The Voice of San Diego opened today with a salvo against Mayor Todd Gloria’s percentages of increasing homeless shelter capacities. It is alarming. Here it is:
Mayor Todd Gloria wants you to know an important fact: He has increased shelter capacity by 70 percent.
Only, he hasn’t.
Across the airwaves and in his ballot statement, voters are blasted with the 70 percent figure. It’s a key reason, Gloria wants San Diegans to vote for him.
The Voice’s reporter, Will Huntsberry, found that Gloria has increased shelter capacity by only roughly 32 percent. The online newspaper says, “That’s not too shabby. Nor is it anywhere near 70 percent.” The Voice continues:
Huntsberry first fact checked Gloria’s 70 percent claim back in June 2023. Since Gloria started campaigning for mayor, the claim has resurfaced.
Gloria’s team comes to the 70 percent figure by picking a convenient start date several months after Gloria came into office when the number of beds was unusually low because of the pandemic.
At the beginning of the year, Gloria said he wanted to add 1,000 beds to the city’s shelter system by early 2025. With just a few months to go, there has been a net addition of just 51 beds.
In today’s regular Voice, they say this:
As a central component of his re-election campaign, Mayor Todd Gloria continues to claim he’s increased homeless shelter capacity by 70 percent. That claim is no more true now than it was in June 2023, when Voice of San Diego first fact checked it.
From the airwaves to his November ballot statement, Gloria is pushing the 70 percent figure as a key reason voters should re-elect him. In one ad, a narrator ticks off several accomplishments. She tells voters Gloria has “increased shelter for the homeless by 70 percent!” An independent expenditure group supporting Gloria called San Diegans for Fairness has also been pushing the claim.
Here’s how Gloria’s team does the math: They pick a convenient starting point where the number of beds was unusually low due to the pandemic. Before the pandemic, and before Gloria took office, the city had 1,409 shelter beds.
Gloria’s team doesn’t use that number. They use a date in April 2021, about three months after Gloria took office.
Up until then, the city had been using the convention center as a shelter, because of the pandemic. But just before April 1, 2021, the convention center closed. Other shelters within the city were operating at lower capacity due to Covid restrictions.
So on April 1, 2021, there were only 1,071 beds available.
Today, there are roughly 1,856, according to the mayor’s campaign staff.
The math works like this: Between April 2021 – when the number was significantly restricted by the pandemic – and now, city homeless shelter capacity increased by roughly 73 percent.
But the city wasn’t providing 1,071 beds before Gloria took office. It was providing around 1,400. That math works out to a roughly 32 percent increase.
That’s not a small increase. But it doesn’t come close to the 70 percent Gloria is claiming.
I asked Gloria about the math at a press conference on Wednesday. He stuck to his administration’s interpretation of the numbers.
“In April of 2021 we had a very small number of beds,” he said. “We don’t have that anymore.”
Since Gloria’s 32 percent increase on shelter capacity, progress has actually stalled.
During the last 16 months, the city has only increased the net number of shelter beds by 51.
In January, at his State of the City speech, Gloria said he wanted the city to deliver 1,000 new shelter beds by early 2025.
That’s not looking likely. It would mean increasing overall shelter capacity to roughly 2,800 in the next few months.
The mayor had hoped to purchase a warehouse at Kettner Boulevard and Vine Street that could be converted to shelter for more than a thousand people, but that plan is now in limbo.
It’s possible the city will tally a net loss of beds by early 2025.
The city is set to lose 614 beds at two large shelters operated by Father Joe’s Villages by the end of the year – and Gloria has known this was coming for months. City officials are now trying to come up with solutions to address the closures.
Meanwhile, Gloria’s administration has come up with alternative options. He has opened safe parking lots, where people can sleep in their cars, and safe camping sites, where people can sleep in a tent.
“We can parse on the numbers,” Gloria said. “We worked aggressively over lots of concerns and complaints and feedback to get this done,” he said, referring to shelter expansion.
His mouth is moving so is he lying ?
LOL
his mouth is moving so he is lying.
Data is a funny noun. It usually goes like this. “I claim this, (maybe I have increased beds for homeless by 100%) or whatever.” Now, let’s find some stats that support such a claim. This article explains how the ‘fruit’ was gathered, and I would say it comes from a ‘rotten’ orchard. But, in fairness to Gloria, he is not an anomaly . It is what advertising people do, whether they are promoting politicians, dogfood, or medicine. If you ever feel like doing research about research you will find that it is pretty easy to ‘find’ or ‘create’ data to support any belief. The creators make a ton of money. The consumers don’t know the truth, even if they investigate, it is hard to extrapolate ‘truth’. Example: many doctors and researchers came to different conclusions (results) using data driven proof, before, during, and after the pandemic. So ‘we the people’ jump into our own box and view of the world, based on our history, and choose data and studies that support our beliefs. It would seem that we are equally divided, at least politically. I wonder what the stats are on that? What is the possibility that we have a 50/50 divide? I was never very good at probability in math class. Hmmmm.