SAN DIEGO — San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria delivered his fourth State of the City address on Wednesday from the Balboa Theater in downtown San Diego.
During the speech, Gloria spoke on the biggest issues facing San Diego including public safety, homelessness, housing and infrastructure.
One of the cornerstones of the Mayor's State of the City tonight was the city's strategy for tackling homelessness, pointing out that since 2021, the city has more than doubled the number of options for people experiencing homelessness to come off the streets.
"While the mission is far from accomplished, we have made significant progress," Mayor Gloria said.
That progress includes the city's safe parking program and safe sleeping program, which has moved more than 600 people off the streets in the course of a few months.
This coming year, the Mayor said a thousand more beds will be added to the homeless shelter system, which includes the re-development of the old downtown Central Library.
"We plan to create additional shelter space, along with hundreds of new permanent affordable homes for low income and formerly homeless San Diegans," he added.
The Mayor also focused on major strides made in public safety over the past year.
"Murder was down 12 percent, rape was down 16 percent, robbery down 7 percent, burglary down 16 percent," he said.
He shined a spotlight on his executive order to strengthen enforcement around illicit fentanyl, before which San Diego averaged 34 fentanyl-related arrests a month.
"Since my order, that number has risen to 53 arrests per month: a 54% increase," he said.
Watch the full 2024 State of the City address:
Mayor Gloria has regularly appeared on CBS 8 to discuss the City of San Diego in the "Your Questions Answered" segment. In December, he joined Carlo Cechetto and discussed the Housing Package 2.0 plan that had just passed City Council to preserve existing affordable housing and promote more construction.
2023 State of the City Address Recap
In the 2023 State of the City address, Gloria touted the city's progress on issues ranging from infrastructure, public safety, homelessness and housing affordability.
Gloria announced that just moments before his address, he signed an executive order that would expedite City approval of affordable housing projects to 30 days.
“None of tonight should come with the suggestion of mission accomplished,” Gloria said. “Our city has crawled out of the deepest of valleys, and we now find ourselves climbing the highest of mountains. The summit may be far in the distance, but San Diego is taking steps every day to reach it – and we will.”
After delivering his first two State of the City addresses virtually to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Mayor Gloria gave the 2023 speech in front of a live audience at the Civic Theater, which sits smack in the middle of Downtown's civic core that the City plans to redevelop into a new City administration hub and thousands of homes for working-class San Diegans.
"This once-in-a-lifetime transformation will revive the Downtown civic core, create a welcoming place of beauty and culture that will serve generations long into the future and that is emblematic of the big-city energy we must embody," Gloria said.
The mayor came down hard on the use and sale of fentanyl, a powerful opiate which had seen a massive increase in use, as well as overdoses and deaths in the past five years.
WATCH: San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria's 2023 State of the City Address