Marine veteran and Police Officer Larry Turner speaks at Mission Beach Town Council meeting on Oct. 2, 2023. / Photo by Ariana Drehsler
By Scott Lewis/ Voice of San Diego / Dec. 9, 2034
This week, former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer endorsed Sunbreak Ranch, the plan to move all homeless San Diegans into a camp somewhere out in the desert.
It would be a vast campus of shelters and services.
It is Pedro from Napolean Dynamite: Vote for Sunbreak Ranch and all your wildest dreams will come true.
“The successful implementation of Sunbreak Ranch will save hundreds of thousands of lives, alleviate widespread suffering, unlock unfathomable human potential, and clean up America’s cities for all of us,” wrote George Mullen, who came up with the idea, and basketball legend Bill Walton.
Proponents of the plan have vacillated on its cost and size – it could be anywhere from 500 acres to 2,000. It could cost $275 million. Mullen says it is nothing compared to what we already spend, which implies we must redirect what we already spend to it. He is looking for philanthropy to cover the rest.
The idea has some objectionable aspects. It’s a remote camp where homeless people would be concentrated. They’d be allowed to leave once a day. But I suspect they wouldn’t want to be there in the first place. They congregate in city centers for the same reason cities exist: to be close to opportunities and community. We’re already stretching the limits of legal enforcement. The amount of pain and violence police would have to deliver to force people to go to a camp in the desert is inconceivable.
Like a floating airport or an NFL stadium on top of a working port terminal, Sunbreak Ranch comes from a long tradition of San Diego dreamers trying to solve major problems with imaginative visions. This is the darkest, one, though. Floating airports are fun. Internment camps are not.
As someone who watched Faulconer endorse one of those fantasies — an NFL stadium that could also serve as a convention center — I suspect something similar is happening now: He doesn’t believe it’s real but enough people do that he decided he may as well.
Many of them came along when Walton, exasperated by the homeless crisis in San Diego, endorsed it. Several prominent philanthropists and politicians joined him and momentum really picked up when they identified a spot: East Miramar, on the Marine Corps base.
That’s when Mayor Todd Gloria, who had tried to humor them without starting a conflict, mentioned the idea to the Marine Corps. That led the commanding officer of Miramar to send a letter unambiguously rejecting the idea. Mullen immediately blamed Gloria.
Even so, it was no problem. Mullen declared the Marines could change their mind. Also, the idea was not “site dependent” and many places in Otay Mesa or even farther in the eastern parts of San Diego County were still considerations.
It’s un-debunkable. Sunbreak Ranch cannot be debunked. Anything that doesn’t kill it, makes it stronger.
Unlike the floating airport and the stadium with cargo cranes underneath, Sunbreak Ranch, isn’t just this year’s make-believe rendering that could solve a big problem if we only had vision and courage. This idea could hurt a lot of people and a lot of progress as long as it keeps pulling in the Faulconers and the Waltons of San Diego.
It has become a big black hole that’s beginning to suck up all the energy the homeless crisis has generated. As long as it lives as a supposedly viable alternative to any proposed solution, it will absorb and kill all of them.
Look at Faulconer’s backyard. When our Lisa Halverstadt asked Faulconer about his Sunbreak Ranch endorsement, she also asked him about the proposal to transform H Barracks, the abandoned buildings on nine acres of land adjacent to the airport that will someday be home to a massive sewage treatment pumping facility. Before it becomes that, the mayor wants it to be a campus for services and safe shelter for hundreds of homeless residents.
Sound familiar? Yes! It would be a large, safe place for people to be while they clean up and access services. It’s, frankly, a much less dark and more realistic vision of what Sunbreak Ranch says it wants to do. It has a site. It has funding.
This concept of telling people where they can go and where they can’t sleep is nothing new. With a new ban on camping in city limits and an increase of enforcement, Mayor Gloria has felt tremendous pressure to find places where homeless people can safely be so he can ratchet up enforcement even more in the places he doesn’t think they should be.
Some of that pressure came from Faulconer, who slammed Gloria’s camping ban because it didn’t, at the same time, offer enough shelter spaces for people who would be pushed along by it to go. In explaining his support for Sunbreak Ranch, Faulconer’s spokesperson even pointed to the former mayor’s own moves.
“It does exactly what the City of San Diego did under Mayor Faulconer’s tenure during Covid (at the Convention Center in partnership with the County) where we had all the help needed to turn lives around under one roof,” he wrote.
So, H Barracks may make sense considering Faulconer’s previous support of the Convention Center as an emergency shelter and his insistence that more places need to be opened up.
But, actually, no. Because it’s within walking distance of Liberty Station and Point Loma, H Barracks has provoked a cry from Faulconer’s Point Loma neighbors. The concern is that if homeless people are gathered near the airport, they will spill out into Liberty Station and further into the peninsula.
I live in Ocean Beach and I have a hard time understanding this concern. Every day my kids and I walk past unsheltered people. They camp. They carry their things. I greatly sympathize with the concerns my neighbors have about Robb Field’s unofficial residents. If you’re going to force them to leave, it seems like H Barracks is a great first stop. [OB Rag emphasis.]
H Barracks took a barrage of heat from Point Loma residents at a recent hearing about it in front of the Peninsula Community Planning Board. And the Sunbreak Ranch proponents were there to fan the flames. H Barracks got a “no.” Sunbreak Ranch got a unanimous endorsement.
Faulconer is running for county supervisor in a tough battle. And if he can’t win his neighbors, he can’t win.
H Barracks is conceivable. Sunbreak Ranch is make believe. It’s attractive, though. Like a stadium with cargo cranes underneath, you get two things you want: You don’t have to see homeless people anymore and you can feel good about them being taken care of.
For that reason, it will continue to gain traction, especially if Faulconer and people like him give it more support. He didn’t just endorse a step or a new shelter or a safe camping site. An endorsement of Sunbreak Ranch means opposition to everything else. It’s not a part of a wider array of solutions, it’s the solution. It lives only as a foil to everything else. It lives only to kill any other effort.
When Faulconer endorsed, in 2016, the plan to raise hotel room taxes to build a stadium downtown that would serve also as a convention center, he knew it was doomed. He knew it wasn’t real. He thought he had to endorse it for political reasons – to show the Chargers he was serious about keeping them.
Now, he’s endorsing another concept he knows isn’t real. There’s no site. There’s no money. Unlike the stadium meant to placate a petulant billionaire NFL owner, this is meant to placate a community traumatized by the homelessness crisis. The Convadium was harmless.
Sunbreak Ranch, however, may take down dozens of actual solutions that could help homeless residents before it burns out.
Scott Lewis is the chief editor of Voice of San Diego and is a resident of Ocean Beach.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Strikes a nerve when an adult son of mine had a DUI car wreck and what little he had left was gone. There was a point of him going to a rehabilitation in the east county mountains connected with a church group after jail, I agonized over, due to the seclusion, the religious aspect within it, that eventually I said to come live at my house instead at the last minute. I wasn’t happy bc of his not being responsible with personal actions. The hole to get him out of. It wasn’t perfect. After 19 months of free rent/ utilities (he did repay the bail money), I had to say enough, but he’s progressed to being a functioning adult, who lives in a van, by his choice, but due to his life choices, will never be able to afford anything meaningful to live in. It’s one thing to get stabilized, but when you have to reconnect to society, the distance out in the hills, could be a challenge for the next steps. Connection to society has it’s reasons.
Excellent point. Sorry to hear about your son.
Thanks Geoff. The impacts of a bad choice can really cost. Time, money, effort, potential. If you’re a second shift worker without a license, getting public transportation alone is challenging. We talk of public transportation as if it’s a 24 hr thing, but it’s not.
I haven mentioned it before but I’ll say it again. I traveled all over Mexico and parts of Central America and the bus systems were amazing. They went everywhere and there were lots of them. They even picked up people signaling them from the side of the road. Mexico had first, second, and third class busses. First class was a comfortable seat on a nice bus. Second class was also an assigned seat but they also packed the aisles. Third class was the cheapest and most chaotic. But, they had something for everyone. The problem is you need riders to make it profitable.
Why not both H barracks AND Sunbreak?
The Desert is a great place….. Get moving!
How is Miramar or Otay a desert? They haven’t even identified a place.
Of course, neither Miramar nor Otay Mesa are desert. However, both locations are out of the question. MCAS Miramar has said an unequivocal No and now Brown Field, the only potential site on Otay Mesa, has also stated No Way! Furthermore, marooning people at distances from “civilization”, without any public transportation available, is cruelty on its face.
I live just west of Loma Portal and I’m not in the least concerned about homeless people being provided tents and services at Site H adjacent to the airport. These are not people who will be coming into our communities to set up tents or live in the bushes because they’ll have a roof (of sorts) over their heads. They will be people who want to gain some degree of stability while they work on regaining a real roof and jobs, assisted by the services that will be available on site. Plus, there’s public transportation along Harbor Drive which goes downtown as well as into Point Loma and Ocean Beach.
Has anyone in this city ever hear or ever read the word “prevention” anywhere in the “Voice of Scott Lewis”? Nobody has beaten the drums more for the mindless and reckless build-to-rent development policies while Wall Street has usurped all of the single family home sales over the last 15 years more than the walking plaid leisure suit in white loafers Scott Lewis.
We get it Scott, you still hate Kevin Faulconer. FYI, nobody engaged by the OB Rag has ever been all that fond of the guy either. That doesn’t change the fact that there has existed a considerably large homeless encampment for over a decade on the very land off of Convoy in Kearny Mesa for more than two decades. So it may very well meet the criteria you’ve outlined that are necessary to facilitate a portion of a solution. That being said, the conditions will continue to accelerate until well targeted housing policies preserve existing affordable housing (not in quotation marks) AND PREVENT HOMELESSNESS!
For the record, I am betting that Scott Lewis has never worn a plaid leisure suit or white loafers.
I said “the walking plaid leisure suit in white loafers Scott Lewis.”
A metaphor intended to humorously encapsulate a National Lampoon Cousin Eddy type detachment from reality, to clarify.
“ Every day my kids and I walk past unsheltered people. They camp. They carry their things”. Ok Scott! Sure dude. Is there anything else they do that might be cause for concern? Since you’re in OB, how about the guy who walked into a cupcake bakery on Voltaire with a crowbar? There was a guy assaulted by a group of homeless on Newport a few months ago. Tell your kids to watch out and not step in people poop. Do your kids use the bathroom at the beach. One stall is permanently out of order and quite disgusting and the other one has a man that lives there and smokes meth all day. There is a faint scent of urine pretty much all over OB and there are people having psychotic episodes that would have been unimaginable 30 years ago.
Dropping my kids off at Robb field for surf camp this summer looked like a scene out of robocop. There are 10,000 homeless county wide. A 40 person motel conversion for $20M is a drop in the bucket and a complete waste of public finances. To people like Scott Lewis comparing Sunbreak Ranch or similar concepts to internment camps or worse, shame on you. Auschwitz did not offer drug rehabilitation or vocational training or medical treatment. Shame on you for disrespecting the people that actually endured this reality.
We need to start thinking about facilities and treatment for 10,000 homeless and somewhere out in east county makes a hell of a lot more sense than spotted throughout our residential neighborhoods.