The Mayor Is Still Saying He Increased Shelter Capacity by 70 percent. He Still Hasn’t

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.

Lisa Halverstadt contributed to this report.