The San Diego City Council approved a resolution last week that asks staff to craft a measure that would place a $900 million affordable housing bond initiative on November's ballot.
The measure, approved by the council on a 6-3 vote, instructs staff to come back with language for a ballot measure to be voted on by the council in June.
The partisan-split vote had Republicans Chris Cate and Scott Sherman joining Independent Mark Kersey in opposition. All six Democrats supported the resolution.
If approved by voters, the bonds would finance the construction of permanent supportive housing and affordable housing units for veterans, seniors, youth, persons with disabilities, and lower-income families with children with the aim of reducing homelessness.
The San Diego Housing Federal first proposed the bond two years ago, which are expected to pay for 7,500 affordable housing units. The bonds would be repaid through a property tax levying an increase of 19 cents per $1,000 of assessed valuation, or roughly $72 a year for the average-priced home.
Critics argued the tax places too much of a burden on struggling middle-class homeowners.
Proponents argued that the city is missing out on matching state funds that are instead going to other large California cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles that have already approved affordable housing bond measures.
Democrat Chris Ward, who spearheaded the measure, tweeted the vote “brings us one step closer to establishing a desperately needed source of local funding for critically needed homes, and allows San Diego to tap into hundreds of millions of dollars of state and federal funding that would otherwise be left on the table.”
The council will need to approve placing the measure on the ballot by a two-thirds vote, and then voters will need to approve it in November with a similar two-thirds margin.
San Diego already has a hotel tax hike on the March ballot to combat homeless — and San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, that measure's creators lobbied for it in his State of the City speech.
The mayor opened his speech by sharing a story about a formerly homeless Navy veteran who thanked him for a program that got him into housing. The veteran, who was addicted to drugs and once lived under a freeway, now lives in a former motel the City and San Diego Housing Commission rehabilitated into veteran housing units.
The mayor didn’t speak to the proposed bond, but asked voters to support Measure C, the March measure that would raise hotel taxes to build housing and fix streets.
Faulconer put out a call to action on reducing homelessness saying “it’s time to get real about these problems.”
“It’s not acceptable to condone living outdoors in urban areas. It’s not humane to let people with severe mental illness wander our streets,” Faulconer said. “It’s time to clean up the unsafe homeless encampments that symbolize California’s failure to act.”
