SAN DIEGO MAYOR BRY: WE’LL SEE A SUBSTANTIAL DECREASE IN HOMELESSNESS
Councilmember Barbara Bry and Assemblymember Todd Gloria, both Democrats, received the most votes in the spring primary to advance from a field of several candidates to a fall runoff election in the San Diego mayor’s race. Below are their answers to a series of questions posed by The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board via email.
Q:
Combined with flu season, the pandemic may pose even greater problems for San Diegans this winter. How will you balance public health and the economy if shutdowns are needed? A:
Medical authorities and economists are in agreement that getting the virus under control is a necessary precondition to completely reopening the economy. We already have seen both health and economic impacts of the pandemic fall most heavily on communities of color and on lower-income communities, so our future actions must give special attention to their needs and to small businesses which have been disproportionately impacted.
My Roadmap to Recovery describes measures that I will take as mayor to bring us out of both the pandemic and the recession. Priorities include:
Collaborating with the county to ensure more widespread testing combined with comprehensive contact tracing, with a focus on lower-income communities.
Providing technical assistance to businesses needing to convert their workspaces for greater social distancing and new patterns of use.
Expanding Internet access citywide to all families and small businesses to enable more people to work effectively and study at home.
Expanding affordable childcare services regionally through collaboration with the county and the private sector.
Working with transit agencies to make their systems safe, for the benefit of those needing to commute.
• Developing plans to restore tourism, including attracting more cultural visitors.
Q:
How satisfied are you with the progress the city has made on its Climate Action Plan and how will you ensure its legally binding goals are met? A:
When it was adopted five years ago, the Climate Action Plan was considered ambitious, but worsening conditions require it to be more aspirational as to its major goals of reducing vehicle miles traveled and increasing reliance on renewable energy. As mayor, I will push to have its goals enhanced, in recognition of this region’s vulnerability to climate change impacts of sea level rise, wildfire and inland f looding.
Here are my priorities on how to update the CAP and make it more effective:
• Develop a tech and biotech employment center downtown to bring more
good jobs closer to where many people live and where there is good transit, particularly with the completion of the Blue Line connecting downtown to the UTC area.
Develop a biopharmaceutical manufacturing sector in Otay Mesa, again increasing more good jobs in area near more affordable housing.
Develop a regional strategy for an effective remote work force with the city as a leader.
• Develop incentives to encourage transit ridership which has dropped during the pandemic.
• Promote conversion to use of electric personal and commercial vehicles.
• Ensure that San Diego Community Power meets its goals of providing residents with new sources of renewable energy and lowers electric bills for residents and businesses.
• Develop metrics and goals with timelines.
• Develop a regional transit plan that truly meets the needs of our city.
Q:
Neighborhoods south of Interstate 8, including communities of color, don’t always get the funding or consideration wealthier communities to the north get. How will you address that?
A:
The focus of my Roadmap to Recovery is addressing the historic inequities in housing, employment, education and access to investment capital for small businesses. My goal is to grow the pie, using my private sector experience creating jobs, while simultaneously improving access to it.
• Equity starts at City Hall with the city ending racial and gender pay disparity, funding the new Office on Race and Equity, and ensuring the city’s contracting system allows all small businesses to compete.
Working with San Diego Community
Power to ensure investment in solar, charging stations and other green infrastructure in communities south of I-8.
• Ensuring that infrastructure investments are prioritized according to where they are most needed.
• Leveraging philanthropy (San Diego Library Foundation and San Diego Parks Foundation) in conjunction with other sources of capital for infrastructure.
• Using community plans to relieve impacted communities of land uses which impose environmental burdens on them.
Q:
How, specifically, will you address the high cost of housing in San Diego? A:
From my years in business, I know how the shortage of affordable housing is constricting recruiting even in wellpaying tech industries and impacting even more employees in service industries and young people entering the workforce.
As mayor, here are the highlights of my plan to produce more housing for working families:
• Revamp our Development Services Department to make it more customerfocused, with shorter timelines to get a permit. Every month of delay adds costs.
• Develop a citywide plan for adaptive re-use of commercial and office spaces that are empty because of the pandemic. These spaces can become both for-sale and rental housing.
• Enforce our existing law against shortterm rentals in residential neighborhoods, bringing back 16,000 housing units ($1 billion of housing) for our residents either as owners or renters.
Continue to update community plans along transit with appropriate density and requirements for affordable housing. This provides developers and residents certainty about what will get built where.
• Develop a down-payment assistance plan for first-time home buyers.
• Lease surplus city land for development of lower-income housing.
Q:
What will homelessness in San Diego look like after four years of your administration?
A:
Addressing homelessness requires a multipronged strategy, starting with focusing on root causes, which include mental health and substance abuse issues. Solutions require psychological counseling, drug detox programs and job training, all offered in conjunction with provision of transitional housing. This will require collaboration with the county and state, which have far greater resources and responsibility.
However, at the city level, my administration will connect homeless individuals with trained professionals, will transfer such engagement as much as possible from law enforcement to social service agencies, will halt destruction of low-income housing units, will provide shelters and transitional housing to meet immediate needs, will press the county to adequately fund mental health and addiction programs, and will prepare homeless individuals to be integrated into the workforce.
By pursuing this set of strategies, the city will see a substantial decrease in its homeless population. That will mean fewer people living on the street or in cars, fewer homeless encampments in public parks and along the San Diego River, reduced demand for emergency services, and overall improvement in quality of life citywide. I cannot predict the exact amount of the decrease but based on the city’s success with this approach for homeless housed at the Convention Center, I am confident that my proposals will lead to greater and more permanent improvements than we see currently.
Q:
Will — and how will — you accept and evaluate Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s proposal to redevelop the sports arena site?
A:
I have serious reservations regarding the current redevelopment proposal for the Midway district, including the sports arena site, due to the lack of community engagement. While the local community planning group supported it in concept, the city did not involve the public in establishing criteria in the request for proposals or in evaluating the developer proposals, other than to solicit comments online regarding the two final proposals. Given that limited choice, selection of the Brookfield proposal may have been appropriate, but it deprived the city and the community of an opportunity to obtain a potentially better proposal — for example, one that included a commitment for a substantial share of affordable housing or one not dependent on eliminating the current height limit. As mayor, I will first seek public input on what project features are needed at that location and then attempt to negotiate those with Brookfield.
If that proves unsuccessful, I will reopen the selection process, with better criteria. By that time, we will know whether voters approve lifting the 30-foot height limit in that area. If they reject that proposal, then Brookfield can be expected to withdraw, in which case a new request for proposals will be needed anyway.