Gloria is mayor of San Diego and lives in Downtown.
At the outset of 2023, San Diego finds itself at a critical point. We’ve navigated the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on our local economy, and we’ve continued to recover and rebuild from the city’s past mistakes and inaction. We’re steadily rising to meet the challenges before us as we chart a course toward becoming the great city we know we can be.
In short, in 2023, we are going to keep making progress and getting things done for the people of this city.
This year, I will remain focused on our city’s top issues: homelessness, housing, infrastructure and public safety. We will keep improving our infrastructure like roads, sidewalks, streetlights and parks; ensuring that San Diego continues to be one of the safest cities in the country; getting unsheltered folks off the street and into permanent housing; and building thousands more homes that people can actually afford.
We’ve already hit the ground running to start making progress. Moments before I took the stage to deliver the annual State of the City address last week, I signed an executive order requiring that all 100 percent affordable housing projects be fully reviewed within 30 days, shortening a process that can take six months down to one.
This spring, I will bring my second Housing Action Package to the City Council for its consideration of 11 additional policy reforms that will make it easier to build more homes across the city.
In 2022, our outreach workers, shelters and Safe Parking programs connected more than 2,200 unsheltered residents into housing. Yet homelessness remains a crisis because people are becoming homeless at a faster rate than we are getting them off the street. That’s why we must focus on prevention, and one of my priorities this year will be building out the policy framework that City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera and I announced late last year to protect and help renters at risk of eviction.
Over the past two years, we’ve made an additional 658 shelter beds available — a 61 percent increase. In the early part of this year, we’ll open the old Central Library as a shelter, open a fourth Safe Parking lot for people to temporarily live in their vehicles, and create a new shelter with private rooms for families.
And as the new chair of the California Big City Mayors coalition, I’m setting my sights on mental illness and addiction — working with the state Legislature to reform conservatorship laws to help people who are too sick to care for themselves and crack down on dealers of illicit fentanyl, which is super-charging our homelessness crisis.
San Diego saw a sizable decrease in crime last year, and I plan to keep it going in that direction by continuing to create incentives that will allow us to recruit and retain the best and brightest police officers.
Other than homelessness, the issue I hear most about is the quality of our streets. This fiscal year, we are on track to resurface 283 miles of roads, which is 40 percent more than the previous year.
In 2023, I’ll present to the City Council an updated Street Preservation Ordinance requiring utilities or construction companies that dig up our streets to leave them in similar or better shape than they found them — and foot the bill for the repairs. This is expected to net the city an additional 25 miles of repaved streets next year.
All our infrastructure work is being prioritized with an eye toward equity, ensuring that historically disadvantaged communities are served. This includes the new or improved sidewalks, streetlights, fire stations, libraries and parks that make residents proud of their communities.
In 2021, we ed the first update to our Parks Master Plan in 65 years, overhauling the way we prioritize and fund park improvements. In 2022, we opened a dozen new parks and improved a dozen others. In 2023, we’ll do even more — adding 13 new parks and improving 18 others.
As long as I’m mayor, we’ll move forward with big-city energy, saying yes to projects that promise hundreds or thousands of new homes, bring new economic activity to communities that have lacked commerce and opportunity, and inject a vibrant, dynamic sense of place into neighborhoods that have seen better days. This is why I’m so excited about the efforts underway to redevelop and revitalize the Sports Arena area and Downtown’s Civic Center core.
In San Diego, we are nowhere near mission accomplished, but we are heading boldly in the right direction.
