In San Diego’s cutthroat housing market, your job title can matter almost as much as your savings account. New data shows who is actually managing to buy homes and who is getting pushed to the sidelines. Management and business occupations still sit at the top, STEM workers remain close behind, and health care and service roles have logged the biggest gains over the past decade, even as transportation and public safety workers have lost ground. All of that is playing out in a brutal market where typical single-family prices are far above what most households earn.
Occupation winners and losers
According to the National Association of Realtors, management and business professionals had roughly a 61% homeownership rate in San Diego in 2024. STEM and technical workers were near 59%, and education and social-service employees hovered around 58%. The same analysis shows health-care workers at about 54% ownership and service workers at roughly 33%. Taken together, those metro-level results underline how occupation, pay and local housing costs intersect to shape who can actually buy.
Affordability is the bigger issue
Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies finds that the median single-family home in the San Diego metro area now costs more than nine times the median household income, placing the region among the nation’s least affordable markets. That multiple sharply raises the income and savings barrier for would-be buyers, especially once mortgage payments and downpayments are factored in. The result is that even workers in relatively well-paid fields can struggle to buy locally without different housing types or targeted policy changes.
Who’s made gains — and who fell back
A San Diego summary in Axios pulls the NAR metro data into local focus and flags some telling shifts. Service and health-care employees each saw about a three-point rise in homeownership from 2014 to 2024, while transportation and public-safety occupations lost the most ground, down roughly six points. Sales and real-estate professionals also inched higher, and management and business roles remain the group most likely to own. The changes are modest, which suggests a bit of progress at the margins but not any real reversal of the broader affordability squeeze.
City pushes middle housing as a potential fix
City planners are advancing a Neighborhood Homes for All of Us initiative that would test cottages, duplexes and townhomes as “middle housing” that could help keep families in place. The program’s planning materials and public workshops frame the effort as a way to create more attainable ownership options for middle-income households. Local reporting highlights a London Moeder Advisors analysis suggesting that smaller lot and townhouse development could produce homes in the $600,000 to $700,000 range, compared with the region’s current single-family median near $950,000. Supporters argue that those price points would not be deeply subsidized affordable housing but could widen the band of what working families can realistically buy.
Regional planning underscores the supply problem
SANDAG’s regional plan documents show that housing production has not kept pace with job and population growth, tightening the for-sale market and pushing more households into rentals. The agency’s forecasts and appendices emphasize that zoning reforms are only one piece of a multi-year solution that also requires targeted production, infrastructure and financing to deliver homes that middle-income buyers can afford. That long timeframe helps explain why officials are pairing zoning change discussions with near-term tools, such as tweaks to accessory dwelling unit policies and buyer assistance programs.
Bottom line for workers
Experts say the reforms now on the table will not drop home prices overnight, but they could shift who is able to buy in San Diego neighborhoods over the next several years. For now, the NAR numbers make clear that occupation still matters a lot it determining whether San Diego residents own their homes.
