Spring Cleaning in San Diego: Homeless People Swept Up Like Roadside Trash
The Padres season begins on Thursday this week, and hopes in San Diego are high that the team will have a postseason worth all the money being pumped into the team.
Hopes aren’t so high for the people living on the street in the East Village, they’re being swept up so as not to disturb baseball fans on their way to see a game.
The game being played by the authorities (I’m assuming it’s more than just the police) is that they’ve effectively kettled homeless humans into areas near the stadium by offering services and porta potties.
Now, police have them all lined up, the better to confiscate and/or trash their belongings and send homeless humans into the death pit also known as the San Diego County jail. There aren’t enough shelters. For every 10 people housed these days, 13 more take their place.
On Monday Mayor Todd Gloria sent out a press release announcing “new leadership” at the City of San Diego to address the homelessness crisis. How many homeless czars have we been through?
It’s unfair and untrue to say it’s any one individual's fault that the number of unhoused people is increasing. Local government agencies and nonprofits can only put bandaids on the problem. Needless to say, musical chairs in local programs isn’t helping.
The fact that Hafsa Kaka, current Director of the City’s Homelessness Strategies and Solutions Department (HSSD), will be leaving the City at the end of this week to accept a “new role of regional significance” does not inspire confidence on my part.
I hear the Mayor didn’t want her to go. She obviously sought greener pastures, no doubt because of people like the ones who used her departure to cite increasing unhoused humans as her fault. Maybe she wasn’t right for the job. Maybe she was incompetent. But for sure the vitriol infecting local politics around these issues does nothing to put even one person under a roof.
As I understand it, there are beaucoup entities working on the issue of unhoused persons and too many leaders not talking to each other. Coordination alone wouldn’t solve existing problems, but it would hopefully make what resources available more effective.
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On another front, I got blowback for making a passing comment in a recent post aimed at poking at otherwise well meaning people upset with a plan for an encampment on the little used Inspiration Point parking lot on the southern edge of Balboa Park.
Then I saw an article in the Union Tribune about organized opposition to the proposed campground.
My blood boiled.
San Diego City Councilmember Stephen Whitburn has suggested the Inspiration Point parking lot in Balboa Park could serve as a possible site for a large, safe campground or other homeless services. His proposal has the support of Mayor Todd Gloria but has not yet had a hearing before the full council.
The philanthropic Lucky Duck Foundation also has suggested the eight-acre lot at Interstate 5 and Park Boulevard as a site for large tented shelters that could accommodate about 500 people.
Neither proposal is sitting well with some residents.
Love Balboa Park Inc, a citizen group, and the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership, including 29 of the park’s arts, science and cultural institutions, have expressed opposition to the idea of a homeless campground at that location.
David Lundin of Love Balboa Park is making it clear his group will file lawsuits, saying city charter and state laws would be violated by such a facility.
The park’s institutions are concerned about appearances, given the proximity of attractions, including the Spreckels Organ Pavilion and the House of Pacific Relations International Cottages.
I get it. I really do. Having an encampment would be an inconvenience and serve as an unpleasant reminder of life in the less touristy parts of the city. I appreciate that there are people working to keep one of Southern California's greatest assets from turning into a carny sideshow.
I think that Bill Walton’s observation about making an effort to make any such area look a little nicer is worthy.
However, we have a real emergency in progress.
If these folks want to make a stink about using a portion of the public’s land, let them come up with a counter-proposal.
Really. What else do they propose? They can’t come up with a better idea. And they won’t. It’s somebody else’s problem to solve...Yada, yada.
These opponents won’t win lawsuits on their merits and there is no magic wand to make these humans just go away. There is also no way –short of bringing Ron DeSantis over from Florida– of erasing the historical precedents involving using park land in emergency situations.
Voice of San Diego also ran an article about opposition to a facility in Balboa Park::
Whitburn and Mitch Mitchell, chairman of San Diego Housing Commission, a city housing agency that has been analyzing shelter sites and costs, said they hope Balboa Park organizations will recognize their support is needed.
Mitchell said he recently received a call from a person affiliated with a park organization he declined to identify who said they would oppose moving unhoused people to Inspiration Point and rally others in Balboa Park against the project too.
“That conversation broke my heart because we are supposed to be a community that comes together, makes suggestions and solves big problems. In that one conversation, what I realized is that there are those that are only going to say no, and unfortunately saying no is not a solution,” Mitchell said. “The entire community has to think about what the right solution is that allows us to build the infrastructure necessary to address this crisis knowing that it’s not going to happen overnight and that we need a window of time to make progress.”
There were more than a dozen comments on the VOSD article, and none of them had any ideas beyond banishing homeless humans to Borrego, complaining about parking, and implying that somehow being homeless is a choice.
It’s always somebody else’s problem.
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Emergency room facilities in San Diego are often overflowing, so advocates say hospitals are booting an average of 110 people daily back onto the streets.
The City of San Diego announced additional shelter beds are available during inclement weather, except that the number available is but a fraction of what’s needed, and the beds are floor mats.
The death rate among the homeless humans in “America’s Finest City” rose by 77% from 2016 to 2020. Law enforcement agencies are utilized to criminalize poverty, despite claims by the former Chief of Police in a Union-Tribune op ed.
Remember the good old days back in Faulconer administration when, “homeless individuals knew there would be consistent rules, and consequences when those rules were not followed?’
Neither do I.
But apparently that’s the viewpoint of Shelley Zimmerman about her era as head cop.
This latest Balboa Park proposal is paired with an ordinance making camping illegal in the city. Unhoused people rightfully fear the police roundups will occur before any new location will be opened.
There is increasing sentiment to support inhumane and cruel actions hiding behind the “otherization” of people living on the streets.
Those encouraging this public disgust are using the drug, alcohol, and mental health problems among the unhoused population to imply that a “cure” is necessary, even as they oppose the kinds of public safety net programs that might increase access to health care–not to mention, the general unavailability of care for those who say they want it.
One local Mayor –Bill Wells of El Cajon– is trying to get vouchers eliminated in his city to end the use of motels as providers of temporary shelter.
Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey -also aiming for higher office– went on Fox News to brag about his nonexistent influence on a program that boots homeless people back over the bridge into San Diego.
A joint study by The Guardian Newspaper in conjunction with an academic expert at the University of Washington focused on the rapid increase of the death rate among the unhoused in major metropolitan areas, including San Diego.
“You cannot have a healthy society with this many people living on the economic and social margins,” said UCSF’s Kushel. “Homelessness is lethal. We’re not going to be able to solve this without solving homelessness.”
For UW researcher Fowle, who is working on a doctoral thesis about the crisis of US homeless deaths, it comes down to whether our society can muster the empathy to act.
“It’s a tragedy that people are dying without housing,” he said. “We know the solutions. Housing saves lives and, for these people, is often a form of healthcare.”
There’s a good reason why the best we as a city can do about unhoused humans are band aid solutions. There’s a good reason why none of the anti-homeless NIMBY-types have no solutions.
We have a systemic problem. It includes employers not paying people enough to live here, runs through neighborhood groups squealing about imagined declines in property values (in California? You’ve got to be kidding!), and the notion that publicly funded social housing is somehow part of the one world globalists drive to enslave us all.
Finger pointing does nothing, whether its KUSI hoping the give Carl DeMaio a chance to prove he’s not qualified to do more than grift, or street advocates who seem to think the mayor should be at the ready to respond to a “bat signal” every time there is a crisis on the street.
Housing is the solution to homelessness. Housing takes time to build. While we’re waiting (once the political will is created) to make housing happen, every and I mean every citizen and institution in this city needs to lend a hand and support interim solutions. I’ll even bet the “crisis” at Balboa Park wouldn’t be near as bad if all that whining was converted to positive energy.
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Lead image: Still from video shot by Michael McConnell
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It's always somebody else's problem. Local elected officials can meet until the cows come home and there is literally nothing they can do eliminate homelessness. So I say everybody who's all NIMBYed up about Inspiration Point: *where would you have unhoused people go?*
The Board of Supes and the City Council and the Governor and the Legislature can't offer any permanent solutions *because there aren't any.* If some zillionaire offered a donation to build low income housing for all of California's homeless, it wouldn't work because *no* interest group would allow construction near their area of concern.
And any interim solution short of a concentration camp in the middle of the dessert will face the same problem. Saying it's somebody else's problem is a way of denying that it's ALL of US need to act in a way that is empathetic, respectful of the environment, acknowledges economic realities, and understand this needs to be a team effort.
Tourist season is going to pick up, so naturally, the politicians want everything to be lovely for them and they consider unhoused people as unlovely.
One thing I notice is that there seems to be a lot of discussion about homeless people and I never read of discussions with them.