The housing math does not care about your feelings

SAN DIEGO: The City of San Diego's housing plan commits to about 108,000 new homes by 2029. Do the division and the target requires roughly 13,500 homes permitted every year, sustained for the better part of a decade.

This is not a debate about whether San Diego should grow. The state assigned the number, the city accepted it, and the arithmetic is indifferent to everyone's position on neighborhood character. Either the permits get issued or the target gets missed, and missing it carries consequences under state housing law that the city will not be able to talk its way out of.

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons (freely licensed)

The honest conversation starts with admitting what the number requires. Thirteen thousand five hundred homes a year means apartment buildings in the neighborhoods where the jobs are: North Park, Hillcrest, University Heights, the corridors along the trolley lines. It means the city approving projects its loudest residents oppose, because the quiet majority who need the housing do not show up to community planning group meetings.

There is a version of this story where the city gets close. Streamlined approvals for projects near transit, fewer discretionary reviews, and a permitting department measured on speed rather than caution. The tools exist. What has been missing is a council willing to say the number out loud and be judged against it.

So here is a modest proposal for the next election: make every candidate for mayor and council state, on the record, how many homes they believe the city will permit next year, and what they will do when the number falls short. Not a vision. A number. The housing crisis is, at bottom, an accountability crisis, and accountability starts with arithmetic.

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons (freely licensed)

One hundred eight thousand homes by 2029. Thirteen thousand five hundred a year. The arithmetic does not negotiate, which is exactly why it belongs in every housing debate the city has.