Dealing With ‘Minidorms’

San Diego is not a college town in the sense of Berkeley or Iowa City. But San Diego State University and UC San Diego still dominate their immediate communities.

At UCSD, 38% of the 17,600 students live on campus, the second-highest proportion of any public university in the state, and the university plans to increase that to 50% as it grows. But only 7% of SDSU’s 35,000 students live on campus. More than 5,000 others live within a mile of it, mostly in apartments, but increasingly in single-family homes.

Not surprisingly, this has caused parking, traffic and noise problems, exacerbated by some landlords who rent to large groups, turning two-, three- and four-bedroom homes into “minidorms.” Thus far, attempts to control minidorms have been mostly ineffective. Zoning restrictions limiting the number of residents in a home, based on the size of bedrooms, the number of baths and the amount of off-street parking, are difficult to enforce.

Now some city officials and community leaders want to revive a concept struck down by the state Supreme Court in 1980 and impose different standards on “traditional” and “nontraditional” families. The city attorney’s office is working on a measure that would impose stricter parking requirements on households of unrelated people. A citywide planning group wants to prohibit more than three unrelated people from living together in single-family neighborhoods. Proponents hope today’s more conservative court would rule differently than the 1980 court.

But both proposals are inherently unfair and violate individual rights as much today as 10 years ago. They are also likely to be as difficult to police as the current zoning restrictions. And, in the country’s least affordable rental market, any restrictions on unrelated people sharing quarters would only make a bad housing problem worse.

Cal State San Marcos may bring some relief, and the SDSU foundation plans to develop more student housing. But there will always be students wanting to live in single-family homes, and the city needs to find better ways to enforce zoning and parking restrictions. One promising proposal would treat rental properties as the business they are and require landlords to obtain permits. This makes more sense than the city trying to define a family.