San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer is opening another salvo in his administration's efforts to address the city's housing affordability crisis by proposing the so-called "Complete Communities Housing Solutions Initiative," a scheme that looks beyond simply building new housing to embrace holistic urban development. 

The proposal was endorsed unanimously by the San Diego City Council's Land Use and Housing Committee last week, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune. The proposal presents an effort to refocus certain key elements of the city's zoning code to incentivize the development of smaller units, including one-bedroom and studio homes, and by allowing housing developers to offer community amenities that are decoupled from auto-oriented uses.

Describing the plan, San Diego planning director Mike Hansen tells The San Diego Union-Tribune, "We want to meet the needs of everyone in every neighborhood with an integrated land-use management approach that looks at not just housing, but also mobility, infrastructure, parks and quality of life,” he said. “We want to be planning the city in a more holistic way."

Under current metrics, for example, housing projects are measured according to the antiquated metric known as "dwelling-units-per-acre" that dictates an upper limit on the number of homes that can be built on a given parcel relative to a prescribed density level that sometimes conflicts with the size, height, and bulk that might be otherwise allowed by-right on a given site. This approach, according to the city's staff, generally pushes developers to build larger (and fewer) units, a phenomenon that, in aggregate, both limits supply and makes the homes that do get built larger and more expensive to rent or purchase. 

Under the new rules, developers would be allowed to switch to a "floor area ratio" (FAR) metric that instead places a limit on the amount of area built by a project overall, scrapping the residential density limits in their entirely in specific areas. This means that instead of seeing parcels maxed out at 20 or 100 units per acre, for example, a site will instead be limited by being built to a certain maximum size, say 50,000 or 200,000 square feet, as the case may be. The arrangement will allow developers to be more inventive with the number and types of units built within their projects, as long as they stay below the FAR requirement. Of course, the number of pluming and "wet" cores increase the cost of construction as they proliferate, so a certain balance between the number of units units and the number bathrooms/kitchens will ultimately be found based on the particularities of each lot, but along a more amenable rubric when compared to the strict dwelling-units-per-acre approach.

In addition, developers will be allowed to bring various types of amenities, like public gyms and parks, into being in order to mitigate the environmental impacts of their projects. The developers will also be required to incorporate pedestrian and multi-modal design approaches to reduce auto-dependency. On top of everything, sites that benefit from the new requirements will also be compelled to offer 20% of their residential units at below market rates, up from the current 10% inclusionary zoning requirements the city has in place. 

Next, the city's Planning Commission must approve the proposal before it heads for consideration by the San Diego City Council.