Jan. 24, 2026 7 AM PT
To the editor: San Diego has certainly laid out the welcome mat for house builders and their buyers (“San Diego shows what happens when a city actually lets builders build,” Jan. 20). However my metropolis’s laissez-faire strategy to growth has failed to provide actually inexpensive housing whereas just about ignoring the apparent want for extra parks, faculties, fireplace and police stations and parking for car-dependent, working-class households.
A few of these new rental tasks supply small studios for $2,500 per thirty days and one-bedrooms for $3,000. Parking, when accessible, can value $300 a month extra. The so-called inexpensive models required by the town in a few of these high-density buildings nonetheless value more than $2,000 per month, properly past the attain of our low- and really low-income residents.
Our mayor and his building-industry allies now declare their fast-track approval processes — which disregard neighborhood issues concerning the unfavourable impacts of those high-density/high-rise tasks — are pushing down rental charges. However based on knowledge from RentCafe.com, the latest 1.85% drop in month-to-month rental charges equates to simply $55 per thirty days in financial savings and a nonetheless costly $2,938 common month-to-month hire.
In the meantime, bike lanes and on-street parking restrictions have led to lowered parking spots. Builders are discovering it a lot tougher to hire models with no off-street parking. Vacancy rates are regular or growing, which is able to tamp down new building, inflicting rental charges to renew their upward climb.
Our metropolis doesn’t have a rental housing “disaster.” However we do have a extreme scarcity of actually inexpensive housing. Our elected officers’ love affair with building {industry} execs who fund their political campaigns proves that the personal sector and free-market methods is not going to resolve that drawback.
Paul Krueger, San Diego
