic faith where your first vocation is your spouse and parents, and I’ve got to give that due diligence,” he said. As we all know, Catholicism notoriously prohibits giving your employer notice before resigning.
Gentry: He had quite a run as CEO of the city’s Housing Commission. He left right when controversy at the agency had led the City Council to want to oversee an overhaul of it.
Mayor not on board with tourism minimum wage: I asked San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria’s staff if he had a position on the new proposal from the Council’s Select Committee Addressing the Cost of Living to increase the minimum wage for workers at hotels and event venues like Petco Park.
They threw some shade: Director of communications, Rachel Laing sent this statement: “Mayor Gloria has an established record of supporting workers and working families in San Diego – most notably, as the author of the City’s Minimum Wage and Earned Sick Leave ordinance, which raised the minimum wage for all workers in the City. He proposed this change after months of engagement with the mayor at the time, as well as a broad spectrum of community and business stakeholders. In this case, the author has not yet shared, discussed, or engaged the Mayor or the Mayor’s Office – or some key stakeholders. That should happen before this proposal moves forward.”
If you have any feedback or ideas for the Politics Report, send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org.
Why kill the ADU? The first place to look is the campaign money.