San Diego has experienced a welcome trifecta: More housing, better rents and a lower homeless count.
It would be nice if it was simply that the first two resulted in the third, but the recent positive trend in the unhoused tally isn’t so easily explained.
As when homelessness is on the rise, many factors are cited, and none provide definitive answers. Nevertheless, affordable housing or the lack of it is always central to the discussion.
San Diego officials have been frustrated for years by increasing homeless counts despite millions of dollars spent and an unknown amount of sweat and tears and sometimes blood expended to reverse it.
So the results of the annual January point-in-time homeless count released last week should be widely celebrated, while acknowledging the trend is fragile and storm clouds loom on the horizon — especially with the anticipated Trump istration cuts in federal housing and homeless programs and economic uncertainty.
A few highlights from the count: The “unsheltered” tally countywide was down 6.5 percent from 2024 and the sheltered homeless count was 7 percent lower. Homelessness among veterans, young people and families was down by wide margins.
The unsheltered figure would be even lower if the federal government allowed the count to include people staying at sanctioned safe sleeping campsites and car lots, all of which have security guards, showers and other services found at traditional shelters.
There were previous signs that things might be looking up in San Diego. The 2024 count showed an increase, but it seemed to be slowing.
Tamera Kohler, head of the Regional Task Force on Homelessness, told Blake Nelson of The San Diego Union-Tribune last week that the improved situation likely resulted from a number of factors. Among them: a stable rental market, expanded shelter options, investments in mental health and substance abuse services and programs aimed at keeping people from becoming homeless.
San Diego County is in the midst of an apartment boom that has flattened rents and lowered them in some areas, according to a report earlier this month by the Union-Tribune’s Phillip Molnar. That’s a departure from double-digit increases in recent years.
More than 4,000 new apartments are expected to open this year. A current vacancy rate of 5.1 percent is slightly lower than last year, but still healthy enough to reduce upward pressure on rents.
Compared with many other regions in the country, San Diego is still expensive. In central city neighborhoods surrounding Balboa Park — one of the less-expensive areas surveyed by Molnar — the average monthly rent was $1,997, down 0.1% annually.
Nevertheless, there’s a strong connection between rent increases and homelessness in cities across the nation, according to the Pew Charitable Trust and other research organizations.
“In recent years, many metro areas in the U.S. have seen stark increases in levels of homelessness along with fast-rising rents,” Pew said in a 2023 study. “At the same time, some other locales that saw slow rent growth experienced declines in homelessness.”
Specifically, reducing the gap between rent and income level is seen as key to keeping people from becoming homeless. A robust local job market also likely factored into San Diego’s declining homeless numbers.
Still, the market hasn’t provided enough affordable housing in San Diego, even though many jurisdictions require most housing projects to include some rent-restricted units for lower-income residents.
The boom may be short lived. When rents flatten or drop, apartment projects aren’t as profitable and developers can lose interest. That happened in Minneapolis, Minn., where an upzoning led to more multi-family housing and lower rents, which resulted in some builders backing off.
Further, Nathan Moeder, a San Diego housing analyst with London Moeder Advisors, told Molnar that some local developers have pulled out of apartment projects because of higher interest rates and increased costs.
The region has seen an overall increase in housing permits in recent years, but that trend also could succumb to changing market forces.
The market can’t do it alone. More subsidies, more help with financing homes and increased incentives to make housing more affordable are needed.
The trends in the homelessness tallies may be more significant than the actual numbers because there’s almost certainly an undercount, experts say. Despite the decrease, it is often pointed out that the number of people seeking homeless services continues to grow. The number of people becoming homeless regularly outpaces those becoming housed on a monthly basis.
ers of bans on camping in public places say those laws have contributed to the positive trend, but where all those people go is still not clear. Shelters are nearly full all the time, with the vast majority of people seeking a bed rejected.
The count also likely misses people couch surfing, otherwise doubling up on housing or living in motels.
Some very grim numbers aren’t always mentioned in regard to the homeless count: the hundreds of unhoused people who have died in San Diego County. Except for a drop last year to 495 people, deaths of homeless people have risen steadily for at least a decade.
Deaths increased dramatically from 2020 through 2024, when 2,616 homeless people died, according to the San Diego County Medical Examiner.
It will never be known if having a roof over their heads may have helped keep those people alive.
But this much is clear: More affordable housing may not be the sole answer to homelessness, but it’s a big part of one.
What they said
CNN headline.
“The 10 richest Americans got $365 billion richer in the past year. Now they’re on the verge of a huge tax cut.”
