With rents soaring and the homeless population growing, San Diego County supervisors are set to put $25 million into a trust fund to help create more affordable homes.

The trust, first proposed three months ago, is intended to put a dent in the region’s increasing shortage of affordable housing and help some of the most vulnerable residents. Supervisors voted unanimously in support of the trust on Tuesday, and the matter will return to the board in October for final consideration.

“Clearly the populations we have in this region in need of affordable housing is getting bigger and bigger every day,” Supervisor Greg Cox said. “If we don’t do something and try and provide more affordable housing, those numbers are going to increase in the future.”

The most recent tally of homeless people found that there are about 9,000 living outdoors or in temporary shelters, while other studies have found that people are spending too much of their income on rent as the supply of affordable housing dwindles.


The trust, which was endorsed in concept by the supervisors in June, will be administered by the county’s Health and Human Services Department and used for specific projects included in the chief administrative officer’s budget. Projects that house people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, veterans, people with disabilities, seniors, transitional age youth, and families, will move to the front of the line for funding.

Non-profit organizations and private businesses can use the money to rehabilitate low-rent homes or build new ones and provide subsidies to keep housing costs low. Funds can be spent on permits and fees, labor, supplies, real estate, or as collateral to help secure loans. Estimates vary, but the county estimated that it could cost between $11,000 to $300,000 per home, depending on the type of project.

In an effort to stretch the value of the county’s dollars, projects that use the trust money to leverage additional funds from other sources will be given priority.

But a suggestion by Supervisor Dianne Jacob to drug-test people who participate in these housing programs may mean that some projects could be ineligible for some federal funds, a crucial source of ongoing support for affordable housing programs.


“I don’t want to be providing housing to feed somebody’s drug habit,” she said at the supervisors’ meeting.

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development requires programs that receive funding to shelter people whether or not they are sober. Under its “housing first” model an increasingly popular protocol that has been embraced in San Diego and elsewhere, stable shelter is a necessity that must be satisfied before the underlying problems that cause homelessness can be addressed.

“We know that stability allows residents and their children to focus on their education and employment and quality of life,” said Nick Macchione, the director of the county’s Health and Human Services Agency.

One Vista-based group, Solutions for Change, has decided to forego about $600,000 per year from HUD because it requires drug testing and other practices that conflict with federal funding policies. While drug testing can cost an organization money from HUD, it is legal.


HUD’s funding requirements are themselves controversial, and some politicians, including Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, are pushing the department to change its policies to allow projects that drug-test residents to receive funding.

In a statement, Jacob said she’d like programs that receive county money to test for drug abuse, but at the same time wants to see the housing-first model and other protocols that work to be implemented different communities.

“While I acknowledge there are legal challenges with mandating drug testing for every project, there may be proposals that come forward that provide housing designed for substance abuse recovery patients,” she said. “However, I think we also need to consider housing first and other models to see what ends up working in each community.”

Stephen Russell, the executive director of the San Diego Housing Federation, said the trust is a “very small commitment to an enormous problem” that he hopes is a success.


“It is leading you toward those solution, and I commend you for doing that...But please know that we want this to prove the concept to make a solid case for future investment,” he said told the supervisors.

San Diego County is short about 142,000 affordable units, according to the California Housing Partnership Corporation.

Supervisor Ron Roberts said that the trust helps address a housing problem that policy makers have created.

“In some respects, it’s a crisis of our own making,” he said. “Government has largely got into the way, government has largely said no. Government has largely come up with concepts and theories that has made building housing difficult.”


In some cases, such as in the city of San Diego, affordable if sometimes substandard housing has been torn down over the years and replaced with other housing, with the promise that enough affordable units would be created as replacements. That largely hasn’t happened.

Supervisor Bill Horn said he supports the trust, but he wants to make sure that projects that receive money stay on budget, or that ones that are loaned cash from the trust pay it back.

“I am concerned that when we use public money we forget the fact that we have to be accountable for it,” he said.


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joshua.stewart@sduniontribune.com


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