George Mullen recently has been pushing — through emails and opinion columns — for a plan aimed at reducing suicides from the Coronado Bridge.
That’s a worthy cause on an issue that has bedeviled San Diego for generations.
But the East Village artist and businessman is better known for what has seemed his singular drive behind a proposal to address another long-festering civic problem: a facility to provide shelter and services to thousands of homeless people called Sunbreak Ranch.
His quest hasn’t shown much material progress since he proposed it seven years ago, but Mullen said he’s not waving the white flag.
“Not even remotely so,” he said in an interview.
He noted his take on the Coronado Bridge is not new, but a revived push he began a handful of years ago.
“My focus,” he said, “is on saving San Diego lives that are unnecessarily lost.”
The region’s homeless population continues to grow and deaths among the unhoused jumped to 624 last year, according to the Voice of San Diego, up from 592 in 2022. Virtually everyone agrees much more needs to be done.
Mullen continues to sound unflaggingly optimistic about Sunbreak Ranch’s potential. Once a voice in the wind, he got a lot of people to listen and lists dozens of civic leaders who have endorsed the proposal.
Ben Carson, the former Housing and Urban Development secretary under President Donald Trump, recently issued a letter lauding the idea.
But there are signs that some of the ers may have come to with the likely reality: This will never happen.
The hurdles — financial, logistical, political — are tremendous and remain as daunting as ever. The biggest of the big problems is there’s simply no there there.
From the beginning, the proposal identified two potential sites far from the urban core — property near Brown Field on Otay Mesa and another at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. They have been non-starters all along.
To borrow a real estate maxim, homeless shelters are all about location, location, location. Securing a site even for a small facility takes a Herculean effort because almost no one wants them anywhere close.
Mullen stresses Sunbreak Ranch is not “site-specific” but those properties are the best two he has come up with. The Marines have nixed the Miramar idea, and the city of San Diego has put the kibosh on Otay Mesa. The Federal Aviation istration likely would have issues putting Sunbreak Ranch around Brown Field — or on it.
As a “last resort,” Mullen said he would propose temporarily shutting down Brown Field and putting the homeless facility on the runway and surrounding tarmac. “On a wing and a prayer” would seem too kind a description of that ever happening.
Early on, Mullen’s quest was treated as a long shot, even something of an oddity — a sincere obsession that would harmlessly go nowhere.
More recently, Sunbreak Ranch was deemed a counterproductive threat in brutal takedowns by the editorial board of The San Diego Union-Tribune and in a column by Scott Lewis, editor in chief of the Voice of San Diego.
In short, they blamed Mullen and Sunbreak Ranch for diverting attention and energies from realistic efforts to address homelessness. But they also scorched those who endorsed it because it allowed them to safely suggest they were doing something about the region’s most pressing problem by backing a nothing proposal.
Jack McGrory has helped make a lot happen in San Diego — both during his time as city manager and in the decades since. So when he signed on to Sunbreak Ranch last year, it seemed to add momentum to the project that already had backing from some familiar names — developer and philanthropist Malin Burnham, former NBA star Bill Walton, former U.S. Attorney Robert Brewer, and restaurant owner Mary Pappas, to name a handful.
“I’m confident they’re going to get something done here,” McGrory said in July.
That was then. McGrory this week said he hadn’t been to a meeting on the project in two or three months and feared the proposal may have become “radioactive” like other efforts to locate shelters.
Asked if he thought Sunbreak Ranch had stalled, he said, “I don’t know if I’d characterize it that way.”
McGrory noted that even in the unlikely event the Otay or Miramar sites became available, it would take years to get approvals at various levels of government. He added that Miramar would require congressional approval.
“Good luck with this Congress,” he said.
That doesn’t even get to the questions of where the money would come from to build and operate the facility.
Mullen said he has met with many people, including Eric Dargan, the city of San Diego’s chief operating officer. County Supervisors Joel Anderson and Jim Desmond the proposal. Yet, there’s no traction at local government levels and even mild hostility from Mayor Todd Gloria’s istration.
Currently, the city is focused on trying to place a large temporary homeless shelter at the abandoned H Barracks site adjacent to San Diego International Airport — in the face of fierce opposition from Point Loma residents.
“To make it work,” McGrory said of Sunbreak Ranch, “(George) has got to get a hell of a lot better reception from the city and county.”
Despite all of that, McGrory said he still thinks “the concept is a good one.”
So do many others, location and logistical issues notwithstanding.
In San Antonio, Texas, a more sweeping version of Sunbreak Ranch exists. Haven for Hope is a “campus” that houses people and provides services from health care and employment assistance to food and laundry facilities. It cost more than $100 million to put together, which doesn’t include ongoing operating costs.
The overarching goal there, as with most other homeless programs, is to get people into permanent housing.
Something similar almost came together in San Diego. In 2017, not long before Mullen launched his idea, city officials, civic leaders and homeless service providers were closing in on an agreement for an ambitious homeless facility for thousands of people at a municipal maintenance yard at the south end of Balboa Park. Many elements were in place to make it work.
For publicly vague reasons, the plan overseen by then-Mayor Kevin Faulconer fell apart. Since then, the site at 20th and B streets has been used twice for more modest safe sleeping sites for homeless people, including the current operation that has capacity for 136 tents.
The homeless shelters there have not had the negative impact on the surrounding community many had feared.
If a game-changing homeless facility is going to come to , it seems a city-owned property is the best bet. Unfortunately, it appears the moment to put one at 20th and B has ed.
That one’s not on George Mullen.
UPDATES: The tent capacity of the 20th and B site has been corrected, and more recent data on deaths of homeless people have been added since this column was originally posted.
