In 2025, San Diego Can't Look Away From The Screaming

By Scott Lewis, the Voice of San Diego

January 3, 2025

A few weeks ago, a man in the alley behind our house began screaming. Screaming is not unusual around us, unfortunately. But usually it comes and goes – less frequent than the airplanes, more frequent than the helicopters.

One man walks around screaming all the time. Long beard, bike. Sometimes he begs on the corner. Sometimes he disappears for weeks. But he’s always back and almost always screaming.

This wasn’t him. We know him. This was deeper, closer and more disturbed. And it wasn’t going away. It scared my daughter. I went back there with the flashlight and found the man. He was ensconced in a combination of blankets and garbage. He was ranting incoherently, unaware of me even as I tried to get his attention.

I finally yelled “Hey!” He turned and looked right at me. “You’re freaking people out.”

He snapped out of it. “I’m so sorry. I know, I know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go.”

The way he snapped out of it turned my anger and fear immediately into pity and wonder. It was like he was two people. The one made mad, screaming at the cold, fueled by the drugs, the trauma. And the one below the surface almost watching himself.

It was cold. San Diego is more comfortable than most places to be homeless but try sleeping in 45 degrees. It is bone-chilling cold. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t last more than a night or two before … well, before I did things that would probably lead to screaming.

We are now entering the eighth year of the homeless crisis, counting back to 2017 when their deaths due to viral infections spread through lack of hygiene alarmed San Diego’s leaders so much that they mobilized the government to address it. Now, almost eight years later, it’s as bad as ever.

We are numb to so much of it. The suffering and poverty. The disorder and chaos. The screaming. It almost takes someone new, a visitor, to remind us to look at it.

Matt Greene had that experience. He’s a hotel manager who recently returned to San Diego to become the managing director of Hard Rock San Diego. When he arrived, the disorder in downtown stunned him. The city’s inability to take care of dangerous people or people just suffering left him shocked. He decided to dig in and figure out what is going on. Now, he’s become the latest in a long line of businessmen who tried to solve it. It’s taken him months, since this summer, of research and meetings with law enforcement leaders and city leaders and experts.

He’s gotten, basically, nowhere. Just trying to answer the simple question of why police and prosecutors do not try to enforce the misdemeanor violations they get called on every day has driven him nuts.

“The city and county is completely broken – the way jurisdictions are bifurcated. They don’t work together,” he told me.

He has met with many leaders.

“Everyone does care. You can see it on their faces. They don’t disagree with any of my frustrations. But nobody knows what to do,” he said.

“The last thing I want to be is adversarial. But things have to change and change quickly. It’s at a catastrophic level,” he said.

San Diego is facing a catastrophe. The city is teeming with suffering. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Its cost of living is extreme and escalating rapidly. People are leaving. The region’s growth projections, for the first time in decades, show a peak and downturn not because people don’t want to be here but because they can’t afford to be. Public school enrollment is down.

San Diego’s history, however, is full of moments when it seemed irredeemable. Every city has a similar story – moments of prosperity followed by recessions, public health crises, disasters, despair but then great leaps in design, construction and innovation followed by growth and prosperity.

We can, once again, meet the moment. But in 2025, it will take something we did not see in 2024: creativity and leadership.

We enter 2025 with the county Board of Supervisors, once again, lacking leadership. The chair, again, has abruptly vanished. The agency responsible for the region’s giant behavioral health crisis must, again, wait for an election to determine its priorities.

The city of San Diego’s mayor, Todd Gloria, has declared this an “era of austerity.” With a budget deficit as big as the one staring at him, we can expect austerity. But austerity is not vision. It’s a practice, a discipline to raise revenue and cut spending.

What we can’t do is apply austerity to our creativity, as though we must also cut back on ambition and determination.

This isn’t a storm we can hunker down in and let pass. Creativity and ambition is our only way out. We’re going to need people to seize on ideas, hunt for resources and partnerships, press their peers and superiors to cut red tape. All of that just to get the beds we need to treat people, the shelters and spaces they can go to, especially if we are going to run them out of other areas.

If we are ever to build the infrastructure and housing needed to support a great city, we must go further faster to make the case and marshal the resources.

This New Year will have to be one of ambitious efforts to solve problems. If not, San Diego, the city and broader region, will take another turn down the spiral of decline and despair.

The thing that scared me most when the man in our alley woke up to my voice was his statement: “I’m so sorry. I know, I know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go.”

It scared me because I also didn’t know what to do or where to go. I’m one of the most well-connected people in the city. I know more about how it works than almost everyone. And I had no idea what to do for him.

He got up and gathered his things and walked away. I called after him, asking if I could help and he said nothing. As I walked in our house, I could hear the screaming begin again.

Voice of San Diego will complete its 20th year of operation in 2025. It represents a small investment, in the sea of San Diego’s vast wealth, in a conscience for San Diego – a voice in San Diego’s head reminding it how it needs to get better, how it can be better and how it is strong enough to face its problems directly.

We’ll be there in 2025 to report on the beat of San Diego’s future. We have to face the screaming directly.

Voice of San Diego is a nonprofit news organization supported by our members. We reveal why things are the way they are and expose facts that people in power might not want out there and explain complex local public policy issues so you can be engaged and make good decisions. Sign up for our newsletters at voiceofsandiego.org/newsletters/.