By Jose E. Navarro | The Navarro Report | San Diego
After two years of on-again, off-again negotiations, the deal to build state-mandated affordable housing on Del Mar Fairgrounds property is dead. On Tuesday, the 22nd District Agricultural Association board, the governor-appointed body that runs the Fairgrounds, voted 5-3 to terminate its exclusive negotiating agreement with the city of Del Mar, ending a partnership first signed in 2024 to identify a site for roughly 61 affordable units the city needs to meet its state housing quota.
A Deal That Was Never Quite Stable
The agreement had nearly collapsed twice before this final vote. Board members paused talks in early 2025 after accusing Del Mar’s mayor of undercutting the Fairgrounds’ interests in a separate rail-alignment dispute, and paused them again months later over the city’s support for a statewide ballot initiative some board members considered hostile to affordable housing generally. Each time, the two sides patched things back together. This time, the sticking point was jurisdictional: the only Fairgrounds site the board considered viable, a current RV park, technically sits within the city of San Diego’s boundaries rather than Del Mar’s, meaning Del Mar would need San Diego to formally annex the land before it could claim housing credit for anything built there. Del Mar’s mayor told the board that conversations with San Diego’s council on annexation were going well. Board member Ted Miyahara wasn’t persuaded, and the votes to kill the agreement followed.
The Backup Plan Nobody in Del Mar Wants
The practical effect is to push the housing obligation back onto Del Mar’s North Bluff, the site the city has been trying to avoid for years. The state’s housing department has told Del Mar plainly that if the Fairgrounds option fails, the city must rezone the North Bluff site under its Housing Element’s backup provision — clearing the way for a 259-unit project that a developer, Seaside Ridge, has been trying to build there since 2022, and which Del Mar has resisted at nearly every turn, including litigation over the city’s refusal to process the application at all.
Del Mar voters have already weighed in once on North Bluff development, rejecting a smaller 2020 ballot measure that paired a hotel project with 22 affordable units by roughly 60%. That result is the clearest evidence yet that the two years spent negotiating with the Fairgrounds were, in part, an attempt to find literally any other location than the one the city’s own residents had already voted down.
The NIMBY Math Behind the Headlines
Strip away the jurisdictional technicalities and the story is a familiar one across coastal San Diego County: a state mandate meets a local government that supports affordable housing in principle while working, meeting after meeting, to place it somewhere else. A 2024 state bill from Sen. Catherine Blakespear that would have forced a Fairgrounds deal by a hard deadline died in an Assembly committee worried about setting a precedent for other state fairgrounds — itself a sign of how much institutional caution surrounds land the state technically owns but local boards jealously protect.
With the Fairgrounds option now off the table, Del Mar’s options have narrowed to exactly the ones its own voters and council have spent years trying to avoid. The city still faces the same state housing quota it faced in 2024. It simply has fewer places left to point.
Human-Directed AI Journalism: This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance under the direction, editing, and final approval of Jose E. Navarro. The Navarro Report | navarro-report.com