Article written by Nate John. Click here to listen to this podcast on the Voice of San Diego website.

VOSD Podcast host Andrea Lopez-Villafaña brought in County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer this week to get a temperature check for the Board of Supervisors.

The foremost issue in the region is homelessness. (Duh.) And that’s what most of this discussion was about.

“We have challenges,” Lawson-Remer said. Seniors comprise about 25 percent of our region’s homeless population. To that end, Lawson Remer says the County is pushing a pilot program to provide rent subsidies to seniors — an effort to stop them from becoming homeless in the first place, which is cheaper than pulling someone out of homelessness.

A conjoined issue with homelessness — for which the County is responsible —  is behavioral health. We’re hurting for behavioral health workers, as Supervisor Nathan Fletcher explained in our Politifest panel on homelessness. And now, we’re on track to have 18,000 too few behavioral health workers by 2030, according to Lawson-Remer. To that end, she says the Board just allocated $15 million to “catalyze new growth” in that workforce.

In this interview, during the second half of the show, you’ll hear some of the biggest hurdles and newest ideas the County’s got as we look ahead to 2023. But if we’re talking CARE court, multi-million dollar partnership grants, or “live-well mobiles,” Lawson Remer’s firm on the fact that it’s all gonna be a slog. “No silver bullets.”