The State of the City Doesn’t Have to Be This Bad
It’s the time of year when elected officials stand up and tell the public what’s going on and what they’re going to do about it. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria will give the first State of the City Speech delivered in person since 2020 tonight (Weds, 1/11) from the Civic Theater at 6:30 pm.
Historically, the practice dates back to the British practice of giving “a speech from the throne” to open every new session of Parliament. The founders included the concept in Article II, Section 3, clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution, but did not insist that it be an annual event.
Via the National League of Cities:
A State of the City speech is essentially an issue-driven keynote address. Any good political speech has five sequential parts: attention grabber, problems, solutions, visualization, and call to action.
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria gives a damn good performance during his state of the city speeches. His optimistic outlook shines through as problems/calls to action/promises are cataloged.
According to a press release previewing this year’s event, the Mayor will focus on "the city’s most pressing challenges, provide an update on the progress made during the past year and lay out a path for 2023 and beyond."
Last year’s speech started off with references to the pandemic including the claim that 86% of the city’s workforce was vaccinated. Missing from this assertion was the open revolt taking place in the SDPD, with many officers buying into the premise that defying vaccination mandates was some sort of badge of honor in the “war on wokeness.”
According to an article in Sunday’s Union-Tribune, 250 officers left the department during the previous fiscal year, a 52% increase from the previous year, leaving 150 vacancies.
I mention this because the article in question was focused on what I’m presuming will be at the top of this year’s list of issues, namely homelessness. What wasn’t being said last year due to political expediency can’t be a template for what gets said this year.
In case you haven’t noticed, what local authorities throughout the county are doing is a Sisyphean effort. Having souped-up programs on mitigation and human services once the problem was too big to be ignored, they’re fighting a losing battle. For every 10 people they get off the streets, another 13 appear to take their place.
To its credit, San Diego has taken steps that –someday– might help out with a serious lack of housing. That someday is years away, and the tents adjacent to many thoroughfares are increasing in numbers.
Voice of San Diego’s Scott Lewis gets into the nitty gritty with his essay entitled Yes, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem.
Attracting top shelf businesses into the region hasn’t resulted in “trickle down” for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. In fact, it’s pushed them out of many housing options.
In 2000, San Diego was a decade or so removed from the cutbacks in the defense industry that devastated the economy. San Diego County had 1,312,800 jobs.
A home is where a job sleeps at night and housing prices were in the very beginning of what would become a dizzying rally upward. San Diego was expensive but nothing like today. You could buy a nice home in need of some work near Sunset Cliffs for $250,000 – the equivalent of $440,000 now.
There were 1,040,149 housing units in the county.
Twenty years later, in January 2020, the region had 220,000 more jobs than in 2000. In that same 20 years, the population of San Diego grew by more than 529,000 people.
As for homes? Only 175,980 new homes had been constructed in those two decades.
Back in my days as a reporter for the San Diego Free Press, I interviewed a promising political candidate who had once been homeless. They told me one thing I’ve never forgotten, namely that six months was the maximum you could live on the streets before damage to your mental health became increasingly untreatable.
Time is of the essence here. The longer we accept people living on the streets, the more difficult it will be to re-integrate them into society.
Back to the VOSD article:
If a biotech company attracts a half a billion dollars in investment and begins hiring scientists and project managers and accountants at high salaries, those employees are going to find places to live. If they can’t find one in Carmel Valley, or Poway, they will bid up the prices of homes in a place like North Park or Del Cerro. People who make less, who may have hoped to live in North Park or Del Cerro, will find those homes out of reach and begin bidding up the prices in Barrio Logan or Lemon Grove.
It goes all the way down the ladder until someone ends up on the ground.
Lewis’ Voice of San Diego article is notable for its comprehensive take on the reality of being unhoused, namely that the excuses proffered up by apologists/denialists for the current state of affairs don’t hold water. Other cities have drug addicts, mental illness, social safety nets, and agreeable weather, yet do not face the magnitude of the homelessness problem existing in San Diego.
The cause of homelessness is a lack of housing. Look at yourself in the mirror and repeat this phrase until it sinks in.
Mayor Gloria will admit the obvious tonight, that what the government and charities are doing isn’t enough. He’ll point to the residential construction underway, and promise more to come.
There are bureaucratic barriers and resistance by so-called neighborhood groups and they’re not magically going away because an elected official smiles a lot.
As important as it is to get services to people living on the street, it’s also critical to change hearts and minds of those who either refuse to see the problem or don’t accept the truth.
THIS is something a mayor can do, by promoting the truth (the more times it gets said, the more people will accept it), calling out the bad actors (this includes the sadism inherent in the local criminal justice system), and by boosting those individual and institutions who are willing to do the work (even if it isn’t enough.)
But the thing the Mayor can’t (or won’t) say tonight is that he’s willing to move mountains to get at least temporary housing available NOW.
The city has (for the time being) given up on a pilot project of a small encampment site with services and security, because of the inability to find a provider to run the show. And that’s just a very incremental step.
It’s time to think BIG. Get the governor to call in the national guard, not to round up and incarcerate humans in the manner reactionaries envision, but to erect temporary shelter and make it safe and secure.
National guard not an option? There has to be a brain trust somewhere capable of helping. If the neighborhoods in the northern part of the city were somehow destroyed via natural disaster, I’m certain shelter would be available.
The political obstacles and consequences for bold actions will be daunting. The mayor (and other elected officials) need to take the initiative by selling the public on what can be done.
The full State of the City address will be broadcast on local tv, as well as live-streamed on CBS8+ - free on Roku and Amazon Fire.
Email me at: WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com
Lead graphic: Screengrab from CBS8 News video report.