Faulconer, Turner Vie for Overseer Jobs on America’s Finest Tourist Plantation

The existence and visibility of our homeless population is the central issue driving campaigns to unseat incumbents in both the city’s mayoral and District 3 county supervisor elections.  

If money talks, I’d say it’s starting to look like we’ll get a homeless concentration camp for San Diego, after all.

The Lincoln Club dumped another $350,000 into the campaign to elect Larry Turner Mayor of San Diego this week. That’s a total of $800,000 in the month leading up to the election, with most or all coming from a single donor.

Kevin Faulconer’s big issue is homelessness backed by dubious claims based on the city’s capability of forcing homeless encampments to move elsewhere. Larry Turner boasts about his personal contact with “those people” and supposed insights to remedy the problem.    

Forget policies about the environment, land development, and potholes; the Mayoral and District 3 Supervisor contests are all about homeless humans. Strip away all the other noise and what you’ll hear are the “I’ve got mine” and “somewhere else” types complaining about the visual blight that’s been forced upon them.

Candidates representing the financial interests that got us here in the first place –our unhoused population didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree– are making a serious attempt to retake political power in a region they once held sway.

To do so, those candidates are playing upon division, angst, and uncertainty to sell something they can’t follow through on. Regardless of (only partially true) claims about substance abuse or mental health treatments, the region lacks facilities and workforce comparable to the size of the homeless population. Both of these proposed balms would take longer than any local term of office to accomplish, even if the money was there.

Furthermore, none of the candidates for both positions, regardless of partisan affiliation or incumbency, actually have the insight or the political capital to adequately address the needs of our homeless population. We have a systemic failure in progress and a long look in the mirror would be the first step in solving it.

The downsides of marketplace economics can not be addressed within any one place by any one politician, or any one budget allocation. That's like saying the threat of wildfires can be mitigated by firehouses or tanker aircraft. 

The San Diego Union-Tribune begrudgingly endorsed incumbent Mayor Todd Gloria for the simple reason that they believe his opponent isn’t capable of doing the job. And sworn law enforcement officer Larry Turner is winking at breaking the law to remove unhoused humans from the streets.

• Turner is now a full-throated backer of the Sunbreak Ranch fantasy that calls for thousands of homeless individuals to be gathered at a remote location with lots of services miles from the neighborhoods they now call home. No local who knows the issue well believes even a small fraction of unsheltered San Diegans would choose this option.

• But Turner says that’s not what he hears from the informed people he talks to. Then why aren’t they coming forward? Because the constituency for this fantasy is angry people, not constructive people. They want homeless individuals taken far from their sight by any means necessary — using, if needed, coercive (read: illegal) methods.

• On city finances, Turner is as vague and unpersuasive as ever. And on what should be another powerful issue for him — Gloria’s supporting role as a City Council member in 2016 in Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s catastrophic decision to enter into a $127 million lease-to-own deal to acquire the decrepit 101 Ash Street office tower — Turner has taken a simply bizarre turn. In a meeting last week with the Editorial Board, Turner seriously argued that Gloria was at least as responsible for the decision and all the calamity that has resulted as the mayor who proposed it. Huh? Faulconer — not Gloria — pushed the deal to passage without the sort of diligence an average person would undertake when buying a used lawnmower.

Interestingly enough, the San Diego Police Officers Association has passed over one of their own to endorse Mayor Todd Gloria. They’re decided to go with the hand that feeds them rather than the man who can’t make up his mind about pensions.

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Politico has taken notice of former Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s quest to unseat Terra Lawson-Remer, along with a headline giving their distinctly reactionary framing to the contest.

Republicans: Don’t let this SoCal jewel become San Francisco

• But driven by anger over the proliferation of homeless encampments, Republicans now have an exceedingly rare chance to regain their majority on the powerful county board — and they’re turning to perhaps the only challenger who could pull off an upset for a wealthy, coastal, swing district: former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer.

• Faulconer, who over his career has projected an even-keeled demeanor, is trying to raise the temperature in his bid to unseat incumbent Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, a Democrat, economist and surfer mom who worked in the Obama administration. The contest, while technically nonpartisan, is the most closely watched in the region, with millions pouring in from labor unions, land developers and pro-business groups.

• “I am not going to let San Diego County turn into Los Angeles or San Francisco,” Faulconer said in an interview. “Why are people leaving San Francisco? Because of the homelessness and all the crimes going on. Los Angeles is not the LA that I remember as a kid growing up. That’s why people are getting so angry.”

People are angry. And, most of all, they’re afraid. 

Politicians affiliated with authoritarian agendas are fanning those flames, whether it’s Trump claiming criminal hordes are pouring in over the border, or Kevin Faulconer touring an encampment and dropping F bombs to prove his urgency about the issue. 

The headline in the UT was: Homelessness along the San Diego River hits its highest total yet

• The rising number of encampments comes as several cities have passed camping bans that increased penalties for sleeping outside. Sarah Hutmacher, the foundation’s chief operating officer, said she knew of individuals who’d chosen to live by waterways in an effort to avoid police on the street.

• But homelessness overall has also grown countywide every month for more than two straight years. People may move to the riverbed only after long periods spent elsewhere, and officials said this population had, on average, been homeless a decade.

Oh, and by the way, Kevin Faulconer has endorsed the Sunbreak Ranch “triage program.”

It should be obvious that any resolution to this issue involves getting to people before they can’t pay their rent and building below-market rate housing.  Otherwise Larry Turner and Kevin Faulconer will have to keep hiring bigger buses to haul homeless humans away.

It’s harder to see the big picture, and even harder for candidates for office to talk about. So the glib quotes of reactionaries are appealing. “Fixing” the collateral damage of people without housing requires coloring outside the lines, and people invested in those lines will squeal like stuck pigs. 

I voted for Todd Gloria and Terra Lawson-Remer because they are better than the wolves in sheep’s clothing vying to replace them. I get it that people dislike Todd Gloria, but those people aren’t apparently putting much thought into being careful about what they’re asking for. ( I voted for Lawson-Remer because we need smart people, not smart mouths on the BoS.)

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Friday Finds in the News World

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Activist, writer Doug Porter looks back at his time at City College by Bailey Kohnen at SDCity Times  – (Woo Hoo, I’m nearly famous!) 

• Working on the Liberator meant no deadlines, no format beyond having an eye-catching and usually sarcastic cover page, and having to paste in clippings that the copy-camera might or might not see as a half-tone checkerboard. We typed a few paragraphs here and there, again mostly sarcastic commentary on the “straight” world. And there was a lot of space taken up with spontaneous scribbles or cartoons in magic marker.

• What the OB Liberator did accomplish was to lay down a marker about the community being chock full of hopheads, radicals, and freethinkers. It’s an assumption by many outsiders that lasts to this day, even though it’s no longer true.

• It took me a few years to become aware of the joy of the craft of writing, but the challenges of those experiences set me on the path I follow today.

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Michael Smolens: DeMaio flips on abortion again, trades bizarre MAGA accusations with Hayes via the San Diego Union-Tribune

• Abortion has become a central theme in the campaign, mostly thanks to DeMaio, a radio talk-show host and former San Diego City Council member. Mailers from his camp have repeatedly hammered Hayes, a Lakeside school board member, for his opposition to abortion.

• Meanwhile, a mailer from a committee supporting DeMaio calls him “pro-choice” on abortion.

• That wasn’t his position the last time he ran for office. In 2020, DeMaio ran for Congress in a more conservative East County district against former longtime congressman Darrell Issa, among other candidates. Issa went on to win.

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The Contests, Clubs and Big Promises of Trump’s Fund-Raising Emails by Karen Yourish and Lazaro Gamio at the New York Times

• Since former President Donald J. Trump announced his 2024 candidacy, his campaign has promoted dozens of contests for supporters to win signed merchandise or “V.I.P.” trips to meet Mr. Trump. It has offered adherents myriad “exclusive” opportunities to join clubs to give counsel to Mr. Trump, and it has repeatedly claimed that Mr. Trump is personally reviewing lists of small donors.

• But most of the contests seem to have no winners, and the campaign did not confirm or provide evidence that the club members have had any opportunity to advise the former president or that Mr. Trump is paying any attention to small donor rosters.

• The New York Times looked at some 7,400 emails sent by the Trump campaign since Mr. Trump entered the presidential race. About one-third of the messages dangled an incentive to entice recipients to make a small donation.