San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
CONVENTION CENTER SHELTER COST $5.7M IN NOV., RECORDS SHOW
Relief funds subsidizing city’s facility, not helping homeless find housing, critics say
In the latest month of the San Diego Convention Center’s unexpected role as a homeless shelter, the city paid $1.6 million in rent to its own nonprofit that runs the bayfront facility and $727,000 in operations and maintenance costs.
Other expenses for November included $1.5 million to the charities running the makeshift shelter, $915,000 to feed fewer than 1,000 clients, $343,000 for extra security and thousands of dollars in miscellaneous costs, city records show.
In total for November, San Diego taxpayers spent $5.7 million to temporarily house about 900 people — just over $190,000 a day, or more than $6,000 per person. That’s more than $210 per day for each person living at the shelter.
Over the eight months since Mayor Kevin Faulconer announced Operation Shelter to Home, the city budgeted more than $40 million for a government program that did not create a single new dwelling. Rather than providing permanent housing to homeless people during the pandemic, at least $10 million in state and federal COVID-19 relief money and
other funds went to the San Diego Convention Center Corp., budget records show.
The spending helped make sure the facility survived the economic collapse sparked by the public health crisis and the resulting cancellation of dozens of conventions.
The shelter effort also spawned a COVID-19 outbreak that sickened at least 120 people in recent days.
“It’s the most expensive shelter that I’ve ever heard of,” said Michael Mcconnell, a community activist who for years has documented the plight of homeless people on San Diego streets.
Mcconnell credited Faulconer for reducing COVID-19 risk in the homeless community, but “it has not been a good homelessness response because of the small number of people who actually got into housing,” he said.
The Mayor’s Office said Operation Shelter to Home was worth the cost because it protected a vulnerable population that otherwise would have been squeezed into the city’s other, smaller shelters.
“When this pandemic hit, the convention center was the best option for providing safe, sanitary options for folks sheltering at the city’s bridge shelters with room to allow more individuals to come in off the streets,” Faulconer spokeswoman Ashley Bailey said by email.
“At the time, no one knew how long this would last, but we knew we had to do all that we could to prevent the spread of the coronavirus among our homeless population,” she said.
She confirmed that COVID-19 relief funds were used to subsidize the San Diego Convention Center Corp., which was set up as a public-benefit corporation to be sustained by event revenue and other income.
“The rent portion of the costs contribute to keeping the convention center corporation solvent and has allowed them to retain employees so that they can quickly resume operations at the first available opportunity,” Bailey said.
Recently Faulconer joined incoming Mayor Todd Gloria outside the convention center for an event toasting the success of Operation Shelter to Home and announcing that the residents would be relocated by the end of December.
“This is a new model, and this pandemic brought our region together like never before,” said Faulconer, who left office Thursday.
City officials said 400 people living at the convention center soon would begin moving into two motels purchased by the city under a housing commission program.
The remaining 500 or so residents might return to so-called bridge shelters or to Golden Hall, another cityowned venue adjacent to San Diego City Hall that was transformed into temporary housing for women and children.
Or they might remain in the convention center. Gloria said he plans to seek additional money from the City Council to keep the convention shelter open beyond this month.
“With cases and hospitalizations on the rise ... the right thing to do is to use this civic asset to provide shelter to our most vulnerable,” Gloria said.
Initial estimates lower
Faulconer announced Operation Shelter to Home in late March, weeks after much of San Diego, California and the nation began self-quarantining in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
The idea was to convert the massive exhibit halls into temporary housing, so homeless people would be farther apart from each other and less likely to get sick. The facility became available after conventions and other large gatherings were canceled due to the pandemic.
Initial cost estimates were lower than what the city ended up paying.
A report to the City Council in late March said the Mayor’s Office expected to spend $7.1 million on the shelter in partnership with its housing commission, San Diego County and the Regional Task Force on the Homeless.
“The agencies have agreed to pool this money to fund the operations at the convention center,” the report said. “Depending on the number of clients served a month, these dollars will be able to be stretched over several months of the emergency response to COVID-19.”
By summer, the population at the convention center had climbed to 1,300. Most of the clients came from other shelters run by the Alpha Project, Father Joe’s Villages and the Veterans Village of San Diego.
The three charities are operating the shelter at the convention center while the county provides medical and mental health services and assists residents in applying for Medi-cal, food stamps and other public benefits. Meanwhile, the task force is helping the housing commission find people more permanent places to live.
Faulconer said recently that Operation Shelter to Home succeeded in linking some 1,100 people to housing. He also credited the program with preventing a broader outbreak of COVID-19 across the homeless community.
Almost $1.5 million of the monthly cost for the convention center shelter is paid to the charities serving the residents.
Bob Mcelroy, president and CEO of the Alpha Project, called the effort a massive undertaking that has proved worthwhile.
“All the services were consolidated in one spot,” he said. “And I’ve never seen the county and the city work together so well.”
Mcelroy said he was surprised to learn how much Operation Project to Home cost. He said his costs come to about $50 per night for each person served by Alpha Project.
“Our budget hasn’t gone up by one penny,” he said. “We’re still at 500-some people.”
In a statement released through the Mayor’s Office, the convention center said it has discounted its standard rent by 15 percent and provided bathrooms, meeting rooms and other space free of charge.
“Spaces used for the shelter are occupied and active 24/7, unlike regular event activity, which ends at night,” the statement said.
The convention center collected $6.8 million in rent from its regular business in the fiscal year that ended June 30, although the pandemic forced the cancellation of numerous events since March.
Under Operation Shelter to Home, the city has paid more than $10 million in relief funds to the convention center corporation, which is more than the $9.6 million the center generated in rental income in the pre-pandemic year that ended in June 2019.
Carl Winston, director of the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at San Diego State University, said many convention centers are struggling as a result of the pandemic.
“To the best of my knowledge, San Diego is in a league of its own when it comes to using their convention center as a homeless shelter,” he said. “If this was widely imitated, it would have been a visionary idea. I don’t know that it’s been widely imitated.”
Winston, who has been studying the San Diego tourism economy for decades, called the amount of relief money being spent on the temporary shelter “eyepopping.”
“That’s $200 a night,” he said. “They might as well put them all at the Marriott.… Hotels are equally starving and desperate for money. Occupancy downtown is well under 30 percent. They would probably kill for this business.”
He noted, however, that the typical cost of running a convention center shelter 24 hours a day would likely exceed the rent charged to a trade group, which closes down at the end of the day to allow for cleaning crews and other maintenance.
‘Pretext of public safety’
Not everyone is pleased with the decision to convert the convention center into a temporary homeless shelter.
In a lawsuit filed this summer, the nonprofit law group Disability Rights California accused the city of unconstitutionally forcing homeless people into the convention center in order to receive public services.
The complaint, pending in San Diego Superior Court on behalf of three disabled homeless plaintiffs, also said the city is wasting COVID-19 relief funds by pushing people into congregate living, against federal health guidelines, instead of to motel rooms or other permanent housing.
“A large portion of homeless individuals have disabilities that include underlying health conditions and the primary strategy for preventing COVID-19 infection is the provision of non-congregate housing,” the lawsuit asserts.
“By expending taxpayer funds on a congregate setting instead of non-congregate, the city knew that it was effectively excluding homeless individuals with disabilities who rely on the city’s homeless programs from accessing shelter,” it adds.
Disability Rights California senior attorney Parisa Ijadi-maghsoodi, who filed the complaint with San Diego attorney Genevieve Jones-wright, said the shelter project is more about sustaining the convention center than helping poor people.
“Under the pretext of public safety, these funds were used to protect the city’s own financial interests instead of the health and safety of those the funds were intended for — including and especially vulnerable and unhoused individuals,” she said.
In its court filings, the San Diego City Attorney’s Office rejected the claims. City lawyers wrote that the Operation Shelter to Home program amounted to “an extraordinary show of cooperation” between the city, county and a task force that kept people safe and gave them access to social services.
“This move allowed those being sheltered to physically distance from each other per CDC guidance, a task which was impossible in the shelters due to space constraints,” the city argued.
The plaintiffs’ request for a restraining order was denied, but the case remains active.
Other activists also have raised questions about Faulconer’s motivation for converting the convention center into a homeless shelter.
“They spent millions not to provide housing or shelter but to cover expenses of a city facility,” said former state Assemblywoman Lori Saldana, D-san Diego. “This is why hundreds — maybe thousands — of people have remained outdoors. The convention center didn’t add new capacity.”
Saldana, who chaired the Housing and Community Development Committee during her three Assembly terms, was part of a group of mothers and grandmothers who protested about homelessness while outside Faulconer’s Point Loma home last month.
“Even after San Diego was ground zero for the nation’s deadliest hepatitis epidemic, Kevin Faulconer has learned nothing about reducing the spread of an infectious virus,” Saldana said.
In 2017, 20 people died and hundreds were sickened during a hepatitis A outbreak. Many of the fatalities were homeless people.
City officials have said the convention center was one strategy to keep homeless people safe during this pandemic.
Meanwhile, Alpha Project executive Mcelroy said he doesn’t know where his clients will be living after this coming week. But if he does reopen his two shelters east of downtown, they will serve fewer people than they did before, to keep people safe.
“We’re scaling both those down if and when we ever move back,” he said.