San Diego creates committee to tackle city's cost-of-living crisis
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San Diego is one of the most expensive cities in America, and now the city council has created a committee specifically tasked with tackling it.
Why it matters: High housing, transportation, water and energy costs all conspire to squeeze family budgets, driving away residents and diminishing quality of life.
Driving the news: New council president Joe LaCava last week assigned his colleagues to the subject-specific committees that drive city policy discussion, and created a new one focused only on the cost-of-living.
- Council member Sean Elo-Rivera, the former council president, will chair the committee.
By the numbers: The San Diego metro area was the 10th most expensive in the country during the third quarter of 2024, according to the Council for Community and Economic Research.
- The organization's cost-of-living index pegged San Diego as 46.5% more expensive than the national average, up from 41.7% a year earlier.
- California had five metro areas among the country's 10 most expensive.
What he's saying: "The cost of living is the biggest issue affecting San Diegans, and it is the thing that most threatens the city in a palpable way when you talk to folks," Elo-Rivera said.
State of play: The city's existing committees already deal with affordability issues — the land-use committee handles zoning and development-related decisions, for instance — but Elo-Rivera said he envisions the special committee identifying areas that can provide immediate relief.
- He pointed to the council's move this year to ban "algorithmic price fixing" in the housing market and to force grocery stores that offered digital-only coupons to extens them to all customers as examples of the type of policy areas the committee would take up.
- "Obviously, cost of living is impacted by global economic issues, but it also feels to me that our entire economy consists of transactions that are being gamified by Big Tech and Wall Street to squeeze every cent out of us," Elo-Rivera said. "We wont get it all back at once, but $5, $10 at a time."
Between the lines: "As Democrats generally, a fair critique of us is that we fly the success banner on the passing of policy, which doesn't matter to people. And why should it? It matters when their lives change based on the implementation of a policy we pass," Elo-Rivera said.