The San Diego Sun recently interviewed the two candidates running for mayor of San Diego. Incumbent Todd Gloria and challenger Larry Turner were both asked similar questions about themselves, each other and the city’s top hot button issue of homelessness. Turner’s profile ran October 11; Here is Gloria’s story.
There’s a question San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria gets on a regular basis that involves Vice President Kamala Harris.
Some back story first.
Gloria is a third generation San Diegan of Filipino, Dutch, Puerto Rican and Native American descent. He served two terms (2008-2016) as the District 3 San Diego City Councilmember.
When Bob Filner resigned as mayor in 2013, Gloria stepped up on an interim basis and the public gleefully dubbed him the iMayor.
Instead of running for mayor against Kevin Faulconer in 2016, Gloria sought to become California’s 78th State Assemblyman. He succeeded, and after two terms (2016-2020), Gloria returned to city politics and beat Barbara Bry to become the 37th Mayor of San Diego.
He’s running for reelection against political newcomer Larry Turner. Gloria has name recognition, and is intelligent, glib and well-spoken. He should be a shoo-in against a cop/former Marine — but polling suggests a tight race, with Gloria leading Turner 37% to 32%, with a whopping 30% of voters undecided.
Gloria is a Democrat in a blue city with all nine city councilmembers united under the same party flag. Turner is an Independent.
A healthy percentage of Dems on the fence about voting for Gloria know he’s well-aligned with Presidential candidate Harris. Gloria stumped for Harris in Nevada and he attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Harris has supported Gloria politically and calls him on his birthday.
The question: If Harris wins the White House, would Gloria accept a job in her administration?
The first time I asked the mayor this, just after the October 3 mayoral debate on KPBS, he chastised me.
“The fact that you’re asking makes me concerned about [you] paying attention to the reports we’re doing,” Gloria says. “Yes. I’m here running for mayor for four years. This is my dream job. I’m asking to keep my dream job.”
A glutton for punishment, I asked the mayor the same question one more time, a week later, in a one-on-one interview:
Me: “If you win your race, and Kamala Harris becomes President of the United States and she calls you and implores you to come join her team, are you going to say no to the President?”
Gloria: “That would be hard to do, but I would say that. And I recognize I get asked this a lot, and so I think there’s some belief that that’s not the case. But if anyone knows anything about me, I finish what I start. I meet my commitments and I try to follow through with the best that I possibly can. I’m standing before my hometown and asking them to rehire me for a job that has a specific term of four years. And I’m doing that with the absolute 100% intention of staying here all four years. Saying no to the vice president, hopefully President-elect, and a friend, would be difficult, but…this is where it’s at.”
The hot-button issue in the mayoral race is homelessness. Voters will have to interpret which way the needle is going in the struggle to get roofs over people’s heads.
It was reported this week that for the 30th straight month, according to the Regional Task Force on Homelessness, San Diego has seen more people go into homelessness than escape out of it.
Gloria points out that the Task Force stats reflect countywide numbers, not just the city.
Given that Gloria spent eight years as the District 3 city councilmember (which includes downtown), it’s fair to ask the mayor where he sees progress on homelessness since 2008.
“Back in 2008, the city put up two tents during the wintertime, basically from Thanksgiving to Easter,” Gloria says. “That was the sum total of our engagement on this concern.”
Fast-forward to today, he says.
“What you see are permanent shelters, temporary shelters, a whole host and diversification of the portfolio,” he says. “That’s along with coordinated street outreach, better partnerships with the county and changing state laws to be more effective.”
Gloria says he’s improved the situation, even though more people are homeless.
“And that’s largely the fact that housing is very expensive in our city and pushing more people out onto the streets,” he says. “We have to be able to tackle this issue in the multifaceted way that it requires, and we’re doing that work.”
In the summer of 2023, Gloria pushed for a Camping Ban on city streets. It passed the city council by a 5-4 vote. At the time, Gloria’s opponent was in favor of the ban. Now Turner says it was mostly performative.
“I didn’t realize they were playing a game,” Turner says. “It was bogus. Their plan was to have downtown empty of homelessness right before the election, so it’d look like they did something on homelessness. But that plan wasn’t well thought out.”
According to the monthly reports done by the Downtown San Diego Partnership, people living on the street in 92101 dropped by 60% since the Camping Ban.
Turner and others say the Camping Ban created increases in homelessness in the San Diego Riverbed, in other downtown-adjacent neighborhoods and outside the fences that border Interstate 5.
Gloria points to two Safe Camping tent sites as part of new shelter system product created by the city. One is in a parking lot at 20th and B Street; the other is in a remote section of Balboa Park called the O Lot. The city council recently voted to raise the number of tents to a total of nearly 800, including both sites.
The vote to increase the number of tents came the same week headlines declared there was a rat infestation at the O Lot.
Gloria says the press conference that claimed rats had infiltrated the camp’s drinking water supply “are not reflective of reality.”
He adds that the tent camps are “certainly more safe than unsanctioned encampments in the public right of way.”
The mayor says a large percentage of residents in the tent villages are people who have previously never accessed the city’s shelter system.
“[The tents] are serving a very important part of our continuum of homelessness response,” Gloria says. “We’re getting people who’ve previously not interacted with our system into shelter, to get them connected to our networks and hopefully start addressing the causes of their homelessness. No shelter is perfect. We can always do better.”
Gloria says part of the big picture that often gets ignored is that the city of San Diego has been providing shelter services for more than 40 years while, until recently, other regional cities have offered next to nothing.
“Folks have simply come [to the city] because we chose to provide services,” he says. “That should be a challenge to those other cities to step up and do their job. I think all of us collectively should hold them accountable for what they have not been doing.”
One of the proposals Gloria made public this year was a “Mega Shelter” at Kettner Boulevard and Vine Street near the San Diego International Airport. Critics pounced on the idea of putting 1,000 people in a 65,000-square-foot site. Others contend the land contains toxic materials, has a high-volume traffic issue, and that the proposed deal is lopsided toward the landowner.
The mayor has yet to bring that plan to a vote by the city council.
“It’s still my intent to place a very large permanent homeless shelter there,” Gloria says. “If I can just say, all of those things that you just mentioned are code for ‘not in my backyard.’ There’s always a long list of alleged shortcomings to justify the status quo.”
The mayor says he’ll never accept that too many people live on the street.
“We’ve got to find something better,” he says. “That location is ideal. There are traffic concerns, but…you can engineer for that. The toxicity stuff, that’s a part of why we’re still doing our due diligence…And, we have continued to pass back and forth proposals for what the owner would want and what we’d like.”
Gloria is running for four more years and insists a potential job offer in a new Presidential administration won’t deter him from working in city politics.
“I like results and I’ve worked in a lot of different levels of government,” Gloria says. “Local government’s the best because you can see the tangible results in your everyday life. When I was in the [state] legislature, I loved that job. But a line of code in a thousand-page bill doesn’t give you the same satisfaction as seeing a street that has been neglected get repaired. Or a community park coming online after decades of work.”
Gloria notes he began office during the pandemic and doing the job over Zoom was somewhat unsatisfying.
“As an elected representative, I found it extremely difficult to do this job without regularly interacting with the public,” he says. “On a recent night, I think I went to six events or something like that. That’s a bit exhausting physically, but I will never take it for granted again after the experiences in 2020 and 2021.”
As for pre-election polls, Gloria’s not concerned. He’s confident San Diego Democrats will find his name on ballots. The only numbers that matter, he believes, are the results that get announced on Election Day. SDSun
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