In my post yesterday about the council’s decision to seek additional locations for this year’s winter homeless shelter, I wrote:
The location of the temporary homeless shelter is an annual political football, with council members arguing about which district should bear the responsibility. At the meeting last night, District 2 Councilman Kevin Faulconer called the annual decision to site the shelter downtown “a self-fulfilling prophecy,” attracting homeless people to his district.
There have been some questions about what Faulconer was referring to when he used the term “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Faulconer’s spokesman Tony Manolatos said the councilman was not referring to homeless people continuing to be attracted downtown, but rather to the winter shelter that houses those homeless people continuing to be placed downtown.
Here’s Faulconer’s full quote:
What downtown is doing and indeed what this council is doing for a permanent intake center in the future — as I’ve said last year — it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if we say the only place in the city of San Diego that we can have a homeless winter shelter is in downtown San Diego. Unless we get out of that, it does not bode well in my opinion that we will have any other additional services in the city of San Diego and they’ll keep on coming to downtown over and over and over again.
You can also watch the councilman’s comment here, starting at around minute 17:00.