In San Diego County, a family of four earning just under $140,000 a year qualifies as “low income” for government housing programs. The number is that high because the standard tracks the high cost of housing here. It’s also the clearest evidence we know that our housing shortage has outgrown the government subsidy programs built to manage it.
Simply put, the fix has to match the size of the problem: we need to build a lot more housing, at every price point, faster than California is building now. Government subsidies can rescue individual families, and it should keep doing that.
But state and local budgets don’t have enough money to address a shortfall measured in millions of homes. Letting homebuilders build more homes is the only lever with that kind of reach.
New homes will help the people who move into them, but also renters and buyers who never move into them. Take a building where only 21 of 140 homes are subsidized as affordable, with thousands on the waitlist for those 21. Critics may say that ratio is proof the other 119 units don’t matter. They do. Each market-rate lease pulls someone out of an older, cheaper home down the street. That frees up that home and cools the bidding wars driving its price up. If you block new housing, that demand still exists, but it drives up prices on cheaper homes elsewhere.
Allowing more homes on a lot also attacks a critical cost: the land itself. A lot in coastal San Diego County will always be expensive because it’s a highly desirable region. One house means one family pays for the whole lot; four townhomes on that same lot mean four families split it. That’s why a new townhome usually sells for less, in total, than a comparable new detached house nearby.
In a county where it is illegal to build more than a single-detached house on over 80% of residential land, we are rigidly tying a low-income family’s ability to rent or own housing to the price of a quarter acre of the most desirable land in the country. Our regime of artificially low-density land use was introduced explicitly to exclude, and it still enforces exclusion quite effectively today.
This is why state involvement exists at all: the state didn’t take local authority away from cities out of distrust; it did it because voluntary planning wasn’t producing housing. Cities had years to zone for the homes they were assigned, and many used that time to write plans that got rejected while leaving almost all their land reserved for single-detached houses anyway.
The consequence — losing the ability to reject qualifying projects — falls only on cities with that track record. What reads as Sacramento overreach in ADU programs and density bonuses is really the fallback for local governments that had every chance to build and chose not to.
The skeptics are right that allowing more homes doesn’t make insurance, lumber, or labor cheaper. But not building housing doesn’t make those things cheaper. The insurance market, tariffs, and a lack of trained workers are problems that a single city cannot solve, and state-sized problems require state-sized solutions.
That $140,000 family eligible for government housing programs is a red alarm for every household further down the ladder, with far less room to absorb the same squeeze. California can keep raising the limit for who counts as struggling, or it can build enough homes, so fewer families need government help.
Thomas LaCroix is the North Coastal Political Director for the YIMBY Democrats of San Diego County. Saad Asad is a former board member of the YIMBY Democrats of San Diego County.
