In 2021, Chula Vista laid out a series of new housing goals. The city hoped to add thousands of new homes for lower and middle-income people by the end of the decade.
But three years later, the vast majority of new homes in the city are only affordable for wealthier residents, according to a new city report.
Just last year, the county’s second-largest city approved 1,500 building permits for homes aimed at households with an annual income of more than $143,000. It signed off on only 62 permits for homes aimed at all other income categories — including homes for low income and very low income residents.
The numbers were disappointing to advocates for affordable housing. They said the mismatched pace of construction showed a lack of planning on the part of Chula Vista’s elected leaders.
“It’s very discouraging to see the numbers,” said Jose Lopez, the San Diego director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, a statewide tenants rights’ group. “The housing that is getting built is housing that is not for the people who actually need the housing.”
Chula Vista housing officials said the last year has been a challenging time to secure funding for more affordable homes. They called their progress on higher-end homes “significant” but acknowledged that the city wasn’t keeping pace in other categories.
“I think that we have some work to do to try to meet some of those goals,” said Stacey Kurz, Chula Vista’s Housing and Homeless Services director.
Every eight years, cities across California set new goals for the amount of homes they need to build to meet the needs of current and future residents. Those targets come from state housing authorities and regional planning agencies and are meant to help cities address the statewide housing shortage.
The priority is to ensure cities continue to add new homes for working-class people.
But during the last eight year-cycle that ended in 2020, nearly every city in San Diego County failed to meet those goals, according to a county watchdog agency. Only Lemon Grove met the goals for all categories.
Chula Vista did succeed in permitting enough high-end homes, but failed to supply enough housing for all other income categories. Now, the city appears to be on track to repeat that pattern.
In 2021, city officials set a new target of adding over 11,000 new homes by the end of the decade. They planned for more than 40% of those homes to be aimed at low-income and very-low-income households.
Just a few years later, the city has issued permits for 5,700 high-end homes, a thousand more than its goal for the entire decade. Most of those homes have been in East Chula Vista, where the city is growing the fastest.
Meanwhile, the city has issued less than 600 permits for affordable housing, far short of the 6,400 it plans to issue by the end of the decade.
To Kurz, it’s a structural challenge for the city. She said they have limited tools to influence what projects developers decide to build and what they can get funding for.
The Chula Vista City Council has taken some steps to increase their leverage. In November, they expanded existing requirements for housing developers to include more affordable homes in new apartment complexes or townhome developments.
But city leaders have also shot down other policies that housing advocates say could give developers more options.
Also last year, they rejected a proposal that would have increased the number of accessory dwelling unit cottages, or ADUs, that Chula Vista homeowners could build on their property. Homeowners are currently limited to one ADU.
Kurz wouldn’t say whether she thought Chula Vista would be able to meet its housing goals for the 2020s, but admitted it’s a tall order. “It is difficult to meet those without some really aggressive policies in place,” she said.
Still, Kurz said the city is fortunate to have access to land in East Chula Vista, where they can continue to build outwards.
Lopez, though, argues the city is focusing too much on the east side of the city and on attracting wealthy residents. To him, the numbers suggest that city leaders are forgetting about longtime West Chula Vista residents and their needs as the costs of rent and homes continue to rise.
“They set these goals, but what’s the plan?” he said.
