On Homelessness, Transit, and Climate Action: Why San Diego Can’t Ever Do Big Things

To deal with all of this, you need to aim your anger a lot higher than unruly homeless people or even the mayor...

By Jim Miller

The recent public spat between Bill Walton and San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria exposes the deep limitations of business as usual in San Diego politics.  

Walton rightly chided the mayor for not adequately addressing the homeless crisis, which Gloria did not cause but has also clearly failed to even come close to solving.  That said, Walton’s strong criticism of Gloria also contains more than a little bit of homeless bashing as a Times of San Diego piece reports Walton saying, ““Things are worse now than ever before. Our lives are being dictated by a large and unruly homeless population,” he said. “We want the homeless population off the streets, out of the parks, off the sidewalks and bike paths.”  

Elsewhere, Walton has complained about having to make his house a “fortress” to protect himself from the homeless.  In sum, he wants the mayor to resign and to get a “tax rebate.”  

As someone who has lived and worked in San Diego’s urban core for decades now, I understand Walton (who I like and have long admired) being frustrated with the daily encounters with folks living in desperate circumstances who, at times, can be difficult.  In fact, my neighborhood is far more impacted by the crisis than the area where Walton lives, but I can’t afford to own the house I rent even if I wanted to fortify it, which I don’t.  

Truth be told, hearing a wealthy former professional athlete complain about the “unruly homeless population” is a little cringeworthy even if his frustration at the seeming inability of the city to address this crisis resonates.  

My life is not dictated by the homeless folks who daily make their way past my door, camp out across the street, and use the alley for a bathroom.  I am disturbed by the daily shouts and screams I hear from my dispossessed, mentally ill neighbors, but I am also aware of my great privilege in comparison to their lot.  My wife used to occasionally give meals to the homeless veteran who slept in the alley behind our house before he disappeared and most likely died, alone and friendless on the street.  

As the proverb goes: “There but by the grace of God go I.”  

So, as much as the hard edge of the street with the mental illness, addiction, and public health issues that come with it is disturbing, the kind of NIMBY anger that it evokes from folks of privilege ignores the fact that the growing homeless crisis is part and parcel of the greater catastrophe of historic levels of economic inequality that, like climate change, we have failed to address systemically for decades.  

As historian Heather Cox Richardson noted on her blog last week: 

• [T]he Congressional Budget Office released a study of trends in the distribution of family wealth between 1989—immediately after President Ronald Reagan began the antiregulation and antitax push—and 2019. In those thirty years, total real wealth held by families tripled from $38 trillion to $115 trillion. But the distribution of that growth was not even.

• Money moved toward the families in the top 10%, and especially in the top 1%, shifting from families with less income and education toward those with more wealth and education. In the 30 years examined, the share of wealth belonging to families in the top 10% increased from 63% in 1989 to 72% in 2019, from $24.3 trillion to $82.4 trillion (an increase of 240%). The share of total wealth held by families in the top 1% increased from 27% to 34% in the same period. In 2019, families in the bottom half of the economy held only 2% of the national wealth, and those in the bottom quarter owed about $11,000 more than they owned. 

This level of glaring inequity is what is driving the hunger crisis here in San Diego and elsewhere as the Union-Tribune reported the day after Walton’s public screed, around thirty percent of our neighbors can’t afford to buy enough food.  Shockingly, economic inequality is also the prime driver of homelessness as that tends to happen when people can’t afford to pay for lodging either.  

To deal with all of this, you need to aim your anger a lot higher than unruly homeless people or even the mayor, and our inability to do so is evidence of the poverty of our political imaginations.  

The mayor’s office, wary of Walton’s status as a beloved local celebrity and booster of all things San Diego, responded first with a measured statement of disagreement before launching a broadside calling his criticism “self-aggrandizing hyperbole and outright lies.” Gloria’s spokesperson continued, as the San Diego Union Tribune relayed: 

• “San Diegans are frustrated with the worsening homelessness crisis, and Mayor Gloria shares that frustration,” Laing said. “But unlike Mr. Walton, Mayor Gloria is translating that frustration into decisive, sustained action to improve the situation. To say that he has done nothing on homelessness is objectively false.”

Of course, there is some validity to the Gloria administration’s irritation over Walton’s solution-free public scolding, but while it is true that the mayor has tried to address the issue, he and other San Diego Democrats have long been averse to the one thing that would really help: raising more revenue.  

As I wrote in this space back in 2020 in a column endorsing Gloria over Barbara Bry for mayor, San Diego’s transition from Republican to Democratic governance has not moved the needle as far as one might have hoped in terms of tax-aversion and fear of irking the Chamber of Commerce and/or other elite interests:  

• Neither of the two candidates running for mayor of San Diego are true progressive champions.  In fact, both of them have done things to alienate the local progressive base.  Front and center here is the fact that both Democratic candidates for mayor failed to endorse Proposition 15, which would bring in around $700 million in resources for education and community services to our region and reform one of the most egregious parts of the Proposition 13’s legacy by closing a glaring corporate tax loophole that has robbed schools and municipalities of funds for decades. This puts both candidates at odds with the state Democratic party and the governor, who endorsed Prop. 15. As any progressive with a historical memory understands, Proposition 13 was at the heart of the rise of the New Right here in California and nationwide.  

• Indeed, the biggest legacy of Proposition 13 has been that California, despite being the world’s 5th largest economy, has schools, counties, and cities that frequently struggle with austerity, particularly during economic downturns.  Another way of putting it is that Proposition 13, the spawn of right-wing backlash politics, was very effective at what folks like Reagan administration official David Stockman charmingly refer to as “starving the beast.”  That is, preventing government from being effective by limiting resources and then calling for more cuts because of that ineffectiveness. 

• Thus, when Barbara Bry came out vociferously against the measure and Todd Gloria did so more tepidly, it was a clear sign that neither of the two candidates to be the next mayor in the post-GOP era had deep progressive principles.  Shame on both of them for this.  

Perhaps some of the revenue that Proposition 15 would have brought San Diego might be useful now in the face of this growing crisis, but political expediency by local Democrats and some of their like-minded brethren in the state, helped assure that that measure narrowly failed.  

Nonetheless, the inescapable truth remains: Doing big things and solving huge problems requires a lot more revenue than municipalities have at present and THAT is the “third rail” discussion that local Democrats like the mayor are extremely averse to having.  

Thus, we are left to engage in a superficial food fight over the homeless crisis that will never deal with the root causes and/or the profound changes needed to address the lack of truly affordable housing and fully funded social safety net services.  

Another “third rail” issue that Gloria and other local Democrats fled from was the inclusion of the “road charge” in SANDAG’s transportation plan after Carl DeMaio’s public campaign against it successfully bullied them into retreating.  Rather than standing up to DeMaio as the Mayor chose to rebuff Walton, Gloria parroted his line and went a long way toward eviscerating any chance our region has of meeting its ambitious climate goals.  

By nixing this fee, the mayor and many of his Democratic allies did much to thwart local efforts to combat climate change and upgrade our region’s transit system.  Not all local progressives were pleased with this.  As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported: 

• La Mesa Councilmember Jack Shu, who expressed concerns that the board was backtracking on efforts to rein in greenhouse gasses.

• “It’s terrible for the leadership of this board, for political actions, to move ahead with taking out a vital element of the (regional transportation plan),” he said. “The road user fee is critical for us to reduce vehicle miles traveled.”

• Removing the tax, which was planned to be implemented in 2030, leaves a $14 billion hole in the agency’s plan. Officials said they could likely patch that with several alternatives, including new vehicle registration or parking fees.

• However, SANDAG Executive Director Hasan Ikhrata said the move will also limit the agency’s ability to discourage driving, a key strategy for curbing tailpipe emissions and limiting traffic congestion.

• “From the financial standpoint, I’m not as worried, as from the behavioral standpoint,” he told the board Friday.

• Staff also stressed that removing the fee could jeopardize state and federal approval of the plan, which is needed to attract government funding. The agency specifically hopes to capitalize on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill approved by Congress last year.

Thus, despite their big talk about the existential crisis of climate change and support for the idea of addressing it, when it came time to speak to San Diegans like adults about what was at stake and why such a policy was necessary to combat climate change and fund a sustainable future, Gloria and many of his fellow Democratic board members folded in the face of rightwing anti-tax demagoguery. The result, as Michael Smolens pointed out last week, is that San Diego’s transportation plan is “on the road to nowhere”.  

On this, homelessness, and a range of other issues, all of San Diego’s Democratic leaders need to find the political courage to do better.