By Ryan Fonseca / Los Angeles Times / April 24, 2024
[Please see original for links]
‘Managing mode, not solutions mode’
San Diego’s mayor created a department in 2021 to find solutions to the homelessness crisis, signaling a new direction. It hasn’t made things better.
The city’s homelessness count increased 35% from 2022 to 2023. Nearly half of the unsheltered people counted were considered chronically homeless.
Homeless deaths increased about 135% over five years, up to at least 624 last year, according to the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s office.
For every 10 people who find housing in San Diego, 13 people become homeless for the first time, says a 2022 report by the Regional Task Force on Homelessness.
And 19% of households who exited the city’s shelter system last year fell back into “homeless situations,” according to San Diego Housing Commission data.
“Homelessness is the most complex problem for which people crave a simple solution,” San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria told me. “And there isn’t one.”
A camping ban has moved the problem from one part of town to another
Gloria has championed the city’s controversial Unsafe Camping Ordinance, which bans people from sleeping outside close to schools, transit hubs and shelters, or in parks and other open spaces.
But just because residents, business owners and tourists are seeing fewer tents downtown doesn’t mean homelessness is being reduced.
“Tents line San Diego’s highway on- and off-ramps, where the city can’t enforce its ban because Caltrans owns the land,” CalMatters’ Marisa Kendall reported earlier this month.
Disjointed efforts make progress challenging
Michael McConnell has spent nearly 15 years advocating and providing aid for San Diego’s homeless communities.
He characterized the city’s current approach as “managing mode, not solutions mode” — like using a teaspoon to keep a bathtub from overflowing.
“If we were to build a homeless service system from scratch, it would look nothing like what it looks like today,” McConnell said. “It’s so fragmented.”
The nonprofits and providers that the city relies on each need funding and have varying approaches, he said, which creates competition and undermines collective progress. And with no one strategy in place, it’s hard for elected officials to effect change.
If you ask Gloria, it’s not so simple.
“I have very blunt instruments with regard to responding to homelessness,” Gloria told me. “It’s the sanitation department or the police department. Neither of those are the social workers or human services agencies.”
A group of businessmen has floated a different version of moving homeless people around.
George Mullen, who grew up in San Diego, said the severity of the humanitarian crisis requires radical solutions.
He and a group of residents have an idea: build a facility to house thousands of their homeless neighbors, several miles outside of town.
They call it Sunbreak Ranch. It would serve as a large-scale “triage center” complete with shelter, health treatment, job support, schools and daily shuttle service to downtown San Diego.
The Sunbreak group’s website includes among its goals a “return to the rule of law” and cleaning up city streets that are “filthy beyond recognition.”
Proponents say the federal government should declare a national emergency and build the facility on federal land, similar to how FEMA responds to natural disasters.
Mullen and his collaborators have been pitching a version of the idea for years, and found support from a former mayor and former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. But it’s been dismissed or criticized.
- The San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board said “Mullen’s messianic tone only adds to his utter lack of credibility.”
- Mayor Gloria told me “there’s not a lot of depth to the proposal.”
- McConnell worried that the proposal could encourage those who “think it’s a good idea to just ship folks out somewhere.”
- The Marine Corps called the idea “not supportable” due to wildlife habitat, live-fire gun ranges and unexploded ordinance. (Mullen’s group also proposed an alternate site.)
Mullen is unperturbed. “Why not try?” he said. “Do you just let people keep dying? Or do you actually try to do something to get them off the streets?”
City officials are pushing their mega-shelter plans
Mayor Gloria announced a plan earlier this month to convert a massive warehouse near San Diego International Airport to a long-term mega-shelter with 1,000 beds. The site would include 24-hour security, meals, showers and other amenities, plus services to connect people with housing.
Another large shelter being considered, dubbed H Barracks, initially aimed to provide temporary beds for up to 700 people, also near the airport. The plan faced some local opposition in the fall when more than 6,000 residents signed a Change.org petition urging the city to kill the idea.
Gloria said that the H Barracks plan could change if city leaders act on his new proposal and sign a long-term lease for the warehouse site.
None of these shelter proposals address housing costs
San Diego was recently ranked the most expensive U.S. city to live in by U.S. News and World Report.
Gloria called the lack of affordable housing the “primary cause” of the current crisis.
“It is not uncommon to have a conversation with a resident who is incensed about our homelessness crisis but will simultaneously, in the very same conversation, share their opposition to more housing,” Gloria said.
It’s one place where advocates and the mayor agree.
“None of these ideas are going to solve homelessness without homes for people to go into,” McConnell said. “People don’t drop out of the sky onto the street; they were in housing, and they became homeless. These were your housed neighbors and now they’re your unhoused neighbors.”
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Mayor Toad has an Ash St. asbestos problem. H barracks will require a toxic clean up. And now, the latest shelter, will require a toxic clean up also. There seems to be a theme with this mayor and his deals that need full disclosure.
The increasingly Toxic Todd.
Gloria…gloriously wrong so much of
the time.
There’s no clear answer to how much of this comes from outside the area, but here’s some anecdotes:
“Alpha Project outreach worker Craig Thomas, however, said he has noticed a rising number of people from out of state in downtown San Diego over the past two years, or roughly since the start of the pandemic. ”I’d say on an average day we speak to 20, 25 people, and at least 12 of them are not from San Diego,” he said. “From my understanding, they become homeless for various reasons in other states, and they do their research and travel here due to the information they read.”
He said he’s heard people say they are moving from cities that had fewer resources and fewer shelter beds.
“And when they look into the resources we have here, they’re just blown away and immediately want to come here,” he said.
At a recent homeless outreach with the Alpha Project in downtown San Diego, some people on the street did say they were from out of town.
Their individual stories did not back up the idea that they were lured by services and shelter.
Matt Tucker said he came to San Diego from Missouri last November, but he expected to find a job and be self-sufficient.
“I came here with 400 bucks thinking I’d get a general labor job,” he said, explaining a friend had told him he’d be better paid here.
He did find work, but without a car he couldn’t make it to his job. As a registered sex offender, Tucker said he isn’t allowed in shelters, and if things don’t improve he plans to move to Texas, where his wife has family.
In another encampment, Beverly Chatman said she recently arrived in San Diego from Texas, where she was homeless.
Chatman is originally from San Diego, however, and was homeless in Texas for a month and a half after being released from prison. Her sister invited Chatman to come live with her in San Diego after learning of her situation, but she said things didn’t work out.
Matt Southworth is living in a vehicle with his wife, and arrived in San Diego from Georgia just two months ago. But he also has roots in San Diego. Southworth said he moved to San Diego expecting to work as a truck driver 10 years ago, but didn’t get the job and became homeless. He briefly moved back to Georgia last year because his grandfather was dying, and recently returned because his wife’s friend and child are here.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/homelessness/story/2022-06-17/question-persists-do-homeless-services-attract-homeless-people