Driving with my daughter this Sunday morning, I pointed to her another San Diego “success story” – another affordable housing project somewhere in mid-town, supposed to help us “solve the housing crisis”, according to Newsome, our mayor and housing officials. The building itself is a four-story, brand-new gray box building that was probably opened by a triumphant mayor proclaiming another housing policy win, except it is so ugly that it seems Trader Joe’s paper bag had more design thought put in it than this architectural masterpiece.
So, while many celebrate the super sprawl of affordable housing projects throughout San Diego, I have my reservations. And as a builder, I’m definitely not a NIMBY, but I am a devoted QIMBY – QUALITY in my back yard!
First off, architecture matters! One might say, who cares, it’s supposed to fulfil a specific goal of providing affordable housing, it’s all about quantity, not quality. I disagree! Even during the “crisis time,” nobody cancelled urban design and planning, community feel, and other variables that we are rapidly throwing away for the sake of “solving a crisis”, and the same people who are approving these shoeboxes are the ones who created and continue exacerbating this housing crisis to begin with!
Growing up in the Soviet Union, I remember the same boxes: clunky 5-story apartment buildings made from concrete Lego-style blocks that sprung up all over the USSR after World War 2 with tiny apartments between 350 to 800 s.f. with tiny kitchens, single bathroom regardless of the apartment size, no elevators even to the 5th floor, cold in the winter, hot in the summer. They were called “Kruschevki” after Nikita Khruschev, head of the USSR, and his goal was to urgently provide housing to the population that really needed it after World War 2. That was a REAL housing crisis, there was no time for architectural nuances, just mass production and the ability to put as many families into basic houses after the devastation of four years of war against nazi Germany.
80 years forward, San Diego is not dealing with war consequences; it deals with the devastation of its own making – incompetent government that only exists to justify its existence and creates crisis after crisis in order to be able to fight the crisis through more regulations or more incompetent decisions justified by the urgency of the crisis. Who needs a war when we have bureaucrats in charge?
Secondly, when the city or county of San Diego announces that they issued a record number of permits, they don’t tell you that 80-85% of those permits go to ADUs, micro-units, studios, seven-story gray-box affordable housing and complete community projects with no parking. And behind this excitement, nobody notices that the permits for homes for families, for the middle class are on decline. Where are the homes for people who need three bedrooms to raise their kids, a garage for their junk and cars, a school around the corner, a backyard for the kids and dogs? When the house size makes it inconvenient to have children because there is no place for a stroller, it becomes a crisis for the future – the crisis of the declining population, and it’s much harder to solve than the housing crisis.
It’s publicly reported that California households with children declined by 82,000 between 2019 and 2024, while households without children increased by 722,000. The Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy reported that annual California births fell from around 600,000 in 2001 to about 400,000 in 2024, and that Southern California’s household size fell from 3.03 in 2010 to 2.83 in 2024. To me, this long-term destruction of our community is the real crisis!
To be fair, housing policy is not the only reason for the reduction of birth rates and household size. Things like culture, marriage patterns, work environment, economy change. But housing is absolutely part of the story. If we are only producing units to look good in a city staff report but don’t help actual families, then we are not really solving anything for the sustainable future of our community.
Housing crisis is not the root cause of our problems, it’s a glaring symptom of a larger problem: a complete failure of our community by Sacramento. We are prioritizing everything for the sake of zero emissions, green agenda, fairy shrimp and sagebrush, homeless housing, transient housing, ADUs and walkable communities for singles, and at the same time, we are making family-sized housing harder, slower, denser, and more expensive, because it’s not a priority. Then we should not be shocked when fewer people build families here, or families choose to leave for other states.
Middle-class families are the core of community longevity, its economic health and demographic stability. Building affordable middle-class quality housing should be a priority in California, not an afterthought. But in Sacramento, they believe that the Middle-Class families with kids and dogs, driving non-electric cars over 16 miles to work from their suburban homes on 8000 sf lots is inconvenient, it’s a “housing sprawl” that needs to be limited or penalized. Congrats, we solved the housing sprawl by making having kids in San Diego unaffordable!
By Alex Lisnevky