In December 2025, the state said San Diego added 11,000 people. In March 2026, the Census Bureau said we lost almost 6,000. Same county. Same year. Both were true the day they were published, which tells you everything about how to read a market report from here forward, including this one.

The exact same both/and is happening in apartment owners' rent rolls. Right now San Diego has 8,835 units under construction and the market's as dynamic as it has ever been so let's dive deeper into the submarkets and buildings that recently opened and some case studies.

The question is what are the net effective rents that residents will pay?

Our Take: Nobody's lowering the face rent number. Everybody's just quietly negotiating in the back office.

This is not a signal to step back from San Diego as a developer or investor, it's a signal to stop reading the headline and start reading the T-12. The market is bifurcating not just up or down, but both, in the same building, on the same day.

San Diego's apartment market doesn't move in straight lines. It moves like the San Diego River used to before the Army Corps of Engineers straightened it, channeled it, and told it where to go. Supply follows the same physics. It originates in capital decisions made during a boom, gathers momentum over 24 to 36 months of entitlement and construction, and then breaks all at once, all in the same place, in the corridors with the cheapest land and the most permissive zoning.

That place, in this cycle, is the valley floor. Mission Valley sits in a literal river basin.

The Kumeyaay called it Nipaguay — "the place by the water." The Spanish built their first mission on its banks. The Army Corps ran a concrete channel through it in the 1950s to make room for shopping centers. Now a large number of 3,531 units are landing there in 2026 alone, followed by another 3,447 units into the City in 2027, before Riverwalk (721 units) and Avalon (621 units) arrive in 2028. This is test of what San Diego's mesas and valleys can actually hold.

North Park still has 444 units in 5 more projects incoming, but at a fraction of what already landed there, and spread across boutique infill the corridor absorbs without breaking stride. Mission Valley, by contrast, is just getting started: Broadstone (497 units) is delivered and sitting at high vacancy, with Riverwalk, Avalon, and The Becker still to come.

The pipeline taper in 2028 is real and meaningful. The dropping from 3,500+ to 1,857 units of supply is what patient capital wants to see in a well-located development today.

We surveyed 8 of the largest recent deliveries in North Park along El Cajon Boulevard that experienced a supply wave of 1,021 units, and the set is stabilizing at 6.95% vacancy, and it didn't come without ups and downs of the market forces. We are keeping a close pulse on Mission Valley, Kearny Mesa and Bankers Hill leasing up 2,176 new units and watching the 35.02% vacancy rate dropping each day.

We are watching some of the largest new deliveries in 2025 and 2026 becoming thriving communities. North Park is standing on high ground and Mission Valley, Bankers Hill, and Kearny Mesa being tested by the tides. We are keeping an eye on rent and concessions during this historic supply peak.

A decade ago, the San Diego Union-Tribune ran a story on my vision for North Park (Click to View Story & Video) as the regional epicenter of infill development. At the time, it felt like a bet. In retrospect, it was just reading the topography correctly and understanding that the Balboa Park neighborhoods had the density capacity, the cultural infrastructure, and the community plan support to absorb what the market was about to send.

Between 2014 and 2015, the Uptown, North Park, and Golden Hill Community Plan Updates created a decade-long run of development unprecedented in most California neighborhoods or cities. I was inside those rooms. I worked those plans. I understood that planning and zoning isn't just regulation, it's an economic forecasting.