This week, former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer endorsed Sunbreak Ranch, the plan to move all homeless San Diegans into a camp somewhere out in the desert.
It would be a vast campus of shelters and services.
It is Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite: Vote for Sunbreak Ranch and all your wildest dreams will come true.
“The successful implementation of Sunbreak Ranch will save hundreds of thousands of lives, alleviate widespread suffering, unlock unfathomable human potential, and clean up America’s cities for all of us,” wrote George Mullen, who came up with the idea, and basketball legend Bill Walton.
Proponents of the plan have vacillated on its cost and size – it could be anywhere from 500 acres to 2,000. It could cost $275 million. Mullen says it is nothing compared to what we already spend, which implies we must redirect what we already spend to it. He is looking for philanthropy to cover the rest.
The idea has some objectionable aspects. It’s a remote camp where homeless people would be concentrated. They’d be allowed to leave once a day. But I suspect they wouldn’t want to be there in the first place. They congregate in city centers for the same reason cities exist: to be close to opportunities and community. We’re already stretching the limits of legal enforcement. The amount of pain and violence police would have to deliver to force people to go to a camp in the desert is inconceivable.
Like a floating airport or an NFL stadium on top of a working port terminal, Sunbreak Ranch comes from a long tradition of San Diego dreamers trying to solve major problems with imaginative visions. This is the darkest, one, though. Floating airports are fun. Internment camps are not.
As someone who watched Faulconer endorse one of those fantasies — an NFL stadium that could also serve as a convention center — I suspect something similar is happening now: He doesn’t believe it’s real but enough people do that he decided he may as well.
Many of them came along when Walton, exasperated by the homeless crisis in San Diego, endorsed it. Several prominent philanthropists and politicians joined him and momentum really picked up when they identified a spot: East Miramar, on the Marine Corps base.
That’s when Mayor Todd Gloria, who had tried to humor them without starting a conflict, mentioned the idea to the Marine Corps. That led the commanding officer of Miramar to send a letter unambiguously rejecting the idea. Mullen immediately blamed Gloria.
Even so, it was no problem. Mullen declared the Marines could change their mind. Also, the idea was not “site dependent” and many places in Otay Mesa or even farther in the eastern parts of San Diego County were still considerations.
It’s un-debunkable. Sunbreak Ranch cannot be debunked. Anything that doesn’t kill it, makes it stronger.
Unlike the floating airport and the stadium with cargo cranes underneath, Sunbreak Ranch, isn’t just this year’s make-believe rendering that could solve a big problem if we only had vision and courage. This idea could hurt a lot of people and a lot of progress as long as it keeps pulling in the Faulconers and the Waltons of San Diego.
It has become a big black hole that’s beginning to suck up all the energy the homeless crisis has generated. As long as it lives as a supposedly viable alternative to any proposed solution, it will absorb and kill all of them.
Look at Faulconer’s backyard. When our Lisa Halverstadt asked Faulconer about his Sunbreak Ranch endorsement, she also asked him about the proposal to transform H Barracks, the abandoned buildings on nine acres of land adjacent to the airport that will someday be home to a massive sewage treatment pumping facility. Before it becomes that, the mayor wants it to be a campus for services and safe shelter for hundreds of homeless residents.
Sound familiar? Yes! It would be a large, safe place for people to be while they clean up and access services. It’s, frankly, a much less dark and more realistic vision of what Sunbreak Ranch says it wants to do. It has a site. It has funding.
This concept of telling people where they can go and where they can’t sleep is nothing new. With a new ban on camping in city limits and an increase of enforcement, Mayor Gloria has felt tremendous pressure to find places where homeless people can safely be so he can ratchet up enforcement even more in the places he doesn’t think they should be.
Some of that pressure came from Faulconer, who slammed Gloria’s camping ban because it didn’t, at the same time, offer enough shelter spaces for people who would be pushed along by it to go. In explaining his support for Sunbreak Ranch, Faulconer’s spokesperson even pointed to the former mayor’s own moves.
“It does exactly what the City of San Diego did under Mayor Faulconer’s tenure during Covid (at the Convention Center in partnership with the County) where we had all the help needed to turn lives around under one roof,” he wrote.
So, H Barracks may make sense considering Faulconer’s previous support of the Convention Center as an emergency shelter and his insistence that more places need to be opened up.
But, actually, no. Because it’s within walking distance of Liberty Station and Point Loma, H Barracks has provoked a cry from Faulconer’s Point Loma neighbors. The concern is that if homeless people are gathered near the airport, they will spill out into Liberty Station and further into the peninsula.
I live in Ocean Beach and I have a hard time understanding this concern. Every day my kids and I walk past unsheltered people. They camp. They carry their things. I greatly sympathize with the concerns my neighbors have about Robb Field’s unofficial residents. If you’re going to force them to leave, it seems like H Barracks is a great first stop.
H Barracks took a barrage of heat from Point Loma residents at a recent hearing about it in front of the Peninsula Community Planning Board. And the Sunbreak Ranch proponents were there to fan the flames. H Barracks got a “no.” Sunbreak Ranch got a unanimous endorsement.
Faulconer is running for county supervisor in a tough battle. And if he can’t win his neighbors, he can’t win.
H Barracks is conceivable. Sunbreak Ranch is make believe. It’s attractive, though. Like a stadium with cargo cranes underneath, you get two things you want: You don’t have to see homeless people anymore and you can feel good about them being taken care of.
For that reason, it will continue to gain traction, especially if Faulconer and people like him give it more support. He didn’t just endorse a step or a new shelter or a safe camping site. An endorsement of Sunbreak Ranch means opposition to everything else. It’s not a part of a wider array of solutions, it’s the solution. It lives only as a foil to everything else. It lives only to kill any other effort.
When Faulconer endorsed, in 2016, the plan to raise hotel room taxes to build a stadium downtown that would serve also as a convention center, he knew it was doomed. He knew it wasn’t real. He thought he had to endorse it for political reasons – to show the Chargers he was serious about keeping them.
Now, he’s endorsing another concept he knows isn’t real. There’s no site. There’s no money. Unlike the stadium meant to placate a petulant billionaire NFL owner, this is meant to placate a community traumatized by the homelessness crisis. The Convadium was harmless.
Sunbreak Ranch, however, may take down dozens of actual solutions that could help homeless residents before it burns out.
If you have any feedback or ideas for the Politics Report, send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org.
Great writing Scott. I really appreciate your teams efforts to stop these people from getting away with pretending they are offering real solutions.
Heartbreak “Ranch” is more like it….when will we learn it never works to warehouse people. And what exactly makes it “ranch” for heavens sake! Freedom is often more valuable to the poor than elites realize. It’s difficult and expensive but we need individual solutions for individuals. That’s what can work.
Exactly Carolyn. Every time I read this sort of thing my mind says, “Can you say concentration camp?” Or the more polite term for Japanese citizens during WWII, “internment camps.” A former City Council member decades ago had the same idea. He included giving each internee a cow. It was ludicrous then and it is ludicrous now. BTW, this same Council Member also argued that the 9-1-1- system couldn’t work because, “There is no eleven on the [dial] phone.”
Agreed Carolyn. Great writing Scott
The criminal homeless vagrants want to be downtown because it is “closer to opportunities and community”. HILARIOUS!!!! YES, YES — closer to shoplifting and theft opportunities, and also free food, clothes, haircuts, etc. from the vagrant enabling community. What a bunch of garbage.
DONATIONS??? NO WAY
Faulconer is doing what he’s always done, and what professional politicians always to: watch to see which way a crowd is going, then get in front of it and pretend to be leading it. Playing a community leader doesn’t make Faulconer a true leader, and voters have had decades to see that he’s not one.
So if sun break ranch is a concentration camp what is H barracks?
VERY GOOD!
San Diego doesn’t have enough housing for all those who want to live here. That means prices of housing will rise bring the demand down to the available supply. Hard-working, self-supporting accept they can’t afford to live in San Diego and move to where they can afford housing. Yet Scott Lewis thinks the homeless are entitled to be housed in San Diego at taxpayers expense and shouldn’t be expected to move to a place where taxpayers can provide housing and services for them at a fraction of the cost, and where people doing those services could also afford housing on their salaries. I don’t know anything about Sunbreak Ranch but the principle of government provision of housing where the costs are affordable, thereby reducing the demand for available housing in expensive areas, is worthy of debate. Unfortunately people like Scott Lewis dominate news media so we don’t see such debates.
Well said!
Sunbreak Ranch needs to happen. It’s about time contributing members of society did something concrete to both better their often deplorable circumstances ( living next to screaming, violent open air asylums, feces on the street, deranged nude people in crisis walking around everywhere ) as well as taking these homeless and mentally ill people off the street and finally somewhere they’ll get real help. The money will be well spent, unlike the taxpayer gravy train currently underway for the “not for profit” industry that’s sprung up around the crisis for little to no return on the vast sums already spent.
It’s worth a shot and I will be voting for it as a primary issue.
Dan Smiechowski is a supporter of Sunbreak Ranch. Dan is running for SD Mayor!
I see, the goal of this ranch is to move the homeless somewhere out of site (and hold them there illegally) rather than actually doing something about homelessness. Here’s a better idea – have the City rent abandoned properties (those waiting on building permits) and use them as homeless camps. This will provide the homeless with a place to say, and provide an incentive to the City to expedite building permits, which will create the housing that will lower housing costs and hopefully, reduce homelessness.