San Diego’s historic district rules were designed to protect neighborhood character, and for the people who own property in them, they work beautifully. For almost everyone else, they’re a part why the city is becoming unaffordable.
A report released this month is giving those property owners cover to block reforms that could change these rules — and it deserves a closer look.
The city is thousands of homes short of what its residents need, and the gap is visible in the costs — and in who can afford to stay. The neighborhoods best placed to absorb more housing — North Park, South Park, Mission Hills and Golden Hill — are close to jobs, schools and transit. But building there isn’t straightforward.
Historic district rules in parts of these areas require new construction to pass a compatibility review — a process that typically takes a year or more, adds significant cost and can end in outright rejection. Every project that gets blocked or never proposed is a family priced further from where they need to be.
Justifying these rules on affordability grounds doesn’t hold up. Older housing is more affordable everywhere in San Diego, designated or not, because it’s smaller, denser and predates the era of large suburban homes. The report compares designated neighborhoods against a citywide average that includes Rancho Bernardo and Scripps Ranch, finds they’re more affordable, and credits the designation.
But these neighborhoods were already more affordable before they were ever designated. That’s just the benefit of smaller homes built close to one other.
And what affordability remains in these neighborhoods is disappearing. Median household incomes there rose 34% between 2013 and 2023, faster than the citywide rate, and the report calls that a sign of economic vitality. A more accurate word is displacement.
Lower-income renters get priced out, higher-earning newcomers take their place, and the median income rises not because existing residents are doing better but because they’ve left. Preservation rules did nothing to prevent that, and may have made it worse. The fewer homes available, the less leverage renters have, and these rules kept homes scarce.
In these districts, 77% of homeowners are white — in a city where white residents make up just 41% of the population. The report points to a 183% increase in non-white homeownership since 2010 as evidence of progress. That sounds significant until you do the math: just roughly 40 additional non-white owner households per year across 16 neighborhoods.
More to the point, these neighborhoods are 72% renters. Renters are the people most exposed to rising costs, most likely to have already left, and least represented in an analysis built around who owns property. The report’s signature affordability program, the Mills Act, cuts property taxes for historic homeowners, who are, by the report’s own data, 77% white and wealthy. That lost tax revenue comes out of the same pool that funds schools, which matter most to the renters who get nothing from the program.
The report’s climate case also misses the forest for the trees. Rehabilitating a single century-old building may produce lower construction emissions than building new, but a worker in Chula Vista driving forty-five minutes each way because nothing affordable exists closer cannot live a low-carbon life. Every family pushed to far suburbs is driving, every day, for years. Preserving a single building does nothing to offset that pollution, while building more homes in neighborhoods near jobs can.
San Diego’s historic districts have genuine architectural character worth preserving, and the city’s upcoming reforms would do exactly that, but also create objective standards for new construction near historic properties, streamline conversions of underused buildings into housing, and strengthen enforcement against owners who let protected properties deteriorate.
Every year these rules go unreformed, San Diego gets a little more expensive, a little more unequal, a little more comfortable for those who designated their properties, and a little more out of reach for everyone else. Let’s fix that.
Saad Asad is a former board member for the YIMBY Democrats of San Diego County.
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