NBC 7’s Artie Ojeda has the latest on the back-and-forth between San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria and NBA Legend Bill Walton
Basketball legend and San Diego native Bill Walton issued a scathing rebuke of Mayor Todd Gloria Tuesday regarding his handling of homelessness in the city, calling him a "failed mayor" and asking that he step aside to make way for different leadership.
The 69-year-old UCLA and NBA champion has long been a supporter of the city, but says he can no longer do so as the homelessness crisis intensifies.
What San Diegans Are Reading
"Paradise Lost: This is the city of San Diego, a once great city," Walton said. "Sadly, and with a broken heart, I can no longer claim San Diego is the greatest place on Earth."
Get top local stories in San Diego delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC San Diego's News Headlines newsletter.
In a fiery news conference alongside Drew Moser, the executive director of homeless-focused nonprofit the Lucky Duck Foundation, and Lucky Duck Executive Committee Member Dan Shea, Walton said he had been harassed, chased and attacked while riding his bike in Balboa Park near a large homeless encampment he has dubbed "Gloriaville."
Walton first sent an email to Gloria regarding the issue on Aug. 8, which read, in part, "I'm begging and pleading for your help. This permanent homeless encampment in our neighborhood is a travesty, with endless trash, urine and feces, that goes unabated, forever. This makes our public Balboa Park unusable. It is not healthy, safe, or desirable to do so."
Gloria's response called Walton's news conference a "tantrum full of self-aggrandizing hyperbole and outright lies."
The complete response from the mayor's office is below in italicized text:
“Today’s ‘news conference’ was simply a tantrum full of self-aggrandizing hyperbole and outright lies. San Diegans are frustrated with the worsening homelessness crisis, and Mayor Gloria shares that frustration. But unlike Mr. Walton, Mayor Gloria is translating that frustration into decisive, sustained action to improve the situation. To say that he has done nothing on homelessness is objectively false.
“Let’s be very clear: Addressing homelessness has been Mayor Gloria’s top priority since day one, and he has done far more to address it than anyone else in our region’s history. He has dramatically increased and diversified the City’s network of shelter beds, launched and expanded and highly effective street outreach program, initiated 18 different policy reforms to make it faster and easier to build affordable housing, directly invested City funds into 10 affordable housing projects, championed efforts at the state level to enhance access to mental health care, and stepped up sidewalk cleanups and law enforcement to protect health and safety in our public spaces. Homelessness is a crisis up and down California and across the nation. It’s an uphill battle and we’re nowhere close to winning it yet, but Mayor Gloria is doing the hard work and leading effectively. We encourage others to do the same.
“I’d like to add that you, the news media, know all of this to be true because you cover Mayor Gloria’s progress on the creation of shelter, housing and services to get people off our streets. You visit these new shelters as they open and meet the people being helped; you examine the numbers provided about how our shelters and services are leading to permanent housing; you witness and ask questions about enforcement operations designed to clear and clean the streets. So you know the ‘nothing is being done’ assertions by Bill Walton and Dan Shea to be false. And they know it too.
“The Lucky Duck Foundation knows the City of San Diego is the only city that took its donated tents – after other cities rejected them – and funds their operation and maintenance to the tune of over $5 million each year without a dime of support from Lucky Duck. Further, the implication that the two tents constitute a large portion of our homelessness efforts is also years out of date. In this administration, the shelter capacity we’ve created far outstrips the Lucky Duck structures – and it’s growing by the week, along with our other efforts to address this crisis.
“Finally, Mayor Gloria is clear-eyed and has been completely honest with the public about the enormity of the challenge our city is facing. It’s unfortunate Bill Walton is quitting on San Diego, but you can be damned sure Todd Gloria never will.”
Reporters bringing up the Gloria administration's touted achievements at Tuesday's news conference quickly became the focus of Walton's ire, with Walton asking them what neighborhoods they lived in and if they were denying what they saw with their own eyes on the streets of San Diego.
Other city leaders acknowledged the crisis, but backed Gloria's efforts and said the issue existed long before he took office in 2020.
"The city continues to add shelter and take critical steps to address homelessness," said Councilman Stephen Whitburn, who represents District 3, including Balboa Park and Walton's neighborhood of Hillcrest. "We need to keep adding shelter and housing as quickly as we can, because more people are becoming homeless due to the high cost of housing. San Diego is a wonderful home and we are working to make sure there's a home for all of us."
It did not take long for social media to get involved in the debate either, with vocal supporters of Walton's perceptions in counterpoint to those critical of his approach to the topic.
Also in recent weeks, San Diego opened the 150-bed Rosecrans Shelter, expanded to 24-hour operation at one of the Safe Parking Program lots, supported Gov. Gavin Newsom's CARE Court initiative, which was signed into law earlier this month, and announced Round 2 of the city's "Bridge to Home" initiative that funds low-income and permanent supportive housing projects.
Moser and Shea said they did not care about party or politics, just results. The Lucky Duck Foundation, a nonprofit that allocates funding to programs deemed effective in getting people off the street, has in the past remained out of political debates.
"We are going to become more vocal than we have been," Shea said. "We're frustrated with the lack of action and we are going to take a public position on any bad behavior taken by anybody in the county."
They also said they supported greater police intervention with encampments, a practice that has drawn criticism from advocates.
The organization will begin releasing "Shamrocks and Shipwrecks," an award for organizations and leaders who have taken "strong actions that drive progress" on homelessness, Moser said -- and a black mark for those who have not lived up to its standards. The first of the awards will come out in December.
On Tuesday, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted to declare homelessness a public health crisis in the county.
This comes on the heels of an inter-governmental spat between supervisors and the city of El Cajon earlier this month, whose elected leaders claimed county government is "dumping" homeless people in their community's motels, a claim county officials said was misinformed and harmful.
