By Gary Warth / San Diego Union-Tribune / April 18, 2023
After six years of homelessness, Edward Honore has had it with life on the street.
“I was just stabbed the other day, in my own neighborhood,” he said, rolling up his blood-stained right sleeve to expose a fresh scar.
Honore was standing in line just past 8 a.m. one recent morning at the Neil Good Day Center, a drop-in facility for homeless people in downtown San Diego. Like others in line, he hoped to be assigned a bed in a city-funded shelter operated by the Alpha Project or Father Joe’s Villages.
“I’m getting older now,” said Honore, 49, who lives in an encampment in National City. “I think it’s my age. It’s different on the street now. It’s the weather and things. I don’t have any clothes. I hit rock bottom.”
Other people lined up at Father Joe’s Villages’ downtown campus and the city’s Homeless Response Center, both just blocks away, hoping for beds. Meanwhile, outreach workers on the street and law enforcement homeless outreach teams also might be seeking shelter beds for people they meet on the street.
It didn’t look promising for Honore. Inside the office at the Neil Good Day Center, assessment specialist Jennifer Benitez collected information from people looking for a shelter bed and submitted requests to the San Diego Housing Commission. That morning, there were only five beds available for men, and three men and one woman had applied for beds at the Neil Good Day Center. Additional requests were likely during the day.
Elected officials, residents living near encampments, law enforcement and others familiar with the homeless population often repeat a claim that homeless people living outdoors routinely decline offers for services and shelters. While that is true, it also is true that people living on the street attempt to get into shelters every day, but are turned away because there are no beds available.
And some people who previously had declined help may change their mind, as Honore did. Others, like a man who gave only his first name Kenny, get frustrated and give up.
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It goes without saying the County needs to step it up in a quantum way so no one is turned away from these places. However, until then, I would appreciate the homeless, vagrants or the nauseatingly woke so-called “unhoused” population would stop pissing and shitting and camping out on my property, under my windows or at my doorways, leaving piles of trash and food scraps and waking me up in the middle of the night screaming, fighting with fellow “unhoused” and take all that mess and live outside this place identified in the article or other such places from which they’ve been turned away.
I’ll wager after a couple of days of that mess, Neil Good Day Center will find room for all applicants.