A year after San Diego banned public camping, most new shelter options are tents

UPDATE: After several hours of public comment and debate, the San Diego City Council voted late Monday night to delay a decision to lease and convert a 65,000 square-foot warehouse into a shelter for unhoused residents. Several council members criticized the deal and asked the City Attorney’s Office to conduct a more thorough review. Officials are scheduled to revisit the discussion in September.

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One year after pushing through a controversial public camping ban, San Diego officials are preparing to tout efforts to expand shelter capacity by 40% in the face of a worsening homelessness crisis.

But more than half of the city’s new shelter options don’t actually qualify as shelter under federal guidelines — they’re tents pitched at two city-sanctioned campsites tucked away in Balboa Park.

San Diego City Council members will hear that update on the shelter system at its Monday meeting, when they also are expected to vote on Mayor Todd Gloria’s request to lease and convert a warehouse into a 1,000-bed shelter facility.

Gloria’s office did not respond to questions by deadline.

The shelter report from the Homelessness Strategies and Solutions Department shows where the city has made gains.

Officials exceeded a goal they had set last year — to add at least 600 new options for unhoused San Diegans — and added more than 930 places to camp and obtain indoor shelter. The city: 

• Created two campsites with 500 tents.
• Expanded two existing indoor shelters, adding a total of 62 beds.
• Added a new indoor family shelter with 168 beds.
• Added a domestic violence shelter with 160 beds for survivors. Women often report domestic violence as the immediate cause of their homelessness, studies show. In San Diego, about one in three unhoused residents are women. 

In addition, the city was just given the greenlight to create 200 parking spaces at the H Barracks site for unhoused residents. Those spaces, along with the two campsites that the city opened in the last year, are not considered shelter in the eyes of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Meanwhile, officials are preparing to lose much of the ground they have gained if new shelter solutions don’t become a reality. More than 1,000 indoor shelter beds will shut down soon, including some by the end of the year, as temporary permits and other agreements expire.

That presentation of the gains and losses will set the stage for Gloria’s big request: To lease and convert a warehouse near the San Diego International Airport into a 1,000-bed shelter. The city would pay $72 million in rent alone over the next 30 years.

“The closing of these shelters further illustrates the need to expand the City’s current shelter capacity,” staff wrote in a memo to City Council ahead of its meeting Monday.

Not everyone sees the warehouse plan as the best option, and critics have posed questions about the site’s safety.

The city’s Independent Budget Analyst also has raised serious questions about the overall cost and the process for identifying shelter. In a report released last week, the IBA said it would be cheaper to just buy the 65,000 square-foot warehouse outright, ultimately saving roughly $16 million on the city’s investment.

The IBA recommended putting out a competitive bid for emergency shelter sites, noting that the property owner approached the city with this idea.

The report says, “… the fact that the City is pursuing permanent shelter for the first time at a site that was not identified through routine real estate searches but rather because the prospective owner approached the City suggests either how challenging it is to find an appropriate site, or that the current approach is not the most productive approach, or both.”

Last year, Gloria sold the City Council on a controversial camping ban using a homeless shelter expansion strategy that mostly hadn’t been funded. The law makes it illegal to camp citywide if shelter beds are available, and anytime, regardless of shelter availability, near schools, parks, transit hubs and waterways. 

Since enforcement began, San Diego police have issued 86 citations and made 15 misdemeanor arrests for unauthorized camping citywide, according to a spokesperson.

The city also saw a 6% increase in the number of unsheltered residents compared to last year.