The median home price in San Diego was $949,900 in February 2024, 128% more expensive than the national average. At the same time, the median household income in San Diego is about $89,457 a year and San Diegans aged 25 to 44 earn an average of $98,194 annually. This means the dream of homeownership is inaccessible for an average middle-income, young family in San Diego.
Instead of relaxing regulations to spur the housing supply, elected officials in San Diego have rolled out a taxpayer-funded assistance program to support first-time homebuyers. Sadly, the program is designed by the San Diego Housing Commission to choose recipients on the basis of race, rather than needs.
Entitled “City of San Diego First-Time Homebuyer Program for Middle-Income, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) Households,” the pilot initiative was launched in June 2023 and provides each qualifying middle-income homebuyer of “any race other than white” up to $40,000 in down payment assistance. Astonishingly, the blatantly discriminatory phrase “any race other than white” is put down in writing.
Excluding beneficiaries from government housing assistance on the basis of race clearly violates the equal protection guarantee under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The government should help prospective homebuyers based on needs, not race — period.
As a result, the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, represented by the public interest law firm Pacific Legal Foundation, is taking the city of San Diego, its Housing Authority and the San Diego Housing Commission to court. On behalf of members who dream of owning a home in San Diego and would have qualified if race were not a factor, we are suing to halt the discriminatory program.
We believe that the city should expend its precious funds and energies on addressing the constraints in housing supply as the right solution. These complex constraints are frequently micro-level socioeconomic and demographic factors, such as a lack of affordable housing, migration patterns and existing cycles of neighborhood choice. Obsessing over race only deflects from focusing on the real issues.
But obsessing over race is exactly what the city is doing with the program we are challenging. The race-preferential initiative is based on a July 2022 Urban Institute study commissioned by the city. This flawed research mentions “black” 160 times, “Asian” 54 times, “white” and “Latino” 64 times. There is a clear racial bias and a focus on black homeowners.
With racial disparities and systemic discrimination being the central tenets, the study finds that white and Asian households are “overrepresented” in the San Diego housing market by 15% and 11%, respectively. To address the “disparities,” the city was advised to “reexamine eligibility criteria and program design,” with helping “potential Black homebuyers” as a top priority. However, the study intentionally dodges a high-school level question: is race a causation or correlation for housing disparities?
A closer examination of the Urban Institute study invalidates the race-preferential rationale behind the discriminatory program. Imbalances and disparities should be treated as a given, whenever crude data is de-segregated by race. Second, the study itself identifies credit history and exceeding debt-to-income ratio as the most common factors explaining mortgage denial and a lack of homeownership. Yet, the authors of the study, conveniently treating correlation as causation, have made an indictment on “racial segregation” and a “history of systemic discrimination.”
This government-funded, racial-grievance research has justified a government-funded, discriminatory program. Similar “research-informed” racial preferences have become an unfortunate trend in California’s public policymaking processes. To push back, we opposing Assembly Constitution Amendment 7, which would make it easier to enact race-based programs like San Diego’s housing initiative.
Researchers obsessing with race can easily conjure up any findings to legitimize racial preferences. The passage of ACA 7 would effectively repeal California’s constitutional guarantee of equal treatment, codified by the passage of Proposition 209.
Government programs should not divide us by using racial preferences. That’s why we’re fighting in court to protect equal rights.
Frank Xu is the president of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation.
