By Blake Nelson / The San Diego Union-Tribune / August 26, 2025
Several residents of San Diego’s designated camping areas for homeless people are suing to overhaul the program, alleging that both lots are dirty, lack quality food and remain unequipped to aid those with disabilities.
The safe sleeping sites hold hundreds of two-person tents near Balboa Park. Each location is “rodent infested” and a “fire hazard,” according to the lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court. They are also host to “excessive and dangerous heat” during part of the year as well as “cold and flooding in the winter,” weather that often leaves belongings “saturated with mold.”
All in all, “living conditions in the Camps” are “untenable, seriously threatening and aggravating mental and physical health,” the filing says.
The lawsuit asks a court to force reforms on the effort.
A representative for Dreams for Change, one of the nonprofits managing the sites, directed questions to the city, and the City Attorney’s Office declined comment. A spokesperson for the Downtown San Diego Partnership, which helps oversee the newest lot, similarly declined to weigh in.
All three groups were targeted by the filing.
San Diego’s safe sleeping program has long drawn pushback even as it’s become a central part of the city’s homelessness response.
The first site, known as 20th and B, opened a little more than two years ago. The much larger O Lot followed in late 2023, and since then there have been a number of problems. One area has been repeatedly evacuated during heavy rains. Dozens of people got sick at another for reasons that remain unclear. There have been complaints about rats and the heat inside tents. A representative of the United Nations once called for the initiative to be shut down immediately.
At a homelessness summit earlier this month, Mayor Todd Gloria reminded the crowd of his initial resistance to the idea.
But he and other leaders eventually came to believe that the camping areas were better than many alternatives. The sites offer portable toilets, hand-washing stations, showers, security guards and transportation to additional areas in the city. One meal is served. Couples can stay together — many traditional shelters separate men and women — and pets are allowed. In interviews in recent months, some residents said they felt more secure there than in sidewalk encampments.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan was so impressed after touring one of San Diego’s locations that he made safe sleeping a big part of his city’s homelessness strategy.
Proponents argue that the sites have been especially successful welcoming in people who are chronically homeless, which generally means they have lacked housing for at least a year, and, for whatever reason, are hesitant to accept other services. Of the 1,787 individuals who stayed at the camps in the last fiscal year, more than half were chronically homeless, according to city spokesperson Matt Hoffman.
During the same period, at least 156 people made it into some form of long-term housing, officials said. An additional 76 transferred to a different shelter while 41 left for treatment programs or nursing homes.
The eight people suing, all of whom say they have disabilities such as post-traumatic stress disorder, are not looking to shutter the initiative. But they do want improvements, especially as police sweeps and a countywide shelter shortage often leave homeless people with few other options.
“The conditions there are deplorable for anybody with a disability,” said Laura Zaleta, 60, who uses a walker and said she has been at the 20th and B site for more than a year. The shower for disabled people was once broken for two months, Zaleta added. “At times I felt I was safer sleeping on the streets than I am here.”
Zaleta was one of several program participants who spoke Tuesday at a news conference in Golden Hill Park, which overlooks the B lot. The small crowd that gathered included others staying in the tents who, despite not being part of the lawsuit, described their own frustrations. Several said they had seen staffers demean residents.
The filing also details cases of alleged retaliation. Employees trashed the belongings of one man after he raised concerns about conditions, the lawsuit says. Staff members allegedly called another person who had talked with reporters “media girl” and asked her, “Don’t you want to continue living here?”
County officials received the most recent complaint about rodents this summer, according to an inspection report shared with The San Diego Union-Tribune. Records show that a team checked O Lot on July 17, and while they didn’t see any rats, investigators recommended that the traps be checked more regularly.
Monday’s lawsuit was filed by local attorneys who have repeatedly challenged San Diego’s homelessness policies, often successfully, including Ann Menasche, Geneviéve Jones-Wright and Robert Scott Dreher.
The City could and should buy small vacation trailer houses, people use for camping. Homeless people can get free food from several sources. Put solar panels on the roof, or a small carport/patio, make them all electric, and send a porta potty truck service to empty the septic tank of the trailer. Water truck to provide water, and no evacuations needed, vermin controlled, small heat and air conditioning units powered by solar. They could even have a big screen movie night, and many other activities like the do in senior facilities. Office trailer with computer hookups so those that have relatives they could communicate with can do so, and maybe that relative would willingly take the homeless person into their home. The City could give the non-drug/alcohol user, homeless person, a one way bus ticket, pack a lunch or enough money so they could eat on their way back to their family in the US. There’s a way to help out the homeless, and thin them out in SD, but they have to be triaged first. They are not a one size fits all.
I keep hearing and reading articles where they’re saying that the city has come out to check on us down here to make sure everything is running great. When you give Dreams for Change a heads up that you’re coming, of course everybody is going to act right and things are going to look good. So funny how those are the only days that the staff down here acts like they’re human beings or remembers that we are too. Other than the few times a month or less that somebody comes to check and make sure everything’s running right, we are treated worse than the rats are down here. Retaliation happens, that’s why none of us want to say anything. They’ll find a reason to kick you out of here if you say anything. Other points… ….Rape does happen down here, people are dying left and right, they do take our belongings and just throw them in the trash. there’s hardly ever hot water for showers, the drinking water runs out constantly, and there is ZERO, I MEAN ZERO, NONE, ZERO help from staff concerning anything having to do with housing. They say ” your in the Que, now you just wait. What else do you have to do?” and walk away. The staff reduced our common area where we cook, socialize, eat and charge on the one strip they didn’t even provide to an area the size of a 1 car garage, so they could sit around in the shade and gossip about us, laugh at our conflicts, and do nothing. For 200 annoyed, sad, mentally unhealthy, beaten down and lied to people that’s a powder keg. Not to mention a total fire hazard. Hopefully there’s not anything like that that happens down here because there’s only one way in and out of here and that’s if the guard is in a good mood that day. Since the big fiasco with the rats this program has gone downhill. Not sure how that happened because as you can tell by reading it online, Teresa and all of her staff have gotten substantial raises over the last few years. While the food services get worse than it already was. If there is even enough slop thrown together from the left overs served earlier in the week. I don’t understand how everybody is saying that things are fine. Don’t say this program helps with housing, or anything else, because it doesn’t. It’s a place to wait the years it takes to get thru the housing waiting lists and circles they spin you around in until you die and they can check that body off as ” successful”. But a lot of us don’t have a choice to be anywhere else. We are not all drug users or lazy. Most of you are one paycheck away from being here. So put yourself in our shoes for a moment. Ask yourself how you would feel having somebody always calling you lazy, crazy, telling you you’re not worth any kind of decent help, not able to take a shower, having somebody that’s 30 years younger than you telling you what you can and can’t do, treating you as if you were a child, calling you names, laughing at you. There’s so much dehumanizing that happens here I can’t even name it all. This wasn’t a solution, even though it could have been a great one. It’s a holding pattern untill you either die or somebody bitches long enough to get some change. This place doesn’t need to be shut down, it just needs to get better so that those of us down here don’t want to die every single day that we wake here