Thread: Planners say San Diego needs 390,000 more homes

Planners say region needs more homes

By Lori Weisberg, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
February 26, 2010

Online: To see forecastedgrowth by area, go to uniontrib.com/growthbycity

If the county feels a tad cramped and overcrowded today, try picturing a million more people here 40 years from now, many of them living in apartments, condominiums and townhomes concentrated in urban centers near trolley stations and bus stops.

Faced with the daunting task of plotting out San Diego County’s demographic landscape decades into the future, the region’s number crunchers have concluded that nearly 390,000 more homes will be needed to house an expected 1.2 million additional residents. That’s a 34 percent increase over the more than 1.1 million dwellings in 2008.

About 80 percent of the new homes would be multifamily units, a major reversal from years past, when residential development was dominated by the single-family tract home.

The 40-year forecast, which anticipates a population of nearly 4.4 million by 2050, will go before the county’s regional planning board today for approval. It is a crucial step before the San Diego Association of Governments can finish crafting a long-range transportation plan next year, detailing future investment in the region’s increasingly congested network of roads, freeways and public transit systems.

Although growth is projected to slow considerably over time as the population ages and baby boomers die off, planning for hundreds of thousands of homes requires a major shift in how and where they will be developed. Elected leaders acknowledge that some cities are more willing than others to accept higher-density, infill housing in their built-out neighborhoods.

“If you look back 10 years ago, the only kind of housing anyone wanted to talk about was single-family housing, and you had to bulldoze brush and keep sprawling outward,â€

In FL, Naples and Ft. Myers have done a fine job, taking popular commercial centers and converting upper floors of commercial space into housing units. No need to get in the car to go to the store when you can go downstairs, walk or grab the bike.
In drought-ridden FL, there is the consideration of impervious coverage, something which rainfall cannot trickle through to recharge the water tables. Impervious coverage, besides roads and parking lots, includes the roofs tops, and rather than expand into water recharge areas, the solution is to go up, using the same footprint of the previous building. And who would not love to get onto the sidewalk immediately to get some breakfast or lunch or groceries without getting into the car and driving for miles?