Two candidates battling to be San Diego mayor debated homelessness, the housing crisis, a proposed sales tax increase, the role of cars in the city’s future and other issues during a televised debate Thursday night. Incumbent Todd Gloria and challenger Larry Turner clashed on whether the city should allow property owners to sell apartments they build in their back yards instead of just renting them. Gloria said he’s open to that idea because the city must do everything possible to increase housing supply and solve the local affordability crisis. “We have to do more in order to make sure that working and middle-class people can afford to live in San Diego,” he said. Turner said he would oppose looser rules on back yard apartments, which are often called granny flats or accessory dwelling units. He said the mayor’s efforts to spur more housing don’t solve the problem. “If you just continue to build more in the hopes that it’s going to lower the prices, that’s not happening,” said Turner, blaming out-of-town housing investors and speculators for taking advantage of the mayor’s policies. KPBS host a live broadcast of San Diego Mayoral Debate 2024, with Mayor Todd Gloria and challenger Larry Turner answering questions about their plans to tackle some of San Diego’s key issues, on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (Alejandro Tamayo / The San Diego Union-Tribune) The candidates also disagreed on Measure E, a one-cent city of San Diego sales tax hike on the Nov. 5 ballot. Turner said the tax increase would hit low-income people hard and accused Gloria of trying to get Measure E passed to cover up his own financial mistakes leading the city the last four years. Gloria said the money is crucial for San Diego to address billions in needed infrastructure repairs the city can’t afford. “We will never get ahead of repairing our roads, fixing those storm channels and repairing our public facilities without new resources,” Gloria said. Another disagreement was on city efforts to fight climate change and ease traffic congestion by boosting transit and building bicycle lanes. “We have too much of our infrastructure that is only made for one thing and one thing only, and that’s the car,” Gloria said. “You should have the option to walk safely where you want to go, take high-quality transit, ride a bicycle safely or take your car, if that’s your choice.” Turner said he’s OK with bike lanes if they are built in the right places, but he said Gloria is getting ahead of himself on reducing car travel. “I would like to see less people driving cars,” Turner said. “We’re just not at that place right now where we should force that upon people.” He was particularly critical of the local trolley run by the Metropolitan Transit System. “We have an MTS system that’s unsafe — it’s dirty, and we’re still not at pre-COVID levels of people using it,” Turner said. Mayor Todd Gloria answering questions about their plans to tackle some of San Diego’s key issues at the KPBS studios at San Diego State University in College Area on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024 in San Diego, California. (Alejandro Tamayo / The San Diego Union-Tribune) The candidates also debated Gloria’s efforts to reduce homelessness, which Turner has harshly criticized throughout the campaign. Gloria said Turner lacks any solutions, but just continues to criticize the mayor’s plans for more shelter beds, dedicated sleeping sites for people in tents and designated parking lots for people living in their cars. “It’s just the reflexive opposition we see from many people who are afraid of change,” Gloria said of Turner. “A leader has to set forth a plan and execute it, and that’s what we’ve been doing.” Turner said his solutions include more accurate homeless counts, finding a way to avoid the scheduled loss of shelter beds in January, working with more social service agencies and appointing a city homelessness czar. Turner also criticized Gloria’s proposal for a 1,000-bed shelter near the airport, contending it makes more sense to have multiple, smaller shelters. The candidates also clashed on the city’s handling of the Jan. 22 floods that left more than 1,000 people homeless in the city’s southern neighborhoods. Turner said Gloria should have been more proactive about clearing clogged storm channels that played a role in the flooding. Larry Turner answering questions about their plans to tackle some of San Diego’s key issues at the KPBS studios at San Diego State University in College Area on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024 in San Diego, California. (Alejandro Tamayo / The San Diego Union-Tribune) The mayor said there was no way to know the storm would have such a huge impact. “The difference was the amount of rain being compressed in a very short amount of time — it was a microburst over a very constrained geographic area,” Gloria said. Turner said he’s skeptical of claims by Gloria’s staff that nothing could have been done. “The engineers say nothing could have stopped this 2.7 inches of rain — everywhere in the country 2.7 inches of rain is just a rainy day, it’s not a flood where people die,” Turner said. Gloria is a Democrat who previously served in the state Assembly and on the San Diego City Council. Turner is an independent candidate and a retired U.S. Marine who has been a San Diego police officer for the last eight years. Gloria got more than twice as many votes as Turner in the five-candidate primary, a little more than 132,000 to just under 61,000. Gloria drew 49.9 percent of the vote, while Turner got 23 percent. The debate was shown on KPBS television.