San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
‘POT AT THE END OF THE RAINBOW’
Open one year, Saint Teresa of Calcutta Villa housing for formerly homeless people has about 500 residents
From his room in Saint Teresa of Calcutta Villa, Albert Zuniga can see his past.
“That’s how I ground myself on a daily basis,” he said, looking several stories below at homeless people congregating at the National Avenue and Commercial Street intersection in downtown San Diego.
“I look down there, and that’s where I came from,” he said. “Thank you, Jesus, for giving me this.”
Zuniga, 61, began using methamphetamine in the mid 1980s. At the height of his addiction, the father of two grown sons said his family no longer trusted him, but he knew they still loved him.
“The only one who didn’t have love for me was myself,” he said.
After two years of living on the street, bartering for a bed in a tent in exchange for drugs, Zuniga said his life changed when a police officer arrested him.
“The officer told me, ‘You’re not a bad guy,’” he recalled. “‘You could restore your life. You can make a change.’ That stuck with me. A guy who didn’t even know me, throwing me in the back of a police car, telling me I have a purpose.”
Zuniga has been clean in the three years since the arrest. A couple of years ago, he was living in a rehab house, feeling safe but not completely secure, when he saw a construction project with a large banner that read, “Hope lives here.”
When the building opened in January 2022, he became one of the first tenants in Saint Teresa of Calcutta Villa, the largest residential project ever built by Father Joe’s Villages.
“This right here is like the pot at the end of the rainbow,” he said of
his room he rents for $725 a month, the first he ever has had to himself.
At the one year anniversary of the project’s opening, Father Joe’s Village President and CEO Deacon Jim Vargas has been giving tours of the building. Outside the entrance, he points out the footsteps in the sidewalk, made with Father Joe Carroll’s actual shoes, and notes how they appear to meander a bit, indicating that the path out of homeless is not always a straight line.
The building in a sense reflects that notion by offering different accommodations for a variety of populations. The 407 apartments include 270 units defined as permanent supportive housing, meaning tenants receive services to help them remain stable and housed.
Vargas said about 96 percent of tenants in permanent supportive housing have remained housed, which so far is above the 90 percent success rate of permanent supportive housing programs in general.
Tenants include 40 families, and 271 residents who are 50 or older. Eighty units are reserved for veterans.
About 500 people live in the building, which is 93 percent occupied and has a waiting list for new tenants, Vargas said.
With community rooms on every floor, patios, gardens, an employment center, gym and other shared spaces, Vargas said the building can help people who had been living on the street learn to socialize and live in a community again.
But Vargas said some of the tenants have had trouble making an adjustment.
As he spoke about the building’s history, a visibly upset female tenant walked past, loudly cursing, and then apologized for her behavior.
There also have been some incidents in elevators, although Vargas did not want to share anything specific. About six months ago, Father Joe’s began hiring monitors to ride with passengers between floors.
During a recent tour, one young man working as a monitor was seen passing his eight-hour shift sitting in a chair in the corner of the elevator reading Stephen King’s 1,168-page novel, “It.”
Rent is no more than 30 percent of a tenant’s income. Katherine Fuentes, supervisor of case management, said tenants in permanent supportive housing on average pay between $100 and $300, although some pay nothing.
While rents are low, Vargas said they cover the cost of maintaining the building, making the model sustainable with no extra funding needed in the future.
The building could be argued as a success for the housing-first model, the approach of ending homelessness by housing people before they receive services to stabilize their lives. Vargas, however, doesn’t use the term because he considers it polarizing.
“In all the years I’ve been here, I never use that,” he said. “There are those who would say, yes, this is an example of housing first. That’s all well and good. I’m not a housing-first purist.”
Vargas explained that Father Joe’s also believes shelters are necessary as well as housing because the cost of rent is too high and the vacancy rate too low to address the crisis locally.
“We need shelters, but we know that shelters are a stopgap,” he said. “We have to be working on both shelters and housing.”
Father Joe’s Villages is planning two more housing projects in downtown San Diego. One will be on the site of the former God’s Extended Hand ministry on Island Avenue and 16th Street, and the other is on a vacant lot on Commercial and 17th streets.
Both will have about 100 units and each will cost about $50 million to $60 million to construct, he said.
gary.warth@sduniontribune.com