Future Of Housing At Stake In County Supes Race

By MacKenzie Elmer, the Voice of San Diego

October 15, 2024

Though courts recently upended the county of San Diego’s power over where housing could be built in the backcountry, the fate of development still hangs in the balance. It is dependent on whether Democrat and environmentalist Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer can defend her seat this November against Republican challenger and former city of San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer.

Faulconer and Lawson-Remer are arguing about a lot of things and are very different leaders. Perhaps the starkest impact of the voters’ choice will be on where the county allows housing. If Faulconer is elected, housing could be spread beyond city limits in San Diego. If Lawson-Remer is re-elected, she may try to make much more of the county off limits to development.

If Faulconer wins, he’ll tip the majority Democrats hold on the Board of Supervisors back into Republican hands. And onlookers assumed he’d change the rules and allow more housing projects to sprawl into the backcountry despite climate change policies bent on curbing commutes and greenhouse gas emissions.

Business interest groups blamed those rules, which are centered around a climate-informed calculation known as vehicle miles traveled, for choking off development. Developers assumed they’d face huge fees to mitigate the driving and planet-warming gases their projects created. Some said they decided not to even try to build them.

Lawson-Remer and her Democratic colleagues were frequently swayed by neighbors who fought to keep new housing out of their rustic communities. They often voted to require developers to do more environmental studies. Those added months, even years, to project timelines – as effective as killing them outright. Democrats reasoned their motive was appropriately cautionary and based in good environmental stewardship.

Voice interviews with each candidate revealed starkly different values when it comes to this question of prioritizing climate change or housing. Faulconer believes housing should be built no matter what. Lawson-Remer said the future of these driving rules on housing development is out of the county’s hands.

The county already lost in court to a developer whose project fit within the county’s general plan for development. The courts said the county couldn’t require those kinds of projects to do any more environmental studies, what Lawson-Remer and her Democratic colleagues called for.

That means the county should eventually rewrite and make more progressive its massive general plan that sets the goal posts for climate-based building decisions.

“There’s going to have to be a general plan update in a couple of years in any case,” Lawson-Remer said, adding that doing a rewrite now would upend the years of work rewriting county’s new Climate Action Plan. “When we do have to do a general plan update, it will become much more centered around carbon emissions instead of the way it was done last time which was an afterthought.”

Faulconer wants to leave the one the county has intact, which passed in 2011 before modern climate rules.

And the two are opposed on how the county should even measure the miles someone might drive based on where housing is built. The county board, including Lawson-Remer, voted to go with what the state recommends: Compare miles driven to get between work and home in the backcountry to that of the inner city. By default, projects built further away from an urban center get dinged by that math.

Faulconer said he’d reverse the county’s position for math that’s much more developer-friendly.

“If we are in a housing crisis, which we are, we should be doing everything that we can to increase supply,” Faulconer said. “They’ve done what everyone feared and constricted supply.”

How Commutes Changed Development

In 2013, the state signed Senate Bill 743 into law which changed how California assessed the impact of planet-warming emissions from transportation, specifically, driving – by far the largest source of greenhouse gasses in the state – when anyone wanted to build something.

The law created a measurement called vehicle miles traveled. That means driving impacts to the environment should be counted by the number of miles someone drives. This was a big change because, before that, California cared more about quantifying traffic congestion as the standard for measuring environmental impacts of a development. Then, it was more about moving cars faster than trying to prevent the need to drive.

San Diego County had to figure out how to start assessing driving impacts differently when the law became effective in 2020. Its planning rules were rooted in the old, congestion-quantifying way. So officials devised new policies to move the county in a more climate-focused, progressive direction.

Developers were most worried the new VMT rules require mitigation. If they build a housing project that creates a lot more driving for San Diegans, they’ll have to do or pay more, to lessen the environmental impact of driving gas-powered cars. Examples could be building bicycle lanes or sidewalks, increasing access to public transit. But that costs money. Charging developers a fee would be one way to get it.

One county-commissioned study estimated such a policy change could cost a developer a fee of between $10,000 and $19,000 per mile of driving their project created.

Nobody was happy.

The leader of the Building Industry Association declared that the county “is dead to us.”

Environmentalists sued the county claiming their transportation plans didn’t go far enough to protect the environment.

The county still hasn’t approved a hard fee on developers for vehicle miles traveled. The board asked staff to come back later in the year with a recommendation.

Since then, the politics on this issue have been divided down party-lines, with the two Republicans on the board fighting for housing to take precedence over climate policies.

“We’ve got communities that are kind of dying on the vine because of no new development, housing or growth coming in,” said Republican Supervisor Jim Desmond during a May board meeting.

Desmond voted with his Democratic colleagues in 2021 to put tougher climate rules in place, what the state recommended. But during that May meeting, Desmond intimated that was the wrong choice.

“Everything we’ve done regarding VMT has been out of fear of litigation,” he said. “We did the most restrictive (thing) and we got sued anyway… We’ve got to get back to basics and build housing.”

Faulconer agrees and called the county’s current path an effective “building moratorium” in a recent debate with Lawson-Remer. Both Desmond, Faulconer and Republican Joel Anderson believe opening up the backcountry to housing would cut down on climate emissions because, they say, people are choosing instead to live in Riverside County and commute into San Diego.

“The more you have housing located closer to job centers, it’s going to be better,” Faulconer said, when asked whether he has any plan for mitigating the driving and cost to the climate a return to free-for-all building spree in the county

Lawson-Remer believes the county’s current path – one of following the county’s general plan and devising ways for developers to pay for the driving their projects create – is just following state law.

“My job is to make sure we’re compliant with the law as a county so we don’t get sued,” she said.

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