WORK BEGINS ON MIDWAY SHELTER
It will be first 24-hour intake facility in San Diego and will focus on those with mental health, addiction issues
Construction has begun on what will be the city of San Diego’s first homeless shelter to provide 24-hour intakes and a focus on people with mental illness and addictions.
At a Tuesday morning groundbreaking ceremony in the Midway District, city and county officials stressed that the shelter will not solve homelessness, but will be one of many new approaches to the problem when it opens sometime in July.
The shelter also could provide some relief to an area that has seen a growing number of homeless encampments in the area, including many on a stretch of Sports Arena Boulevard south of Rosecrans Street just two blocks away.
“The homeless crisis has made the streets of Midway into a place of suffering, but this shelter will help turn Midway into a place of healing, a place for recovery and new beginnings,” said County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, who represents the area.
“The people who will benefit from this shelter are the same people who could otherwise end up in jail,” she said, noting the shelter will serve people with mental health issues and drug and alcohol addictions. “The fact that jails are San Diego’s biggest mental health treatment centers shows how broken our system has been. In the past, we were more focused on locking people up than helping people out.”
“We’re working to reduce homelessness in every way we can,” said San Diego City Councilmember Jennifer Campbell. “We’re taking a variety of approaches, and all are working simultaneously to combat homelessness.”
Last week, Campbell and three other council members held a press conference to show support for a proposed new city attorney unit that could increase the number of homeless people with mental illnesses who could be placed into conservatorship and ordered into treatment.
The city teamed with the county last year to open a 50-bed harm-reduction shelter on Sports Arena Boulevard for people with mental illness and addictions, and San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria is proposing new shelters for seniors and families.
County supervisors last week approved a $10 million grant program for other cities to open shelters, safe parking lots, secure camp
grounds or other options for getting people off the street. Board of Supervisors Chair Nathan Fletcher said at the Tuesday ceremony that he hoped cities throughout the county will replicate the new Midway shelter.
The shelter is being constructed behind the County Health and Human Services Complex and the Psychiatric Hospital of San Diego County on Rosecrans Street. The Alpha Project, which operates the harm-reduction shelter and two large tented shelters downtown, will oversee the new shelter while the county will provide staffing for psychiatric and health services.
Gloria said the new shelter will open with 125 beds and could expand to 150. The city has 1,468 shelter beds and is adding more in coming months and plans to have more than 1,900 beds available by the end of the year, he said.
The new Midway District shelter was announced in March, and construction crews have been preparing the site behind the county buildings
by installing electrical lines and underground plumbing. On Tuesday, crews lifted the first tall metal rib into place that will support the industrial tent that will serve as a shelter.
The tent is owned by the philanthropic Lucky Duck Foundation, which has funded several local programs to shelter, feed and protect local homeless people and has pushed the city to open more shelters.
The new shelter will be in a tent the foundation originally pushed for Veterans Village of San Diego, which operated it on Navy property in the Midway District until 2020.
That same year, the Lucky Duck Foundation offered to lend the tent to the city of Chula Vista, which kept it for more than a year but never put it to use as a shelter.
Last October, Lucky Duck Foundation board member Dan Shea offered the tent to San Diego or any city that would use it as a winter shelter. There were no takers, and the large tent remained in storage until county supervisors agreed to construct it on their Midway District property.