San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
HOMELESS DEATHS IN ACCIDENT REVIVE OLD QUESTIONS
The horrific crash that killed three homeless people and injured five others last week called attention to an all-too-familiar reality: Thousands of men, women and children remain on the streets and living in dangerous conditions, despite millions of dollars and years of effort to address the problem.
In the days that followed the crash near San Diego City College, elected officials again said solving homelessness was their top priority, while homeless advocates again complained the city and county are not doing enough.
Old questions were asked anew: Why are so many people not in shelters? Why is there no safe place for homeless people to shelter when it rains or temperatures plummet? Why
haven’t the city and county used hotel rooms for temporary shelter?
Fingerpointing aside, most agree on one thing. The accident was a tragic reminder that too many people still are living without shelter.
“Let me state it very clearly: A street is not a home,” San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said Monday. “It’s not humane or safe to keep allowing our unsheltered neighbors to sleep under bridges, in alleys or in canyons.”
The accident occurred around 9 a.m. Monday when a car veered off B Street and jumped onto a sidewalk in a block-long tunnel just east of Park Boulevard. Rain had been predicted that morning, and a number of homeless people had congregated in the tunnel for shelter.
Homeless advocates said the incident represented one of many failings of past and current elected officials to address the problem.
“This is just one tragic event of many that has happened,” said Michael Mcconnell, former vice chair of the San Diego Regional Task Force on the Homeless. “Will this be the catalyst that finally wakes up our elected officials? We are waiting to see.”
Too many people, few beds
The city of San Diego has operated a large shelter inside the San Diego Convention Center since April, and at its peak it held about 1,300 people.
About 560 people remain at the shelter, which was opened to keep homeless people safe during the pandemic and is scheduled to close this week. People inside will move into two smaller shelters operated by the Alpha Project and another operated by Father
Joe’s Villages.
While those are the city’s biggest shelters, they’re just part of many throughout the county that provide a total of 2,684 beds.
That’s not nearly enough.
The most recent count of homeless people countywide, conducted in January 2020 by the Regional Task Force on the Homeless, found 3,648 people were in shelters or other temporary housing while 3,971 people were living outdoors without shelter. The pandemic has made the imbalance worse. Tamera Kohler, CEO of the Regional Task Force on the Homeless, said the number of shelter beds available has been reduced by 40 percent to 50 percent since the last count because of social-distancing protocols to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The city of San Diego’s 2019 Community Action Plan on Homelessness recognized the need for more shelters and estimated that 350 to 500 more beds are needed to meet a goal of getting half the unsheltered population off the street within three years.
More shelter beds are on the horizon. In Oceanside, officials are hoping to open the city’s first year-round shelter, and Chula Vista has acquired the 200-bed tented shelter once used by Veterans Village of San Diego and 10 FEMA trailers to shelter homeless families.
The San Diego Rescue Mission, which has an emergency overnight shelter for women and children at its downtown headquarters, also is seeking sites for shelters in National City and North County.
Even if there were hundreds more shelter beds, it’s commonly accepted that not everybody offered one is going to accept it. San Diego
Rescue Mission President and CEO Donnie Dee said he suspects about 15 percent of people on the street may decline a shelter, but believes they could be persuaded by persistent outreach.
Kohler said she believes it’s a myth that a high number of homeless people refuse to go into shelters. Rather, she said, they’re avoiding shelters because of specific reasons, but would accept them under other circumstances.
As an example, she said some women may turn down a shelter that has men, and some families may live together in a car because they can’t find a shelter that accepts children. Dog owners also may choose to sleep on the street rather than go into a shelter that doesn’t accept pets, she said.
Going forward, Kohler said the needs of people on the street should be considered when opening shelters.
Out in the cold
The number of deaths and injuries Monday likely would have been less if it were a warm, sunny day. But the forecast was for rain, and a crowd had gathered in the tunnel to keep themselves and their possessions dry because they had few other places to go.
The city had operated an inclement weather shelter at Father Joe’s Villages and PATH Connections Housing in downtown San Diego, but those closed last April out of concerns about the coronavirus and because more shelter beds had become available in the convention center.
Even if those inclement shelters were still operating, however, they wouldn’t have been available to the people in the tunnel at the time of the 9 a.m. accident because they would have closed hours earlier.
Other cities, especially in colder climates, have warming centers that are open throughout the day. In Multnomah County, for instance, the Oregon Convention Center is one of three warming stations open 24 hours.
Former state Assemblywoman Lori Saldaña said she and homeless advocate Martha Sullivan created their own warming center in a 20-seat bus they had parked outside of Father Joe’s Villages when its inclement weather shelter was still active.
When Father Joe’s 134bed inclement weather shelter closed at 5 a.m., the mobile warming center would be waiting outside with coffee, hot chocolate and hot water for tea, Saldaña said.
She hasn’t officially proposed the idea, but Saldaña said the city should look into the idea of creating a place where people without shelter could go that would be safer than on a sidewalk next to a busy street.
“It wouldn’t take much,” she said. “You could set up awnings, protective canopies, outdoor heaters. Why isn’t the city promoting this?”
San Diego City Councilman Steve Whitburn, whose district includes the City College area, said the idea was worth exploring.
“Every day is a dangerous day for people who are unsheltered, and we have to be doing everything possible to ensure individuals have every opportunity to get off the street in good weather and in bad weather,” he said.
With the end of the pandemic possibly in sight, Whitburn said the city also should begin pursuing more opportunities for shortterm shelters.
Kohler said board members on the Regional Task Force for the Homeless have suggested creating a temporary shelter that opens in cold and rainy weather, and it could be something that’s pursued after the pandemic is over.
Lisa Jones, executive vice president of strategic initiatives for the San Diego Housing Commission, said the idea of an expanded inclement weather shelter has been discussed in the city, with Golden Hall identified as a possible site for a daylong center.
Those discussions stopped when the pandemic broke out, but could resume again, she said.
Hotels as shelters
At a Wednesday news conference, several homeless advocates criticized the county for not fully using hotels to temporarily shelter homeless people during the pandemic.
The county had secured about 1,600 hotel rooms last year, with most intended for the general public to use if people needed a place to quarantine. Of those, 222 rooms were managed by the Regional Task Force on the Homeless to quarantine homeless people who had a high health risk during the pandemic.
The occupancy rate was high for the rooms managed by the Regional Task Force on the Homeless, but when the county acquired more hotels from the state’s Project Roomkey initiative, the occupancy rate was among the lowest in California.
The occupancy rate has improved, and as of Friday, the 640 rooms the county has acquired through Project Roomkey are 79 percent occupied.
Jones said the city of San Diego is exploring its own program that will use hotel rooms for shelters with federal funding recently made available.
An executive order signed by President Joe Biden in January changed federal funding rules to allow more flexibility in how the dollars are used. The change could mean San Diego could be reimbursed for acquiring and operating hotel rooms that would provide temporary shelter for homeless people.
The money could be used to hire staff members with backgrounds in trauma-informed care, housing navigation and other skills to help homeless people who would be staying in the hotels, Jones said.
Service providers who had worked with the county’s hotel program have said they had to limit the number of rooms they could provide because they didn’t have enough staff members, so the ability to hire more workers could mean more future hotel rooms for homeless people in the city of San Diego.
Whether there are enough qualified people in the area to meet the need, however, is unclear, Jones said. This past week, the Housing Commission released a request for service providers to submit their qualifications for running such a program.
Jones said the city could acquire its own hotel rooms or partner with the county to use some of its hotels in San Diego city limits if it finds a qualified service provider to run the program, which would be funded through federal dollars through September.
While the city hotel shelter program could be seen as a step toward getting more people off the street, it also was not without some criticism.
In a San Diego Uniontribune editorial this week, Mcconnell criticized Mayor Gloria for waiting 50 days before pursuing the federal funds.
In response to Mcconnell’s comment, Gloria’s Deputy Chief of Staff Nick Serrano issued a statement saying the mayor had been in discussions with county officials about its hotel program since the mayor took office in December.
Serrano said the mayor’s decision last week to direct the Housing Commission to seek qualified service providers to run a hotel program was based on those ongoing conversations.
“This is a critical step toward determining how the region can better leverage a program like Project Roomkey to increase our safe shelter options for people experiencing homelessness during the pandemic,” Serrano said. “A room by itself isn’t good enough. A program like this cannot be successful without expert providers of specialized supportive services, which, up to this point, have been in short supply and the reason it was necessary to call for the RFQ (request for qualification).”
gary.warth@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @Garywarthut