Point Lomans Have What It Takes to Help the Unhoused

By Joni Halpern

There have been many times in the past when community advocates for the best interests of the Point Loma community have needed the support of residents of other San Diego communities. The retention of Dana Junior High School is only one example.  We needed support from other communities to prevent the school from being sold to developers who planned to replace it with almost 300 condominiums.  We succeeded in our efforts, because other communities joined us.

However, had it not been that other communities were targeted to lose their schools to developers, we would have been unable to make the argument that other communities should support us, because their residents widely believed that neighborhoods like Point Loma, La Jolla, and other constituencies of affluence did not care one whit about any community but their own.

The truth is, every community needs the support of others — all of us in this city, all of us in every neighborhood need each other’s support.  In order to gain that support in addressing problems that any one of our communities faces, it is often necessary to call upon the bank of good will that individual neighborhoods have established in demonstrating they are concerned with all San Diegans, not just themselves.

It is foolish to assume that we in Point Loma can constantly direct the actions of people in power just by the fact that we live in this lovely place, that some among us hobnob with the celebrities of public life, and that we can withdraw our monetary support if we really want to impress political decision-makers with our resolve.  Witness what has happened with over-densification of our neighborhoods.  Our protests have gone unheard.  Look at the problem of SB 10; it has only gone away for a while.  It will return, and when it does, we will need citywide support against it.

The false claim of resolving homelessness has been used by developers and ambitious members of local decision-making bodies to promote thousands of new apartment complexes now crowding neighborhoods across the city.  Affluent neighborhoods have resisted these plans in some cases, with residents able to contribute money to bring lawsuits or finding other ways to twist the arms of policy makers who have been trying to sell the “trickle-down” theory that construction of thousands of new multi-household dwellings will cure homelessness.  But none of these methods has stopped the over-development that has crammed our communities with traffic and chaos.  Neither has over-development dropped the rental prices to levels affordable to people in poverty, regardless of how hard they work. Certainly, it has not cured homelessness.

Sometimes we need more than money or stature to fight City Hall.  We need the moral authority that comes from fighting for others in our city as well as for ourselves.  We need unity across neighborhoods that can only be achieved when people who live in one neighborhood extend themselves to help bear the burdens of addressing serious needs that affect everyone in our city.  But we in Point Loma insist on battling against any blemish of poverty being addressed anywhere near us, even in prescribed restricted areas such as that of “H Barracks.”

The vast majority of Point Lomans have not had any contact with the unhoused, except for isolated instances described by some residents – such as finding a man with his pants down in a local park restroom or being scared to death on an early morning walk as a shabbily clad person pops out of shrubbery in someone’s yard.  These incidents should never serve to generalize theories about the behavior of all those unhoused.

There is one thing clear from real data:  When unhoused persons have a safe place to live that can meet their needs, the number of persons who have to clean themselves in public restrooms or sleep under bushes drops dramatically.

The city has been careful to identify a fairly isolated area not directly within the confines of our residential community as the site of the proposed facility for housing.  They have promised the housing will be maintained, that it will have resources and services needed by unhoused persons. The City has promised to provide security – which, by the way, is not primarily to protect Point Lomans from ever encountering the people served at the facility, but to ensure the people served can live there safely.  This is not a facility to incarcerate people.  It is a facility to provide housing and services in a safe environment.

This bring us to the possibility that the concerns Point Lomans raised in a recent letter to the City can be addressed positively, not negatively.  But this possibility was never even raised by the Peninsula Community Planning Board.  Instead, the letter assured the City that Point Lomans “recognize the importance of supporting our homeless community,” and understand “the importance of addressing homelessness in our City.”  At the same time, the letter declared essentially that Point Loma should not be the site of any facility addressing this citywide problem.

Urban areas as densely built and occupied as San Diego cannot make perfect choices about helping the unhoused when the following facts exist:

• Every human being has to take up space somewhere.
• If poor people – working, disabled, elderly, or ill — cannot get help to cover rent through family, nonprofits, publicly subsidized housing, or federally assisted housing (where the wait list is years long), they will never be able to afford rent, even if it is low.
• It doesn’t matter how many advantages the City gives developers (e.g., how many parking requirements we waive, how many fees we reduce, how many thousands of units we build for tenants without providing for very low-income tenants, etc.)  These advantages increase developer profits, but do nothing to make housing affordable for the poor.  The problem of unhoused persons is an economic one.  Today, there are more people living on an unsustainable income in the U.S. than ever in our history.

All the concerns listed in the planning board’s letter to the City can be addressed by our community if we accept our responsibility to the larger San Diego community and begin to carry a portion of the load in resolving the problem of unhoused persons, as opposed to fending off every possible presence of the impoverished in or around Point Loma.

We can monitor the promises of the City to provide adequate services to the people housed in the proposed area.  We can ensure that security is adequate and effective.  We can, God forbid, even volunteer our own services, however small the contribution might be, to ease the burdens of staff and of the people served.  We can even argue about whether a shelter for 700 is too large for reasonable oversight.  But we should not oppose it entirely.

I have served as a lawyer for the poor in San Diego City and County for 30 years.  I have visited my clients in tents, hovels, and shelters.  I have visited them in housing they were set to lose within days or weeks, with no way to save them from homelessness, because we as a society have accepted the ludicrous notion that people are poor because of the poor choices they make – as if the massive forces arrayed against all of us by the concentration of power in the hands of a few has had no effect on all our lives.

Today the poor and the middle class (including the upper middle class) must fight for everything.  And everything – access to health care, service providers, and other necessary institutional or corporate resources – has been made harder to obtain because of the obstacles  wrought by efforts to substitute computers for human beings who once had jobs.  As this process continues, there will be more and more people who cannot afford to be housed, even if rents go down to $500 a month in San Diego.

Shall we ask our fellow San Diegans in other parts of the city to bear the entire burden of housing those who have fallen off the affordable rent scale?  Shall we advertise to those communities our historic record of opposing any facility in our neighborhood intended to serve the increasing number of unhoused in San Diego?  Shall we insist that our neighborhood is too beautiful, too desirable, too precious to take up even part of the burden of addressing the citywide problem of families and individuals losing their housing?

Point Lomans have so much to offer in helping to make the proposed facility a success.  We have great minds, great hearts and great skills among our residents.  We have people who would know how to work with the City to ensure that promises would be kept concerning the safe and effective operation of the facility.  We have people who have worked directly with the unhoused and might be willing to contribute their skill and generosity to those served in the proposed facility.  We have people who could negotiate as to the size and scope of the facility.

Why can’t we, for once, be a neighborhood that sets an example in working with the City to affirmatively promote the success of an effort to address the needs of fellow citizens who never intended to end up on the streets, but who could not compete with the increasing cost of housing in our city?

Perhaps then, we will have the moral authority to ask other communities for help when future problems we face require wide public support.