S.D. Council Moves to Close Loophole in SRO Regulations

Moving to close what one council member said was a gaping loophole for developers, the San Diego City Council on Tuesday enacted an emergency ordinance that prohibits the construction of single-room occupancy hotels in the trendy Hillcrest and Mission Hills areas.

The moratorium, which was made retroactive to Monday, was passed 7-1 at the request of Councilman Ron Roberts, who accused developers of abusing the SRO regulations to build a glut of apartment units without the responsibility of providing parking spaces to go along with them.

Allowing developers to proceed unchecked, he said, would be to further aggravate the parking woes in crowded Hillcrest.

“The parking on the streets is already a problem,” Roberts said. “Building any of these units is literally going to overburden the streets with additional parking. It seemed to me to be an end run around legitimate zoning requirements.

‘It’s Subterfuge’

“It’s a loophole,” Roberts said. “It’s subterfuge.”

SRO hotels are usually located in commercial areas and feature units smaller than the typical apartment. The units, which often require sharing of kitchen and bathroom facilities, usually range from $200 to $375 a month--cheap enough for the elderly and low-income people.

The city is trying to preserve its stock of SROs and, to help keep the rents low, has agreed to waive its parking requirements for the units. In contrast, a developer building a conventional apartment complex must provide 1.6 parking spaces for every one-bedroom apartment he is constructing.

Until recently, all of the SROs had been concentrated downtown. But, Roberts said Tuesday, developers are now using the SRO regulations to build complexes in the Mission Hills-Hillcrest area.

Already, Roberts said, two projects have been approved totaling 94 units, but only six parking spaces. There are permits pending for an additional 263 units that provide only 78 parking spaces.

Roberts charged Tuesday that the so-called SROs are nothing more than scaled-down studio apartments, ranging in rent from $400 to $500 a month.

“What they are actually doing is building conventional apartment complexes, only smaller than the normal size, and by that they are being exempted from the IDO (the city’s interim development ordinance) . . . and parking requirements,” Roberts said.

‘Building a Slum’

“My concern was that we were literally building a slum and that’s what we tried to stop,” Roberts said.

Tess Wilcoxson, president of the Uptown Planners, added: SROs are “a new animal for us. It is the only place outside of downtown that they are being proposed.”

Roberts on Tuesday proposed an emergency ordinance that would require SRO developers in the Mission Hills-Hillcrest area to provide one parking space for every dwelling unit--a provision that could make the SROs economically infeasible. The ordinance could last up to one year.

Roberts also asked his colleagues that the emergency ordinance be made retroactive to Monday because yet another developer had applied for an additional 145 SRO units.

An attorney for the developer, Stu Miller, said making the moratorium retroactive was unfair because his client had been working with the planning department on the new units for more than a year. Councilman Ed Struiksma agreed, and voted against the ordinance with its retroactive provision.

But six other council members sided with Roberts and voted for his moratorium. Councilwoman Gloria McColl was absent.

Asked if the restrictions meant the end of his project, Miller said: “Yeah. Dead.”

Also on Tuesday, council members gave final approval to the Uptown Community Plan, which shows how the area should be zoned and developed. A city traffic engineer said that, if built out to capacity, the plan would result in a 65% increase in traffic, but Roberts and Wilcoxson said they doubted that figure and said a portion of that would be picked up by public transportation.