Building a San Diego that Works for All of Us

As your Mayor, I am working every day to build a San Diego that works for all of us. After years of historic neglect of the pressing problems facing our communities, our San Diego tackles the challenges we face head-on, invests in our people, and gets things done so that our city can be not just a “fine” city, but a truly great city. 

Solving Homelessness

The street or sidewalk is not a home. Under no circumstance is it compassionate to let a person live on the street. We will not be a city that's content with allowing people to sleep on the sidewalk, or in a riverbed, or along a freeway.

Our administration is working every day to get people experiencing homelessness off the street, into care and connected to permanent housing through the following: outreach, shelter, housing, mental health reform, and treating addiction.

We’re investing in street outreach – trained social workers who fan out across the city to meet homeless people where they are with offers of shelter and services.

We’re expanding homeless shelters – adding 70% more shelter beds and specific shelters that meet the needs of women, seniors, families, and those with acute mental health needs or drug addiction.

We’re building more housing.

We’re pushing the State of California to do more on mental health – and leading the way for conservatorship reform that will get those suffering from extreme mental illness the help and care they need.

We’re pushing for harsher penalties for predatory dealers of illicit fentanyl, which is killing people who are homeless at a rapid rate.

Building More Housing

We all know where the City’s historic failure to build more homes has gotten us: sky-high rents, exploding homelessness, families moving out-of-state, bright people leaving us for lower-cost cities.

San Diego must be a city where people at all income levels have a place they can afford to live. You should be able to have a roof over your head at a price you can afford.

We’re working to pass new policies to make it easier to build more affordable housing across San Diego.

We’re also investing directly in affordable housing projects by providing gap-financing to home builders in order to get shovels in the ground faster.

We’re doing the work to update community plans across the city to make it cheaper and faster to build homes. So far, we’ve updated these neighborhood blueprints to add more than 100,000 opportunities to build new homes in Mira Mesa, Barrio Logan, and Kearny Mesa.

We’re also  taking an internal look at the City’s regulations to cut red tape and break down barriers to make it faster and easier to build the affordable housing we need.

Fixing Streets

San Diego has long neglected to fix and repair its streets – and it shows today in the thousands of potholes and cracks in roadways across the city. That stops with our administration.

I am overhauling the way we prioritize road repairs, using data to drive our decisions, be more equitable, and focus on quality, long-term fixes on San Diego’s most used, and longest neglected streets.

From San Ysidro Boulevard in the south to Highland Valley Road in the north, we are focused on making sure these investments in our roads reach all communities.

Keeping San Diego Safe

Lawlessness will not rule the day in our city.

When anyone in our city dials 9-1-1, they should get a fast, effective response from a well-trained, well-equipped first responder.

We will continue to provide our police department, fire-rescue department, and City Attorney the resources they need to keep you and your family safe, respond to crime, and hold criminals accountable.

We will continue to get illegal guns off the street and disrupt the gang violence and drugs like illicit fentanyl that are harming our communities.

San Diego has long been one of the safest big cities in America. As your Mayor, I’m determined to keep it so.

Our Climate, Our Future

Our city is committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2035.

We have one of the most ambitious climate plans in the nation, and we are diligently implementing it to ensure the city we love is here for generations to come.

We are taking bold steps so we can meet our targets and improve San Diegans’ quality of life. We have overhauled our infrastructure delivery process to prioritize sustainability and equity, established a Climate Equity Fund to invest in underserved communities and launched new organic waste recycling service Citywide. We helped establish and launch San Diego Community Power and transitioned all City facilities to use their 100 percent renewable electricity rate.

We continue to tackle transportation emissions by encouraging the use of alternative modes of transportation via subsidies and right-of-way improvements, accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles through policy and charging infrastructure deployment, incentivized employees to work remotely, and are orienting land-use planning around transit-oriented, smart growth.

We have also ramped up construction of our Pure Water project, the largest water recycling program in California and the City’s biggest infrastructure project in its history that, when complete, will provide one-third of San Diego’s drinking water.