The most memorable line from the mayor’s State of the City speech last week was the bit about loss-prevention measures at Target.
“While San Diego hasn’t been hit as hard by these theft rings as other California cities, we’re still paying the price. Both at the cash register and in time and convenience. You shouldn’t have to flag down a Target employee to unlock a plexiglass cabinet just so you can get a tube of toothpaste,” he said.
He’s saying: I see it too and it’s upsetting. I get it.
It was part of the climax of his speech on law and order. He wants us all to know that, on the question of is crime good or bad, he’s staking out the position that it’s very bad.
I don’t agree with some things, but it was his best speech yet.
Aside from the toothpaste-access bit, most of the speech was a triumphant and rhythmic recitation of how many things were going well. My colleague, Andrea Lopez-Villafaña, texted me during it that it was the “Everything Is Awesome” speech and that later became a line in our Morning Report.
You could even graph it!
“We have leveled off the downward slide, climbed out of the deep valley our city was in – and our trajectory is now pointed skyward,” he said.
As much effort as he put into toothpaste-access and the triumphs of his team’s leadership of the city, he didn’t make any similar connections on other things that were dismaying and wrong here. Potholes and the ugly state of many roads were not a shared experience he wanted to acknowledge like he had the toothpaste — beyond that he was fixing them at a tremendous rate.
But the most serious disconnect was on homelessness.
He talked at length about homelessness. It’s just too present in our lives to only describe as something we’re seeing so much success on.
I saw it earlier this month, at Robb Field in Ocean Beach. We were preparing for the start of softball season and noticed Christmas trees were left far from the official city Christmas tree dump site. And then we saw why.
People had burned them to stay warm close to a building that probably would not do well in a fire.
It’s been cold. The common bar stool commentary is that San Diego is a great place to be homeless and that’s partly why there are so many. It’s certainly not Billings, Fargo or Minneapolis. But a night outside in our 40-to-50 degree weather is awful. It would be impossible to sleep well even bundled up and the combination of the painful cold and the lack of sleep would make a lot of us lose our minds.
Blake Nelson did a good piece on this for the Union-Tribune. Along with the hundreds of people overdosing every year, others are freezing to death.
Things are rough out there.
Yet, in his best speech, Gloria had a lot to say about how he was addressing it and solutions he expected to come soon and other things about how he was waiting and hoping for change and investment at the state level. The number of words on homelessness was quite large.
None, though, acknowledged just how disturbing it remains and how much trauma is spreading.
Pretend this was a place without anything close to this level of homelessness. And then one day, suddenly, it had this. Wouldn’t you think that something horrific had happened? A natural disaster? A pandemic? A long list of accomplishments can’t come until that’s reflected.
I think the mayor’s shift on safe camping sites has helped and I think we should accelerate the “you can go here, or there, if you’re homeless” strategy. This isn’t a commentary on his accomplishments or policy shortcomings.
It’s a commentary on the need to recognize it as true catastrophe.
In her Beef Week piece on the mayor and homelessness, Lisa Halverstadt pulled together a fascinating collection of takes about Gloria’s approach to homelessness. His approach has generated a fierce and frustrated response from people on both sides of the divide on how to approach the crisis.
Maybe he’s taking flak from both sides because he’s over the target.
He’s generated so much frustration because he hasn’t demonstrated he’s matching the degree of the crisis with the urgency it deserves. Maybe he believes any powerful recitation of how bad things are is unneeded and something people already know and don’t want to hear. Maybe he has accepted the framing that any bad news about homelessness is bad news about his performance.
It’d be better for him, though, to see it as a catastrophe we all have to deal with as opposed to a performance rating of his job.
That’s why he was able to draw a deep shared-experience connection about toothpaste. Because he was telling us he saw it as a product of the statewide initiative Proposition 47. It’s happened to the city. It’s not a thing the city or he created. He could make a sincere connection on the toothpaste because it is so clearly not his fault.
If he truly believes he’s doing all he can about it then he should never miss a chance to recognize, with all of us, the profound crisis that remains. The mayor has no doubt seen the worst and saddest parts of the homelessness crisis. He leads a city traumatized by it.
If he can’t acknowledge that with toothpaste-access level connection, in his most important address of the year, and the best he’s done yet, even with a long list of accomplishments, he’s missed a chance to show people he gets it.
You’ll have to ask one of the 12 people who watched the speech if your take is on point, but I think sympathy is gone. You can get a house in Arkansas for $6,000. Stop laying in the street, taking regular showers.
The State of the City event was closed to the public under a Democratic mayor. How is this possible? As far as I know, never once in our history has a siting mayor shunned the public. Let that sink in! We all know the reason for limiting the audience to a select few supporters. The goose that laid the golden egg.
It wasn’t closed. You had to sign up for a ticket. I did and I got one.
http://www.dannytri.com
The Mayor’s homeless program has chosen optics over substance. His Camping Ban Ordinance has made a visible improvement in the downtown and east village areas. Due to the lack of shelter beds, those people have just moved on to a different location, they are still homeless.
They have moved to City Heights, Barrio Logan, Chula Vista, OB and more dangerous locations as well. The River Bed, Freeway Medians, Road Margins in underpasses where they are hard to see.
The Mayor talks about his progress in building homes, if you are rich you like his program, you now have more choices. If you are homeless, well it sucks to be you because they Mayor is NOT building homeless housing in the numbers needed to make a dent in the problem.
In a month were the homeless population grew by 412 people, the Mayor is excited because they converted hotel rooms to homeless housing in 25 unit, 50 unit blocks. OK. . . that’s better than nothing but it still leaves 337 new people on the street, to be rousted out by his Camping Ban enforcement.
This administration gets excited because they have added deck chairs to the first class section of the Titanic.
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During his “State of the City” address, Todd Gloria addressed three main topics, and intentionally chose one or two strong, emotionally charged keywords to shape his message and elicit strong audience reactions.
For his key topics, these KEYWORDS and (repetitions) were:
1) Homelessness (20): CRISIS (5)
2) Housing (21): AFFORDABLE (7) – (but no mention of “supportive”)
3) Public Safety (2): POLICE (10) CRIME (7) FENTANYL (6) Prop 47 (4)
One definition of crisis is “a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger.”
Todd used the word “crisis” only when discussing Homelessness.
The choice to use CRISIS 5X to describe homelessness and not use it for housing or even “FENTANYL” is an emotional, cynical and politically strategic approach:
– Gloria was seeking to incite a fearful, emotional response in his audiences, by repeating “crisis” over and over re:”Homelessness” while using less emotionally charged words for other topics that are, frankly, equally urgent and deadly e.g.: increase in number of pedestrian/cyclists deaths, and people dying from fentanyl.
Thank you for this column. While I appreciate the efforts the city, and county, as well as other cities in SD are taking, as well as the many organizations working very hard, indeed tirelessly, to help, it is overtly evident that homelessness in San Diego continues to be a much greater problem that requires much greater and more urgent efforts than all of these. It needs to be recognized and addressed as a true state of emergency. But the mayor did rightly note homelessness requires a multi-faceted response. I would like to see even more effort directed toward getting at the roots of why so many people become homeless in San Diego in the first place, including in particular the high cost of living, limited affordable housing for poor and low income residents, and insufficient protections for renters in trouble as well as insufficient proactive interventions to promote, develop, and sustain an inclusive culture of mental and physical wellness.
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Is anyone voting for “Little Todd?”
I was raised in San Diego and now live elsewhere. Unless you feel it is a personal mission to remain in San Diego, then leave. Leave. Fake leaders like Todd Gloria will continue to offer hope that is as phony as they are. Their entire worldview is erroneous and corrupt. They will use disasters to justify doing more of what caused the disasters in the first place. Leave.