In San Diego County, only Chula Vista, San Diego, and Imperial Beach currently have tenant protection ordinances with more protections than the state’s Tenant Protection Act. In February of 2026, Lemon Grove City Council adopted a temporary ordinance that gave tenants 120 days to vacate their apartments for all no-fault evictions. They also increased the relocation assistance that landlords must pay tenants. This was thanks to the advocacy of the tenants of the Sierra Grove apartment complex, who pointed out that their landlord was violating the state Tenant Protection Act of 2019 regarding the requirements to evict tenants for substantial renovations. The landlord, Orsett Serra Grove, purchased their building in November of 2025 and promptly wanted to evict all tenants to raise the rents. Mayor Snow of Lemon Grove, who is a tenant rights’ attorney, had originally wanted to enact stronger protections that would severely restrict large landlords’ ability to do renovictions, but most of the city council opposed the proposal.

Unfortunately, in mid-March, Lemon Grove City Council repealed the portion of the ordinance that gave tenants 120 days to vacate their apartments when being evicted. This reversal of the policy has led to growing disagreements in the city council over how to proceed in passing a permanent tenant protection ordinance. The city is holding a public workshop on April 9, 2026, at the Lemon Grove Community Center (3146 School Ln, Lemon Grove, 91945). Lemon Grove will hopefully see a proposal for a permanent tenant protection ordinance in early summer, albeit with stiff opposition from several council members.

The Context: Avoiding Tenant Power

City councils are slow to move on proposals that would improve existing tenancies or give tenants more power to stay in their homes. Politicians tend to prefer developer-centered incentive programs requiring construction projects to create a certain percentage of affordable units. Although these units are classified as “affordable”, many are ultimately more expensive than the rents that the long-term tenants displaced by redevelopment projects were paying. Redevelopment projects can price tenants out of their neighborhoods entirely. As our friends at Los Angeles Tenant Union have argued, “affordable housing” is often an outright scam: affordability is “the term by which city officials promise housing for the poor and working people and, by those very same housing schemes, take it away.”

It is easy to see these flaws with developer-centered incentive programs in the City of San Diego’s affordable housing ordinances. San Diego’s “Inclusionary Affordable Development Regulations” require new developments, including those adding on to existing buildings, to reserve 10% of units for low-income or very low-income renters. “Low” and “very low” income are calculated using the Area Median Income, which was $130,800.00 for San Diego County in 2025. In 2025, a unit was very low income if the rent was $1,635.00 a month and low income if it was $1,962.00 a month. Rent restrictions on low or very low-income units generally last 55 years. SDMC §§ 142.1301-142.1314. However, if a developer adds accessory dwelling units (ADUs) restrictions only last 10 years. SDMC §§ 141.0302. Under these Affordable Development Regulations, there is no requirement to preserve existing tenancies or naturally occurring affordable units destroyed by a development project. Furthermore, the law doesn’t stop landlords from massively inflating rents for the other 90% of units in a given project and driving up rents across the neighborhood.

San Diego’s “Dwelling Unit Protection Regulations” (SDMC §§ 143.1201-143.1212) are only designed to preserve naturally occurring affordable housing when a property is demolished to make room for a new project. After a landlord destroys an apartment complex, the law requires that the landlord replace each unit where a low-income or very low-income resident lived in the past five years with a unit that would, in theory, be affordable for that resident. However, there are several caveats:

• First, “affordable” doesn’t mean that the rent is as low or lower than the previous rents at the building; 
• Second, the protected low-income units may count toward and reduce the 10% Inclusionary Affordable Development Regulation requirement;
• Third, since the demolition regulations have no robust notice requirement and residents can be evicted six months before the demolition even begins, the original residents are unlikely to return to the “new” affordable housing anyway. 

None of San Diego’s housing ordinances touch the primary mechanism that landlords use to displace residents and raise rents: Renovictions. Developers across San Diego buy up buildings, evict all the existing tenants under the pretext of making renovations so big that they can’t be completed with the tenants in place, and then raise the rents drastically. Currently, only tenants are fighting the battle against these so-called “substantial remodels.” For example, Imperial Beach only recently passed some protections against renoviction in response to extensive organizing by the tenants of Hawaiian and Sussex Gardens. Even then, the version of the ordinance that passed did not, in fact, help the tenants who advocated for it at all. Their landlord, F&F Properties, is the same landlord that lobbied hard against San Diego’s Tenant Protection Ordinance when it was being debated.  

The most impactful and truly “affordable” housing solution is to give tenants the power to stay in their long-time homes and punish forcible dislocation. Since city councils and the state legislature won’t grant us that power, we have to organize to create that power ourselves.