Politics

City Of San Diego Leverages Its Affordable Housing To Create More

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published February 3, 2010 at 12:03 PM PST

This story was published more than 14 years ago.

City Councilman Todd Gloria, chair of San Diego's Land Use and Housing Committee, outlines the increase in affordable housing units owned by the Housing Commission on February 3, 2010.

City Of San Diego Leverages Its Affordable Housing To Create More

The city of San Diego created almost 700 new affordable housing units last year, and plans to buy or build another thousand in the next five years.

Councilman Todd Gloria, chair of the city’s Land Use and Housing Committee, introduced a new report on the city’s efforts to increase affordable housing.

Gloria said the increase in units is the result of a deal with the federal government. The city agreed to forgo federal housing subsidies, in exchange for taking ownership of public housing. Now the city’s Housing Commission is leveraging loans on the value of that housing stock to build more.

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"The approach is much more entrepreneurial," Gloria said. "Rather than asking for more public housing units, we’re going to take our local assets, leverage them and create more housing, and no one else is doing that anywhere else in the country."

Gloria says 14,000 low income families received rental assistance from the city last year. However 35,000 people remain on the city’s waiting list for Section 8 rental assistance. That's more than last year.

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.