Has San Diego County already built enough new housing to accommodate all the currently projected population growth through the year 2050?
This is a stunning question to ask given the frenzied rhetoric about needing to build large numbers of new units of every type, everywhere to deal with what is widely perceived as a massive housing shortage by politicians, housing advocacy groups, and the public.
But the answer, surprisingly, is “yes.”
A new demographic reality has become firmly established with each successive update of the 2050 population forecast for the county. The increase in population between 2010 and 2050 was originally forecast by SANDAG to be about 30% to almost 4.5 million people. But over time, the forecast for 2050 has steadily fallen as fertility rates continued to decline, increases in life expectancy stalled, and net migration into California turned negative starting in 2015.
The 2024 SANDAG forecast for 2050 calls for under 3.5 million people — not much more than the current population of San Diego County. In fact, San Diego County could see only another 125,000 new residents between now and 2050.
How many housing units need to be built for these new residents? To make that calculation, consider the average number of persons-per-housing-unit, which is 2.92 based on SANDAG’s figures. Divide 125,000 by 2.92 and you get 42,800. Surprisingly, that’s almost exactly the 40,000 permits issued in the county since 2020.
Thus in San Diego County the state’s legal mandate to provide housing units to accommodate projected growth has already been met — all the way through 2050.
A frequently heard contention is there is a need to catch up on building because San Diego systematically underbuilt during the Great Recession. San Diego has caught up from that deficit because the county’s population has declined by almost 30,000 people since 2018, while construction continued at a brisk pace with building permits pulled for over 50,000 housing units.
The absurdity of planning for the massive number of new San Diego residents envisioned by earlier forecasts is nowhere more evident than in the controversial new plan for University City. It envisions building 29,000 more housing units and supporting infrastructure by 2050.
Think about that. University City is being asked to undertake a comprehensive planning effort to accommodate almost the entire population growth now anticipated for the whole county between 2024 and 2050. It is a useless and socially destructive exercise that pits housing advocates against long-time community residents.
This is not to say there are not real housing issues causing many in the region considerable pain. But there is no serious academic research showing that building sizable numbers of housing units, almost exclusively at the high end of the market, makes housing more affordable over a time period relevant for current residents. That is because the process of housing filtering down to a level affordable to lower income households is quite slow.
Further, while the homeless population is concentrated in major West Coast cities with high housing costs, that population is not very responsive to changes in housing costs. These are issues that have to be tackled directly rather than hoping they will mysteriously go away by encouraging developers to engage in a large-scale build out of existing communities to accommodate population growth that is no longer coming.
San Diego County and its constituent cities need to put updates to community plans on hold until the deep implications of a long-term future with a sharply smaller population is fully understood. It is important to plan for the region’s likely future, not one that is no longer reflected by demographics.
Richard T. Carson is a distinguished professor of economics at UC San Diego.