America’s Finest City features some of America’s highest costs of living.
Zillow, an online real estate company, estimates the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city of San Diego is $2,395. It’s a hefty price that many find challenging to afford.
“I couldn't imagine having the bulk of it, the majority of it, going just to my housing, especially when living and everything like that, gas, food, has increased so much in the last couple of years,” Olivia Dinardo, a Linda Vista resident, said.
Dinardo shares a home with two others, paying $1,200 for one room. Her friend Logan Kirin is in the same boat. She pays $1,430 for her room.
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“One of my roommates is a nanny,” Kirin, a North Park resident, said. "She has to work like 50-60 hours a week. She has two nanny jobs. She works the weekends as well."
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Despite both being highly-skilled nurses, they can't imagine affording their place while maintaining their lifestyle.
“If I leave, I'm going to have to have another roommate,” Dinardo said.
Financial advisers recommend following a plan in which your rent-to-income ratio is less than 30%. This means you would need to make at least $120,000 a year to comfortably afford a one-bedroom apartment in San Diego.
The median income for a single person in the city is only $81,000.
The California Department of Housing and Community Development says more than 50% of renters are spending more than what is considered affordable.
Homeowners face a similar problem. The average for single-family homes in San Diego is over $960,000.
Nearly 40% of owner households are spending more than what is recommended on their mortgage.
So why is housing so expensive?
“San Diego is a great place to live,” Randall Waynick, professor of management at Point Loma Nazarene University, said. “That drives the pricing up because there's more and more people choosing to settle here now.”
The State Department of Housing and Community Development says San Diego needs to plan for 161,980 housing units over the next eight years and that no less than 64,150 need to be lower income.
Meanwhile, Waynick says housing costs are also the biggest factor in our high inflation rate, and despite recent efforts by the Federal Reserve to cool it, he doesn’t see it impacting housing costs.
“What you'll see is, it's sort of pushing the balloon from one side to the other. The interest rates are going to go down, but the housing costs itself will probably go up,” Waynick said.
For now, Dinardo and Kirin make the most of their time in San Diego.
“I’ve decided to live in San Diego in my 20s because it's fun and it's exciting, but I've thought to myself that it's not somewhere I choose to settle down just because it is so expensive,” Kirin said.
Waynick did share some optimism. While he doesn’t expect housing costs to go down, he says other things like food and gas prices should start to ease up.
