The California Supreme Court has decided not to hear an appeal from the city of San Diego over a recent appellate court ruling that reinstated a 30-foot building height limit in the Midway District.
This means the height limit will remain in place, and developments like Midway Rising will need to find a different way to move forward.
Background
San Diego rezoned the entire Midway District to allow for over 10,000 new homes back in 2018, and the city did the environmental impact report (EIR) that is required under the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA.
In 2020, the city looked at exempting the area from the coastal height limit to facilitate projects like Midway Rising, which would bring over a thousand new homes to the neighborhood.
San Diego put the issue to voters as a ballot initiative, and voters approved the measure by a sizable margin. But a group called Save Our Access sued San Diego over the ballot measure, arguing the city didn’t do the required environmental impact reporting on the height limit question.
The city argued those impacts were covered by the EIR it did when it rezoned the Midway district, but the courts disagreed. The city went back and studied the impacts of taller buildings.
The firm hired by the city determined that taller buildings would not have any significantly different impact than those studied in the original EIR, and the city put the issue to voters once again in 2022.
Voters approved it a second time, and Save Our Access sued, again. The group argued the city should’ve done a whole new EIR for the height limit question, and the courts agreed.
The city appealed to the California Supreme Court, but that appeal was denied last week.
Looking Ahead
The Midway Rising team told Voice of San Diego last year that they believe the state’s density bonus law could allow them to move forward with the development regardless of the court’s decision. But the final project could look a lot different than what was originally proposed.
The California Department of Housing and Community Development confirmed that the density bonus law allows developers to exceed the local height limit in a letter sent to the city in 2022.
And the state Legislature has made efforts in recent years to streamline housing production, most notably with Senate Bill 131, which changes how CEQA is applied to housing developments.
