How San Diego Could End Up With a MAGA Mayor
In Los Angeles the newly elected Mayor used her first day in office to declare a homeless state of emergency. A barely functional city council may not be able to give its needed blessing to the declaration, meaning Kevin DeLeon’s role in a racially charged discussion could serve as yet another excuse to do nothing. The City of Angels has a reported 42,000 people living on the streets and an angry housed population that just wants those folks gone.
In San Diego, as the rain came down and cold winds blew off the Pacific, police cleared homeless people off the steps of the downtown library in advance of the swearing in ceremony for newly elected officials. Emergency shelters were filled to capacity and there was nowhere else for unhoused people to go.
There’s a slice of San Diego that wants the homeless gone; off the streets and sidewalks into someplace not in their neighborhood. Police regularly conduct sweeps, pushing those living in the open to another block, another park, another freeway overpass, or another stay in the county jail for not paying tickets given out during previous cleanups.
It’s a game of whack-a-mole with human beings being dehumanized as a result of public policy. The only people I can see benefitting from this are the police tasked with doing the dirty work and drawing overtime. Yet if the homeless remain, local incumbents will be to blame.
Then there are the advocates/activists who’ve made it their life’s mission to help their fellow humans with the things they need to stay alive and continuous witnessing on their part. Every day, at all hours of the day and night, they’re reporting yet another human tragedy ensconced in a tent or hiding in a sleeping bag.
Appeals for help are nearly always directed at elected officials in the belief that awareness of ongoing agony will spur them to do more. Often they are couched in language suggesting that these dire circumstances are the fault of the mayor, city council, county supervisor, etc.
SHAME ON THEM so the thinking goes, the priority mission of electeds should be providing aid and comfort to those that need it the most. It’s as if Mayor Todd Gloria should be lured from his lair with a bat-signal aimed at the sky. Meanwhile, concerned property owners are burning up the phone lines with demands that something be done.
The city faces a dire shortage of affordable housing, and with the street population growing faster than accommodations being available, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless.
As long as the widely accepted narrative saying homelessness is driven by mental illness and addictive behaviors is considered true there can be no solution to the problem. Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic looked over all the data, and it became obvious the problem is bigger than individual afflictions and/or choices..
America has had populations of mentally ill, drug-addicted, poor, and unemployed people for the whole of its history, and Los Angeles has always been warmer than Duluth—and yet the homelessness crisis we see in American cities today dates only to the 1980s. What changed that caused homelessness to explode then? Again, it’s simple: lack of housing. The places people needed to move for good jobs stopped building the housing necessary to accommodate economic growth.
It’s easy to look at national economic policy as the critical driver of the homeless crisis. After all, the minimum wage stayed the same for decades, and our societal redistribution of wealth was flipped as tax rates for the wealthy fell along with ever-growing holes in the social safety net. The move away from manufacturing and the union jobs it supported to a service economy whose poorly paid workforce was expected to churn also had a role to play.
While it’s true that collectively most of us became less affluent (and the rich became richer), the non-geographical nature of homelessness points to another source of the problem, according to Damsas: it’s liberals.
A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue. Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups that have historically been shunted to the peripheries of the housing market. But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.
I wasn’t aware that San Diego’s decades-long succession of Republican Mayors and County Supervisors were somehow liberals. And they weren’t. If you apply a class analysis to the suppression of new housing, it makes a lot more sense.
Damas is wrong with his partisan history lesson, but correct in suggesting that Democrats currently in power could end up getting burned by voters.
Politicians who wanted to get re-elected made damn sure that people with even minimal real estate wealth were protected for the simple reason that they vote… in large numbers.
The local left did have a role in getting us where we are, and a succession of otherwise conservative politicians were willing to accommodate them.
This contradiction drives the ever more visible crisis. As the historian Jacob Anbinder has explained, in the ’70s and ’80s conservationists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups, and left-wing organizations formed a loose coalition in opposition to development. Throughout this period, Anbinder writes, “the implementation of height limits, density restrictions, design review boards, mandatory community input, and other veto points in the development process” made it much harder to build housing. This coalition—whose central purpose is opposition to neighborhood change and the protection of home values—now dominates politics in high-growth areas across the country, and has made it easy for even small groups of objectors to prevent housing from being built. The result? The U.S. is now millions of homes short of what its population needs.
Remnants of this lefty/homeowners/conservatives affinity exists to this day, as evidenced by the arms length opposition to lifting height limits in the Midway/Pacific area by certain OB lefties and Carl DeMaio. It appears to me that the otherwise liberal Tommy Hough’s anti-downtown campaign for city council hoped to tap into this sentiment.
If you want to be reductionist about this, you can characterize divisions over housing policy as YIMBY vs NIMBY. There you have “neighborhood first” advocates lined up alongside “we can’t fix this without a socialist revolution” types accusing “build it” advocates of being shills for wealthy developers and plotting to destroy property values. Watching those arguments online is often more entertaining than much of what the streaming services offer.
The political dangers to Democrats in those cities where the homelessness crisis is metastasizing into public disorder are clear. But Democratic inaction risks sparking a broader political revolt—especially as housing prices leave even many middle- and upper-middle-class renters outside the hallowed gates of homeownership. We should harbor no illusions that such a revolt will lead to humane policy change.
Simply making homelessness less visible has come to be what constitutes “success.” New York City consistently has the nation’s highest homelessness rate, but it’s not as much of an Election Day issue as it is on the West Coast. That’s because its displaced population is largely hidden in shelters. Yet since 2012, the number of households in shelters has grown by more than 30 percent—despite the city spending roughly $3 billion a year (as of 2021) trying to combat the problem. This is what policy failure looks like. At some point, someone’s going to have to own it.
I’ll give many of the Democrats currently in power credit for realizing on occasion that the solution to homelessness is more housing. Unfortunately, you can’t just add water and come up with studio apartments.
Interim solutions, like re-purposing commercial properties, and what the County Supes appear to be moving towards with mental health services are good places to start. And there are immediate needs not being addressed, like a lack of services once the sun goes down and hospitals dumping people on the street.
In the meantime, I’d say it’s safe to say there’s growing anger in the city’s neighborhoods. And draconian solutions arising out of a plethora of misinformation about unhoused people are just one demagogue away from gaining power.
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