In his State of the City Address, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria laid out his vision for his community and how he and his administration plan to make progress on keeping neighborhoods safe, reducing homelessness, building more housing, and fixing roads.
To address the deficit, the Mayor detailed immediate steps he has taken to cut spending – freezing hiring for all but the most essential positions and halting non-essential spending, among other mid-year adjustments. He is also evaluating the city’s office space leases to determine if it’s cost-beneficial to terminate or renegotiate leases and consolidate space. He also asked each city department to rethink its operations with a keen focus on the core service it is expected to provide to the public.
The Mayor said he will remain focused on his four core priorities – building more housing, addressing homelessness, repairing roads, and keeping San Diegans safe. Zeroing in on homelessness, he noted that since he took office as Mayor, city-funded programs have served more than 25,000 people and successfully placed nearly 4,700 into permanent housing, while the Unsafe Camping Ordinance passed in 2023 is successfully reducing encampments in heavily impacted areas without widespread arrests. Mayor Gloria vowed to continue to increase shelter opportunities in 2025.
On housing, the Mayor celebrated the success of measures he’s taken to produce more homes that San Diegans can afford – through initiatives such as Bridge to Home, his two executive orders to speed up permitting, and his two Housing Action Packages. He noted that, for the better part of the past two decades, San Diego had issued an average of 4,300 permits for new homes per year. In 2023, as his policy reforms took hold, the City permitted nearly 10,000 new homes. He announced that in 2024, the city permitted roughly another 8,500 new homes despite high interest rates and inflation creating unfavorable conditions for housing construction nationwide.
Watch the Mayor’s full remarks here.
