PACIFIC BEACH CENTER A HAVEN FOR HOMELESS
People can do laundry, charge phones, connect to services in safe location
What once was a Pacific Beach garage soon will be a long-sought center that will offer housing opportunities, sobriety services, counseling and other help for homeless people living in San Diego’s coastal communities.
“If you would have seen this building a month ago, oh my gosh,” said Caryn Blanton, director of Shoreline Community Services, as she stood inside the center. “It was from the 1950s. Now it’s beautiful.”
Blanton had volunteered at Shoreline Community Services since 2020, finally becoming the nonprofit’s only paid staff member in January, and she has been hoping for a brick-and-mortar resource center for years. In a February 2021 profile in The San Diego Union-Tribune, she spoke of the need for a physical location where homeless people can charge their phones, do their laundry and feel safe and comfortable off the street.
The building’s opening now is just weeks away, and the 20 volunteers who will run the program known as the Compass Station are being trained in trauma-informed care.
Blanton has a long career in community service and had worked for a program helping refugees in City Heights before moving to Pacific Beach in 2015. She also created Pacific Beach Street Guardians, which paid homeless people to pick up litter, a program that ended when funding ran out after a couple of years.
She joined Shoreline Community Services in 2020, quickly putting her stamp on the nonprofit formed just five years earlier by residents who had been volunteering in a church-run feeding program.
“I proposed the model that we’re using now, which is away from relief services and doing more what we’ll call development services,” she said about the shift away from meals and toward housing, health and other longer-term programs.
With no place of its own, the program moved each day to different churches that were providing meals.
“We were like a pop-up resource center, and we popped up at six meal services that go on in this neighborhood,” she said about how the nonprofit operated over the past few years.
Blanton got to know the leaders at every church, including Pastor David Nagler of Christ Lutheran Church on the corner of Cass and Chalcedony streets. Directly across the street from the church was a cinder block building known as God’s Garage.
Blanton isn’t clear on the building’s history, but judging from the three large doors facing the parking lot, it probably had operated as a garage at one time. The building had been used for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for about 20 years, and was not in great shape, she said.
Blanton struck a deal with Nagler, and the church is renting the building to Shoreline Community Services, which raised $40,000 to make renovations, while still allowing AA meetings at night. The kitchen was removed and replaced with a laundry room, hardwood floor replaced linoleum and new furniture was brought in courtesy of the nonprofit Humble Design. Other renovations were funded with donations from Allgire Foundation and HomeAid San Diego.
When the center officially opens, clients will find a nursing center in the front for triage and first aid, a computer station with a printer, a phone-charging station, mail service, and places to meet with people from partnering agencies. There also are comfortable couches and chairs for people who just need to relax.
Think Dignity will have mobile showers at the center twice a month, and Blanton said 10 or 12 resource providers will assist people with housing resources, mental health aid, addiction recovery and other services.
The only other place like it for homeless people in the city is the Neil Good Day Center in downtown San Diego.
“All of the resources and services are downtown, and people are afraid if they go downtown, they’re going to get swept up in the chaos and they’re not going to get back,” she said. “People have chosen to be here for a reason. It’s calmer, quiet.”
The neighborhoods are strikingly different. Sidewalks around the Neil Good Day Center on 17th Street are lined with tents and litter, and people often can be seen openly using drugs. In contrast, encampments are a rare sight in Pacific Beach, and Blanton said community members often help Shoreline outreach workers when they run into people who may be in crisis and are living on the street.
“I get a call almost every day from people out on their morning walks,” she said. “Someone will say, ‘There’s a guy on Cass, he looks like he’s asleep, but check to see if he’s OK.’”
Blanton said about 300 to 400 homeless people live in Mission Beach, Pacific Beach and La Jolla Shores, the area the center will serve, and she expects 75 to 100 people to drop in every day between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Blanton foresees a day when homelessness is reduced to the point that it will no longer be the focus of the center. When that day comes, she said Shoreline may pivot to helping another vulnerable groups, such as seniors or the LGBTQ community.
“We’d use the same model, engaging the community into solutions,” she said. “We’re not in the business of homelessness. We’re in the business of helping those who are vulnerable and on the margin.”