San Diego’s Modernized Zoning Project Has Made Development Easier

The City of San Diego has been updating its zoning for the last four or five years to ease the development process and encourage the construction of apartment units. The city’s development and planning strategies were the topic of the latest CREW San Diego meeting this week, and speakers agreed that the zoning modernization plan has been successful. Speakers at the meeting included moderator Betsy Brennan, CEO of Downtown San Diego Partnership and speakers Stephanie Smith, managing attorney of Grid Legal; Elyse Lowe, director of development services at City of San Diego; Laura Black, deputy director of community planning and implementation at the City of San Diego.

“City council has been discussing the effects of the housing crisis. Trying to create the easiest process possible so that developers don’t have to go to city council, which can be expensive and long,” Lowe said at the meeting, adding that the city is making a system to empower staff decisions. As a result, the new process has cut six months off of the permitting process. “We are trying to turnaround a slow system. This goes for land use plan updates and the city’s internal processes,” she said.

The city is not acting completely alone. State pressures to develop more housing have also influenced the modernization of the system, according to Lowe. They are requiring units to be added. They are also looking at what local governments are doing. What are the numbers? Where are those units going? They want to know everything from us. It’s a new level of detail,” she said.

Smith commended the city’s efforts to improve the development process as well as recent housing bills that have helped to ease the development process, like SB330, which prevents the city from making zoning or regulatory changes to a project after a preliminary application has been submitted, including impact fees. “Now if the zoning is inconsistent with the general plan, you can still go ahead if you comply with the general plan. It doesn’t have to be complying with both,” she said.

While the city has made efforts to improve the process, it hasn’t touched height limitations yet. The Midway pacific community plan update, for instance, didn’t tackle height limit. The coastal limit of 35 feet would take a vote of the people to overturn. In Linda Vista, the current overlay allows for 45 feet, but Black said that they are looking to make limitations on height even less restrictive.

Lowe added that with a new mayor and five new city council members starting next year, there will be an educational process to explain the current limitations. “The city wants to reduce height limits that are restrictive,” she said, which could be up to 100 feet with additional discretionary review. “Council also adopted mandatory 15% inclusionary housing,” she said. “Height has visual impacts, but few viewsheds are protected.”