How Adding an Airbnb is Akin to a Demolition
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If you want to understand San Diego’s housing crisis, forget the jargon for a moment. Forget the zoning charts, the staff reports, the alphabet soup of agencies. Start with something simple anyone can picture: a house. Now imagine it being knocked down. Imagine a demolition. Now imagine that happening 10,600 times.
That’s the number of San Diego homes now functioning as short-term rentals — Airbnbs, VRBOs, vacation bungalows dressed up as houses. Charming little demolitions, each one. They stand upright, freshly painted, Instagram-ready, but in housing terms they might as well be a pile of rubble. Some are empty second homes, rented only occasionally. Many are investments, rented constantly. But however often they’re booked, the effect is the same. Once a home becomes a short-term rental, it undergoes a quiet demolition — not with a wrecking ball, but with a booking link.
Once demolished, a family cannot live in it, a nurse cannot rent it, a young couple cannot begin their lives in it. That unit vanishes from the fragile ecosystem of available housing stock, and the disappearance doesn’t happen in isolation. A would-be renter stays where they are. Their home doesn’t open up for someone else. The chain reaction continues — down the market, across neighborhoods, through generations.
Housing does not behave like other markets. It isn’t elastic. It cannot be wished, willed or app-ified into existence. Remove a single home from San Diego’s housing stock, and you remove not just a unit but a possibility — the possibility that a teacher might live near her school, that a grown child might live near her parents, that a young family might put down roots here rather than in Austin or Phoenix or Boise.
In a city where housing is scarce, every demolished home matters. San Diego is not merely tight on housing, it is chronically, painfully short. Vacancy rates hover around 3% — so low they serve as a warning siren. Meanwhile, the state-mandated Regional Housing Needs Assessment has assigned San Diego a target of 108,036 new homes from 2021 to 2029 just to keep pace with projected population growth.
But every time we demolish a home by converting it into a short-term rental, we move backward.
We dig the hole deeper. The math is unforgiving: Take 108,036, subtract 10,600, and keep subtracting the new demolitions happening each month. We’re on a treadmill.
Supporters of short-term rentals argue that a few vacation homes can’t possibly affect a city this large. But this isn’t a few. 10,600 homes is a city within a city — a mid-sized American town’s worth of roofs and rooms and kitchens that San Diego families never get to touch. Housing does not replenish itself. It does not reappear after demolition.
This is the backdrop for the city’s proposed vacation home operation tax, intended to slow the propagation of short-term rentals and reclaim some of the housing we’ve effectively erased.
Reasonable people can debate whether the tax is the perfect tool. But the problem it seeks to address is unmistakable. It’s visible in our rent prices, our overcrowded apartments, our teachers commuting from Temecula, our adult children priced out of the communities that raised them, and our homelessness crisis intensified by every demolished unit.
None of this is complicated. When a scarce thing becomes scarcer, the people who need it suffer.
And in San Diego, housing is as precious as water in a drought. We should treat it as such.
An Airbnb is a demolition. No dust, no bulldozer, but a demolition all the same. And until we stop tearing down homes this way, we’ll never build enough to catch up.
Wilson is a housing advocate and asset manager who lives in Point Loma.
By Chase Wilson | December 11, 2025 | San Diego Union-Tribune | Opinion
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