Supervisorial race will be different from the last one

The county supervisor’s race between incumbent Terra Lawson-remer and former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer is bound to focus on national themes and local quality-of-life concerns.

Like most campaigns, both sides likely will rely on simple messages over more nuanced realities.

There’s a lot at stake in what is expected to be the region’s highest-profile local election next year.

A Lawson-remer victory would retain the Democrats’ 3-2 majority on the Board of Supervisors — something Lawson-remer regularly mentions in fundraising appeals. It’s also a test of whether Republicans can win in a Democratic district in the county.

But this isn’t just about partisanship. Should Faulconer prevail, the Republican-dominated board would be expected to be less labor-friendly and more pro-business and pro-development, and perhaps more reluctant to expand social services than Democrats.

However, a flip of the board majority would be more complex than that.

Faulconer has suggested he would seek to spend more on social services. Early on, he has claimed the county needs to do more to combat homelessness, particularly when it comes to expanding mental health care facilities, creating more housing and increasing support services. He suggests he “delivered results” in those areas as mayor.

But the county has ramped up those programs after just a few years of Democratic leadership — which included Lawsonremer — following a long stretch when a Republican majority did not make homelessness a high priority, though no one is saying more shouldn’t be done.

Among other things, Lawson-remer teamed up with Republican Supervisor Joel Anderson on a pilot

The percentage of San Diego schools that are heavily segregated, in that they are at least 90 percent Latino and Black, did not change much from 2000 to 2019, according to the study. In 2019 about 14 percent of schools were heavily segregated, including in gentrified areas, compared to 15 percent in 2000, the study found.

Overall, the share of the city’s population that is Latino rose by 5 percentage points and the Asian share by 3 percentage points, while the percentage of the population that is White fell by 9 points. The same trends occurred in gentrified neighborhoods to lesser degrees.

The study considered neighborhoods to be gentrified if they had lower incomes and older housing in 2000, if home values had risen since and if their share of collegeeducated households had risen at a faster pace than the city’s overall.

Meanwhile in schools, the White enrollment percentage in gentrified areas fell slightly from 2000 levels. Black student enrollment fell significantly by 7 percentage points in gentrified areas, while Asian enrollment in those areas fell by nearly 3 points. Latino enrollment in gentrified areas rose, but at a slower rate than the city overall.

And in that time, the share of city residents overall who are college graduates rose significantly — by 10 percentage points for the city as a whole and by 12 to 20 percentage points for gentrified neighborhoods. Poverty dropped slightly in the city overall and rose slightly in some gentrified neighborhoods while falling in others.

But in the schools, the share of students who are from low-income families increased at a steeper rate. That number rose by more than 13 percentage points in both gentrified neighborhoods and low-income neighborhoods that did not gentrify.

Segregation by income increased significantly in San

Diego schools, including in gentrified neighborhoods. By 2019, a typical low-income student attended a school where 72 percent of students were low-income — up from 2000, when it was 65 percent.

Income segregation disproportionately affected Black and Latino students. The typical Black or Latino student attended a school that was at least 70 percent low-income in 2019, even in gentrified neighborhoods. That’s up significantly from 2000, when both Black and Latino students attended a school with, on average, about 56 percent low-income students.

Meanwhile, White and Asian students on average attended schools with only about 30 percent low-income students in 2019. But they encountered more socioeconomic diversity in gentrified neighborhoods — White and Asian students attended schools with 40 percent and 57 percent low-income students on average, respectively.

While the UCLA study suggested gentrification hasn’t changed school demographics much, Barrera said he has seen gentrification transform several San Diego Unified schools’ demographics.

He noted North Park schools Mckinley Elementary, which went from being 19 percent White in 2002 to 51 percent last school year, and Jefferson Elementary, which was 13 percent White in 2002 but 29 percent last school year. Birney Elementary in University Heights has gone from being 15 percent White in 2002 to 33 percent last school year, at the same time that its Latino enrollment has risen more recently.

Barrera noted that schools in other gentrifying areas have not changed demographically and still serve a vast majority of low-income and Latino and Black students, such as Perkins K-8 in Barrio Logan. Other schools in gentrifying areas like Golden Hill K-8 are just now starting to see enrollment demographics shift. nationalized — that happened, to a degree, in the Montgomery Steppe-reichert race.

Ron Nehring, former chair of the San Diego and California Republican parties, recently acknowledged the GOP brand has become weak in suburban areas — and District 3 is largely a suburban district. But that may have less effect in some races, he said.

“Party brands matter less when the race is high profile,” he said in an email. “In San Diego the Faulconer race will be high profile which means he will have the bandwidth to make sure voters see him for who he really is.”

Lawson-remer and Democrats also will have the bandwidth to offer up their version of who Faulconer really is.

What they said

President Joe Biden in San Francisco via Uniontribune alum Christopher Cadelago (@ccadelago) of Politico on X.

“Biden also w/ some nice words about Newsom tonite, saying ‘he could be anything he wants. He could have the job I’m looking for.’ The line got laughs.”