Mayor Kevin Faulconer has urged the San Diego City Council to get behind a lineup of new homelessness programs for San Diego County. However, Faulconer has been met with one demand from his fellow leaders.
These leaders argue that San Diego needs a singular, clear plan guiding all of the County’s efforts to find a solution for the mass amount of homeless individuals.
City Council President Pro Tempore Georgette Gómez commented on the County’s numerous plans, saying, “A lot of the programs that have been coming forward [are] reactionary, and I’ve not seen a holistic approach in where we’re going… We’re just reacting, having a piecemeal type of a program moving forward.”
When Faulconer addressed the state of the city, he shot down this approach by stating, “I am not going to tell a veteran sleeping in a park, or a family living out their car, that they should wait for the government to do another study while they spend another night in the cold.”
Early in 2019, the Housing Commission, in collaboration with the nonprofit Corporation for Supportive Housing, established a $183,900 contract. This contract was made in hopes of achieving their vision to address homelessness with short, medium, and long-term actions.
Experts from the groups have spent many months meeting with dozens of homeless San Diegans, local government officials, and homeless service providers to evaluate the city’s current system and crunch numbers on their proposed strategies.
Chief of Homelessness Strategies and Housing Liaison Keely Halsey is expecting the plan to include a to-do list of sorts, as well as the complete breakdown of the funding needed to improve the preexisting programs in place.
In a recent statement, Halsey wrote, “We requested that [the plan] contain not only general policies, but specific tasks that can be executed and adapted in order to reduce homelessness…The report will not be the last step, and we are ready to keep taking action with our partners and find a sustainable source of funding to implement ideas from the report.”
There has been immense progress with regard to battling the issue of homelessness in San Diego County and these plans developed by Mayor Faulconer and the Housing Commission are just a part of the great strides Republican leaders in San Diego have made in the past year.
