San Diego 101: The Housing Crisis

By Maya Srikrishnan, the Voice of San Diego

December 7, 2021

If you’ve moved to San Diego – or even if you’ve lived here your whole life – you’ve probably noticed that it’s really expensive to find a place to live. The city has a large homeless population, the cost of rent eats away a bulk of our paychecks, and for most people, purchasing a home is out of reach.

For years, we’ve been hearing about the housing crisis in San Diego and throughout the state of California. But why have things gotten so bad?

In our newest San Diego 101 episode, hosts Adriana Heldiz and Maya Srikrishnan explain why housing is so expensive in San Diego and how a long legacy of racist housing policies have made the crisis even more acute for communities of color.

Heldiz and Srikrishnan talk to Ricardo Flores, executive director of LISC, which helps finance affordable and homeless housing throughout the region, and Ginger Hitzke, an affordable housing developer, to explain how we got to today’s housing crisis and who the crisis hurts most.

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