Pro-Faulconer PAC, backed by developers, pushes a questionable record on homelessness

A political action committee supporting Kevin Faulconer is set to pour over $800,000 into the pivotal county supervisor race that could tip the board back to a Republican majority. 

Its name: the Homelessness Crisis Response Committee Supporting Kevin Faulconer for Supervisor 2024 — funded not by homeless service providers, but by developers using the money on campaign mailers that tout Faulconer’s record as San Diego mayor.

The group’s mailers claim the city’s number of unhoused residents went down during Faulconer’s tenure. And they blame the recent rise in homelessness on Faulconer’s opponent, incumbent Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer.

But Faulconer is far from getting the same widespread support that he enjoys among developers from homeless advocates, who dispute claims that credit him for any drop in homelessness while he led the city. 

“This is the mayor that allowed the rocks to go under the underpass,” said John Brady, director of Lived Experience Advisers who was himself previously homeless in San Diego. “This is the mayor that resisted any real effort to address the issue as straightforward and forthright and identify what it was, which was a housing crisis. 

“And really, I find any claims of him being somebody that knows how to solve homelessness just laughable.”

Faulconer’s supporters say the region needs to build its way out of the crisis. 

“Fundamentally, the solution to homelessness is a supply of housing,” said Lori Holt Pfeiler, president and CEO of the Building Industry Association of San Diego. The advocacy group is the pro-Faulconer committee’s top donor.

Both she and Faulconer have criticized current supervisors, saying their policies have effectively created a “moratorium” on building in the county’s unincorporated areas, where homes are more affordable. Faulconer’s message to developers, as quoted in a recent BIA newsletter, is “if I’m elected in November the county will once again be open for business.”

Among the PAC’s largest donors are developers set to bring controversial projects to the Board of Supervisors for a vote: a proposed sand mining operation in East County and the long-delayed Harmony Grove Village South housing project near Escondido.

Lawson-Remer’s campaign said in a statement that Faulconer will give donating developers “special treatment” — yes votes on projects that her team argued would create more sprawl across the county and destroy “the character of our communities.”

Yet Faulconer’s team said outside groups like the PAC are out of his control.

“We don’t control who they solicit or how they solicit funds, as it is against the law,” Faulconer’s campaign said in a statement. “Kevin Faulconer cares about tackling the affordability crisis that exists due to a lack of supply and increased demand.”

A shaky record on homelessness

While individuals and companies are limited to contributing $1,000 to any official campaign for San Diego County supervisor, they can contribute unlimited amounts to independent spending groups, also known as super PACs, like the Homelessness Crisis Response Committee.

Outside spending has steadily increased in recent years. The independent committees are legally prohibited from coordinating with candidates’ campaigns.

With more than $800,000 in contributions, half of which has been spent, the PAC alone has raised more than Lawson-Remer’s official campaign. Campaign filings show the group’s principal officer is Aimee Faucett, who served as Faulconer’s chief of staff when he was mayor.

Lawson-Remer’s official campaign has over $600,000 in contributions, with an additional $250,000 in contributions to independent political action committees supporting her and opposing Faulconer. She has primarily received support from the local Democratic Party who has spent more than $500,000 on her campaign.

Faulconer has criticized Lawson-Remer for not taking more action on homelessness as well as not personally attending San Diego’s Regional Continuum of Care Council meetings, for which she is vice chair. “There’s nothing punitive about helping people get off the streets, away from open-air drug markets, and connecting them with the help and housing they need,” Faulconer’s campaign wrote in a statement, touting the mayor’s tenure. 

“What’s punitive is not intervening to help people turn their lives around — that’s what Terra Lawson-Remer is doing by sitting on her hands and doing nothing.”

Claims that Faulconer did well on tackling homelessness — and faulting Lawson-Remer for the growing crisis — aren’t being made just by the pro-Faulconer PAC. It’s a main talking point for his own campaign.

Whether it’s true is more complicated.

Neither Faulconer nor the PAC supporting his campaign mention that local officials made significant changes to the way they count unhoused residents in the region that easily account for the drop. Before 2019, the Regional Task Force on Homelessness assumed that more than one person was living in vehicles, tents, and handmade structures they encountered. The group now only includes people who volunteers participating in the annual count were actually able to speak to. 

The decrease in those two categories from 2018 to 2019, when the methodology changed, is more than the entire decrease in homelessness over Faulconer’s entire tenure as mayor.

When Faulconer was elected in 2014 the regional task force counted 8,506 people experiencing homelessness, and in 2020 when he left office, 7,638. But without the drop in people staying in vehicles or tents, which could have been caused by the change in methodology, the task force would have reported more than 9,300 unhoused residents.

“He didn’t do anything as mayor on the issue except to increase the criminalization,” local activist Michael McConnell said. “It’s all because of that change in enumeration of actually how we counted homeless people. So it’s very misleading.” 

Brady of Lived Experience Advisors credited Faulconer for stepping up as mayor during the city’s Hepatitis A outbreak in 2017, which disproportionately impacted unhoused residents.

But going back to enforcement-focused policies won’t solve homelessness, he said.

“Our Board of Supervisors is probably the most progressive entity in our region that is focused on solutions,” Brady said. “We would be concerned the policy would shift back to a more punitive, less person-centric approach.”

But Faulconer’s supporters say enforcement and building housing is needed to solve the problem. David Malcolm, a real estate giant in San Diego who has held multiple political offices and a seat on the St. Vincent de Paul Management board, gave the pro-Faulconer PAC $25,000 through his La Playa LLC. He wrote in an email that homelessness was his top issue.

“This issue has done nothing but gone downhill since Faulconer left office. I do not believe it is humane to allow people to sleep in their urine and defecation,” Malcolm said. “In order to help the homeless, you must be willing to show tough love and Former Mayor Faulconer did that.”

Up for approval

The largest total donations to the Homelessness Crisis Response Committee from a single company — almost $50,000 — came from Michael Schlesinger’s Cottonwood Cajon ES. That company is the applicant behind the Cottonwood Sand Mine, a more than 200-acre project on a former public golf course next to a residential neighborhood in Rancho San Diego. 

Another Schlesinger company, XJD LLC, gave the same amount to another super PAC supporting Faulconer for a total of almost $100,000 in contributions supporting his campaign. 

Schlesinger is a Los Angeles-based developer known for buying up defunct golf courses and building on them. He was given a warning in 2014 by the Fair Political Practices Commission for trying to disguise his campaign contributions to a super PAC opposing Nathan Fletcher, the Republican-turned-Democrat who served as both a state assemblymember and county supervisor. At that time, Schlesinger was trying to build a residential neighborhood on the Escondido Golf Course and later agreed to pay a $100,000 fine for dumping chicken manure on the golf course. 

Multiple attempts to reach Schlesinger were unsuccessful.

Nearby residents oppose the sand mine, saying that it would harm air quality, cause respiratory health problems and increase traffic. 

The project was in a public comment period after the completion of an environmental impact report, which found the impacts on health would be insignificant. Staff will likely issue a recommendation on the project to the Planning Commission early next year after the developers respond to comments, a county spokesperson said.

Elizabeth Urquhart, a resident who in 2018 organized the group Stop Cottonwood Sand Mine, said locals expect it will ultimately go to the Board of Supervisors to make the final decision.

Urquhart said any supervisor who was financially supported by developers should recuse themselves from voting on the project.

“It’s clear that (Schlesinger is) giving this money so that he has favor with them and that they would approve the project because it will be in their hands, most likely in 2025,” Urqhart said. “It’s not hard to figure it out and put the puzzle pieces together.”

Another developer with a project that will need county approval has also donated to the pro-Faulconer PAC: RCS Harmony Partners, an investment company behind the 453-home development known as Harmony Grove Village South.

RCS donated $35,000. It’s headed by Marcel Arsenault, a Colorado billionaire, and David Kovach, a local developer. Ten percent of Harmony Grove Village South’s units will be affordable housing.

Supervisors approved the project in 2018, but the decision was reversed by a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club and other groups in an appeals court over greenhouse gas emissions that the development would have created. Faulconer called a provision that considers how many miles the project’s residents would travel in vehicles that was a key issue in the litigation “draconian” in a September debate.

County supervisors could vote on the Harmony Grove project again in the spring.

Nearby residents have opposed it, saying the development will make it too dangerous to evacuate the canyon where they live if a fire occurs.

 “The people in that neighborhood who had to evacuate over and over again over the years are scared,” said JP Theberge, vice chair of the Elfin Forest Harmony Grove Town Council. “They’re scared that you’re gonna have a thousand cars on what used to be a road that would only accommodate a handful of cars during an evacuation.

Harmony Grove Village South requires a change to the general plan to rezone the area for higher density, from 174 residential units to 453 which will need to be approved by the Board of Supervisors — likely in spring 2025, a county spokesperson said. The project went before the San Dieguito Planning Group on Sept. 12, when it voted to resend the group’s 2018 comments recommending denial of the project along with additional concerns.

Theberge said he believes if Faulconer wins, supervisors “will have a run on the unincorporated county and you’ll start seeing a lot more (General Plan Amendment) projects in the high wildfire risk areas.”

Unlimited spending without coordination

In July, the Business Industry Association sent a newsletter announcing that a new law has “amplified” the power of PACs and urged readers to donate.

Since the implementation of Senate Bill 1439 last year, supervisors cannot vote on a matter that will directly financially benefit a donor who contributed $250 or more to their official campaign within 12 months prior to the decision. They also cannot accept such a donation for a year after the vote.

“This is very frustrating,” said Pfeiler, BIA’s CEO, in an interview. “If I’m the developer and the landscape architect, and the architect and the general contractor all give to the same candidate and it adds up to $250, that person can no longer vote on your project… You can’t tell your folks who to contribute to or who not to contribute to so suddenly you cannot give to a candidate because you don’t know if that’s going to rise above $250.” 

No such restrictions exist for donations to groups like the Homelessness Crisis Response Committee. That means Faulconer, if elected, would be able to vote on the Cottonwood Sand Mine after the developer spent $100,000 to support his campaign. 

And the only limitation on super PACs — not being able to coordinate with candidates’ campaigns — doesn’t seem to have much teeth.

“So far as I know, no one has ever been prosecuted for coordinating between an independent entity and a campaign. It’s done kind of with a wink and a nod, and I think that goes on kind of rampantly,” said Gary Jacobson, a political science professor at UC San Diego.

Tom Shepard, the head of a San Diego political consulting firm, said the $250 limit “is a very strong disincentive” to make major contributions committees controlled by candidates.

“And their money has to go somewhere, so it goes to these independent expenditure efforts,” he said.

Editor’s note: This investigation was supported with funding from the
Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by
the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.