Report Summary
To help determine the extent to which homes are vacant, the San Diego Housing Commission (SDHC) Board of Commissioners directed SDHC staff to commence a study to identify housing units vacant for six months or longer.
SDHC staff worked with San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) to obtain a dataset of 468,352 SDG&E premises IDs with utility usage for five calendar years, which resulted in 86 million anonymized records of residential utility usage in the City of San Diego between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2019, predating the COVID-19 pandemic.
SDHC contracted with Circulate San Diego and Evari GIS Consulting to work with SDHC to analyze these datasets. The project team developed two methodologies to analyze each of the datasets, respectively, and identify vacant units.
