What the Hell Is San Diego’s Mayor Up To?
Earlier this morning, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria showed the media around at the Rose Canyon Safe Parking lot, the latest parking space dedicated for use by homeless humans who’ve managed to not lose their car.
Sounds good, right?
It is the fourth location in the Safe Parking Program, operated by Jewish Family Service of San Diego under contract with the City.
The lot will operate 24 hours a day and provide a safe place for unhoused residents to sleep overnight in their vehicles, with access to resources to help participants on their path to housing, including employment assistance, credit repair, financial education and more.
In addition to providing 15 spaces for parking, the site includes 12 camper trailers for Safe Parking families to live in as they work to end their homelessness. The trailers come equipped with beds, showers and bathrooms. The trailers were donated to cities by the State of California as part of its emergency response to the homelessness crisis.
Sadly, that’s only one side of the story. And the mayor’s got feet on both sides of the divide.
People sleeping overnight in their vehicles have been a source of friction with nearby residents in neighborhoods throughout the region for years. The city has bounced back and forth on banning, enforcing, and willfully not enforcing rules against overnight parking for unhoused people as public outcry and court orders have changed the landscape.
Enforcing ordinances often means violators are hit with an impossible financial challenge costing them their vehicles and pushing them on to the streets. Today’s parked van becomes tomorrow’s sidewalk (or riverbed) tent.
There simply aren’t enough shelter spaces, care facilities, or personnel to accommodate the homeless population, much less those who’ve been caught parking and sleeping overnight. People with mental health and/or addiction challenges can’t find accommodations even when they want it.
And let’s face a couple of important realities:
Living on the streets is depressing for most humans. One often overlooked facet of being “down” is a sense of hopelessness, leading to a condition where providing assistance has to be an affirmative act on the part of those offering it.
Being homeless is a lot of work involving defending whatever space is occupied at the moment, sustaining physical needs, and the ever present danger of one’s meager possessions disappearing if left unguarded.
A large part of the population has let disgust at the squalor they see turn into hate for beings they see as less than human.
Analysis by Scott Lewis at Voice of San Diego leads me to think that the haters are winning as far as our city government’s response to unhoused humans is concerned.
The headline for the story is: Todd Gloria Wants You to Know He Has Had It.
The piece centers on an ordinance under consideration by the City Council banning homeless encampments within two blocks of schools or shelters, at transit hubs and other sensitive areas at all times. Encampments elsewhere on public property would be banned only when there is shelter where people can go. What’s missing from consideration is a plan to create a larger supervised camping facility with services so those folks would have a place to go to.
The proposal backed by the Mayor and Councilmember Stephen Whitburn originally was said to be inclusive of new facilities.
A trial balloon suggesting the Inspiration Point parking lot in Balboa Park as a location was shot down. Other questions about logistics and visual mitigation (people want those otherized persons to be hidden from view) have made moving on this part of the deal impractical for now.
This left the city government needing to throw a bone to an angry bunch of constituents. After all, former Mayor Kevin Falconer was said to be plotting a comeback based on outrage concerning people living on the streets.
The point is not to create a new city law to prohibit camping. City law already prohibits camping. The point is to send a message: Do not camp here.
If we had a local version of the New York Post (Carl DeMaio & KUSI aren’t literate enough) I can see a headline reading “Mayor to Homeless: Drop Dead.”
More from VOSD, quoting the Mayor’s response to being questioned about the lack of new facilities:
“I will not house the homeless population for every other city in the county of San Diego. A part of this enforcement ordinance is about making sure we are taking care of our people, because we are compassionate folks, but I’m not going to be mopping up the messes in other people’s cities,” he said.
He’s clearly frustrated that the number of shelter beds the city has added has not ameliorated the problem. And now it’s time to tell them to move along.
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An exchange of comments following the OB Rag’s reposting of a November, 2022 News7 story about homeless mothers and children being left to sleep outside in colder weather after having their vehicles impounded illustrates the public division on this issue.
Running through the dialogue, where OB Rag editor implores others to be considerate, are a litany of misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and good ol’ fashioned straight up lying.
Why didn’t they just go to a shelter? - They were choosing to break the law. - The media is just running with these sorts of stories to generate controversy. - They’re tweakers/alcoholics. - The resources are out there, all they have to do is seek help. - If you don’t enforce the law, nobody will respect it - Where are the fathers of those children?…
What all these angry people have in common is the inability to grasp homelessness as a systemic problem, ergo they see moral failures or lack of drive. Dig a little further and you’ll find the cost of addressing all these otherized street people “just isn’t worth it.”
It’s about “me” versus ”we.” Nearly a half century of a deliberate effort to dismantle the social safety net, along with elevating greed and avarice as desirable life paths have led us to where “we” are now.
Government can –and should– facilitate housing, services and shelters. But these things in and of themselves will not “solve” the problem of people who find themselves without the means to keep a roof over their heads.
When President Joe Biden talks about saving the “soul of America,” he’s making the point that attitudes about compassion and cooperation are the ultimate stake in building a better tomorrow.
I expect Mayor Gloria’s PR people to come at me saying something along the lines of “he’s not evil’ or “you’ve mischaracterized the situation.” My comeback is that, regardless of how anybody spins the proposed ordinance, the angry portion of the public will see it as a win.
I will gladly report on what follows after enacting the ordinance, but given the forces arrayed to enforce it, I’m not optimistic.
Other Stuff You Might Want to Read
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Column: The GOP’s debt ceiling proposal bundles every bad policy idea into one noxious package Via Michael Hiltzik at the LA Times. Hoo, boy. Bad doesn’t even begin to describe this version of “every chuckleheaded idea that Republicans have cooked up to undermine the public interest over the decades.”
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Peter Thiel, Republican megadonor, won’t fund candidates in 2024 Via Reuters. Maybe that’s because his favored candidates didn’t meet expectations in 2020 & 2022. In any case, that’s one pile of mogul money the whack-a-doodles won’t be able to use.
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Misogyny Abounds - E. Jean Carroll and Abby Grossberg Via Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance Two women having a day in court, with Trump and Carlson as defendants.
Somewhere on Earth One, Hillary Clinton is happily playing with her grandbabies as she nears the end of her second term in office. Women have not been reduced to second-class citizenship in 2023 America.
But instead, here we are in post-Trump America, where warning signs are flashing everywhere for anyone who cares to pay attention. And the prospect of the country finally being forced to face what has long been sidestepped, hard proof that the former president didn’t just talk about it, but actually assaulted a woman, will be of major significance no matter how the public reacts.
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San Diego City Councilmember Monica Montgomery Steppe joins race to replace Nathan Fletcher Via San Diego Union-Tribune. This will be an interesting race… Wait! I’ve got a text from candidate Janessa Goldbeck…
Say what?
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Lead image by Gary Pruss at Yes! Magazine (Pic not from San Diego, but it makes the point)
The parking lot at Inspiration Point was never a good idea with the number of tourists and others who frequent Balboa Park. However, it's hard to believe that the City of San Diego can't come up with a number of more suitable locations where it could provide safe camping. Have you been on Commercial Ave lately? Tents are cheek by jowl on both sides of the street with nowhere to walk and hardly any place to drive. I almost got run over by the San Diego trolley trying to drive down that street. I think they don't want to provide safe camping areas because every homeless person in the whole country would flock here. On the other hand it's a lot more cost effective than building shelters.
There's something I've thought about for years as people debate the issue of unhoused neighbors is the number of Christian churches we have in this city. What part are these Christians playing to provide safe shelters for people? Many of them have campuses, parking lots, and space not being used for anything else. Jesus tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves as God first loves us. Jesus also makes it clear that everyone in the world is our neighbor. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus details who we are to be when we follow Him. Were those of us who claim to follow Jesus were to actually enflesh the Sermon on the Mount, there would not be any people without homes.|
My In-Home Supportive Services homemaker is a devout Muslim woman. The other day she mentioned that she doesn't save any money. I asked her about when she could no longer work, how would she provide for herself, she replied that her family would take care of her. This is a part of their Somali culture. No one is homeless, they take care of each other.
The United States has this problem because we allow it.