The City of San Diego is a desirable location to live and vacation.
The latter being one of the reasons why short-term vacation rentals are popular in the San Diego area.
San Diego City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera is now proposing the “Vacation Home Operation Tax to Preserve Housing.”
“It would be a tax on vacation homes. That means 99% and I mean that literally 99% of San Diegans would not pay this tax and it’s a way of ensuring that people who have homes in San Diego that are not being used for homes as San Diegans pay their fair share,” Councilmember Elo-Rivera said.
The Councilmember states that the proposal puts vacation homes into categories.
“There’s about 10,500 homes that fall into these two categories and once again these are two types of homes. There’s one that I referred to before a Texas billionaire owns it it sits on a cliff in La Jolla and it sits empty most of the year by definition and there’s a public safety cost to homes like that as well as a moral question for us about how we feel having 10 or 15 bedrooms sit empty most of the year while there are people sleeping on the streets in this city and then there are the 5,500 homes or so that are full-time full home vacation rentals ,” Elo-Rivera said.
Currently, the proposed actions are that Sean Elo-Rivera’s office will work with the Independent Budget Analyst and the Office of the City Treasurer to compile background information and provide preliminary analysis of the proposal and work with the City Attorney’s Office to prepare ballot measure language, according to a City of San Diego Staff Report.
Councilmember Elo-Rivera’s Office began discussions about the framework for the ballot measure and how the policy will work if passed, according to Councilmember Elo-Rivera.
The proposal calls for a general tax ballot measure to be placed on the June 2026 ballot in the City of San Diego.
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