When Eric Dargan took over more than a year ago as San Diego’s chief operating officer, the city’s top nonelected position, he quickly flagged several issues.
Crumbling infrastructure. Aging fire facilities. Police recruitment. These would be his priorities, he thought.
Then he asked residents about their biggest worries.
“Nine out of 10 people would tell me, ‘homelessness,’” he said in an interview. “If that’s your number one concern, then that needs to become my number one concern.”
Dargan is now attempting to reshape how government responds to the growing crisis, inspired in part by what he witnessed running the public works department in Houston.
In short, he wants less bureaucracy and more philanthropy.
“The $78 million that we spend on homelessness, in my mind, should be going to stormwater, streets, facilities, public safety,” he said.
In 2021, the city created a Homelessness Strategies and Solutions Department to take a more active role in hiring service providers, and the office has grown to encompass more than a dozen positions while securing tens of millions of dollars in state grants. It’s 2024 fiscal year budget was about $44 million.
“My plan is to eliminate my homeless department altogether,” Dargan continued. “But the only way I can do that is if this community, the city of San Diego as a community, comes together and says, ‘We’re gonna take over this fight.’”
Data from the San Diego Foundation do show donations are rising to housing and shelter causes, business organizations are increasingly making homelessness a priority and a range of religious groups have long offered up space for shelter.
But Dargan wants far more buy-in.
Every resident needs to contribute, he argued. Companies need to flag employees at risk of losing housing. More churches should launch food pantries.
The first step in this overhaul is “San Diegans Together Tackling Homelessness,” the fundraising effort announced in January by Mayor Todd Gloria that has the ambitious goal of raising $370 million, much of which would be for a 40-story affordable housing complex downtown.
While Dargan will decide how those funds are distributed, the plan calls for input from a 10-member advisory board. Four people have agreed to join so far, he said. (Dargan declined to give their names until the full group could meet.)
“I’m looking for some billionaires who would like to leave their legacy in this city,” he added. “But if I can get 1.4 million people to give me $300 each, I’m good.”
The Lucky Duck Foundation is one of the region’s most prominent philanthropic groups, and CEO Drew Moser said they were always open to cost-effective methods for reducing homelessness. He’s also “cautiously encouraged” by the city’s recent efforts to boost shelter capacity.
Yet Moser was less hopeful about a future where much of San Diego’s homelessness bill is picked up by donors.
“That’s a steep hill to climb,” he said.
Four billionaires are believed to live in San Diego, according to a recent report by Henley & Partners, a residence and citizenship planning firm. More than a dozen other areas of the country appear to have more, including the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Houston.
Dargan is wary of drawing too sharp a contrast between San Diego and Houston, a city that famously dropped its overall homeless population by about half over the past decade, according to federal data.
Texas often has cheaper housing, more available land and fewer building regulations, he noted. But Dargan thinks Houston does a better job supplementing federal funding with local donations and minimizing government oversight.
While Houston’s mayor has an office for homeless initiatives, only one employee is listed online.
Services are largely overseen by the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County, a nonprofit similar to San Diego’s Regional Task Force on Homelessness.
“We are city poor,” Kelly Young, the coalition’s president and CEO, said about the lack of local government funding. “All of the agencies become responsible for raising the money to run their organizations through philanthropy.”
The coalition also takes a more active role placing homeless people in specific programs. Young said they have a central system to track both open beds and how well service groups do their jobs.
“It puts the responsibility on the providers, not the individual, to figure out how to get housing,” she added.
San Diego sometimes struggles to flag when shelter space is available as the city and housing commission oversee separate networks.
Other elements of homelessness in Houston may be more familiar to San Diegans. That region’s numbers have ticked up from 2021 (when fewer than 3,050 individuals were tallied during a point-in-time count) to last year’s total of 3,270. Local media has quoted residents voicing many of the same concerns about people on the street.
Plus, Houston still uses the “Housing First” model of ending homelessness, which has come under fire from some conservative leaders around San Diego who want more of an emphasis on treating mental illness and substance abuse disorders.
Dargan does believe California’s drug laws are too lax and he’s sympathetic to the Sunbreak Ranch shelter proposal, which would build a massive campus on a to-be-determined plot of land that could house and offer support services for thousands. Proponents have sought private donations, including through a public request to Elon Musk for $200 million.
“I love Sunbreak Ranch,” Dargan said. “But the reality is, you can’t force people into a system.”
If Gloria wins re-election in November, Dargan hopes much of his vision can be achieved by the end of the mayor’s second term.
When asked if Gloria agreed with Dargan’s approach, mayoral spokesperson Dave Rolland wrote in an email that “with government funding for homelessness programs limited and the need great, the intent of the philanthropic campaign is simply to help close the gap.”
