Arguments over how much impact Faulconer had on homelessness rest on when you start the clock – and imperfect homelessness data.

Faulconer became San Diego mayor in 2014 and didn’t make homelessness a top focus during his early years in office. It became his foremost priority in fall 2017 after a deadly hepatitis A outbreak hammered San Diego’s homeless population and spurred Faulconer to rapidly bolster both homeless services and police enforcement to address the crisis.

A few years later, in 2020, he cheered annual homeless census results that showed a 12 percent year-over-year drop in street homelessness in the city along with a smaller 4 percent decrease in the overall population.

He’s now touting that 12 percent decrease in people sleeping outdoors as he campaigns for supervisor.

“With your help and your support, we actually drove homelessness down by double digits in the city of San Diego,” Faulconer said during a Sept. 16 debate in Carlsbad.

What he doesn’t mention is that the annual homeless census also tallied overall increases in homelessness three of the seven years he was mayor. There are also significant shortcomings with the count.

The Regional Task Force on Homelessness, which conducts the annual census in late January, has in recent years emphasized that homeless counts represent a minimum number of homeless residents and noted that changes in counting methods complicate year-over-year comparisons.

Claims about Faulconer’s track record are especially complicated by the Task Force’s move in 2019 to stop using multipliers to assume how many people were staying in tents or vehicles. It had used them for years to tally the homeless population and the Task Force argued in 2019 that its count shouldn’t be compared with those before it due to this change.

Other details also muddle Lawson-Remer’s claims about Faulconer’s record. She shared this during the Carlsbad debate: “Under Kevin Faulconer, homelessness doubled.”

Lawson-Remer’s team told Voice of San Diego she started the clock when Faulconer was a San Diego city councilmember in 2007. They shared point-in-time numbers from that year showing just over 1,000 unsheltered city residents were counted in January 2007 compared with the nearly 2,300 counted during Faulconer’s last year as mayor.

“That is a 124 percent increase in the number of people sleeping on the streets of San Diego under Kevin Faulconer’s leadership,” campaign spokesperson Spencer Katz wrote in an email.

This claim overlooks the fact that Faulconer took office in January 2006 when 1,849 people were counted living on the street in the city, which – using the campaign’s premise – would translate into a lesser 23 percent spike in street homelessness during his years in office.

Lawson-Remer’s claim also failed to acknowledge that Faulconer was less empowered as a councilmember to address homelessness citywide and that there was an explosion of homelessness elsewhere on the West Coast during the same period that’s impossible to blame on a single public official.

How to Make Sense of What Kevin Faulconer Did on Homelessness