Homelessness in San Diego continues to rise. Most troubling is the increase in “unsheltered” homeless people — those living outside and not in one of the region’s authorized shelters.
But Mayor Todd Gloria feels the annual point-in-time homeless count doesn’t tell the full story because of federal rules governing how the tally is conducted.
Hundreds of people currently stay at city of San Diego safe sleeping and safe parking lot sites. They receive many of the same services and attention from government and nonprofit agencies as do people in the big tent shelters or temporary shelters like the one at Golden Hall.
Yet those people sleeping in smaller tents at sanctioned camp sites in Balboa Park or in their own vehicles at designated lots aren’t considered to be “sheltered” under guidelines set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the yearly count.
Gloria this month sent a letter to Acting HUD Secretary Adrianne Todman requesting that be changed.
“Simply put, unsheltered individuals on our streets and those residing in our sanctioned Safe Parking and Safe Sleeping facilities are not one in the same and should not be classified as such,” the mayor said in the letter dated Aug. 1.
The number of people living outside or in vehicles rose in the city of San Diego to 3,489 — a 6 percent increase from a year earlier — in the latest countywide count in January.
In the letter, Gloria said there were 749 San Diegans who were residing in Safe Sleeping and Safe Parking programs during this year’s homeless count.
“If the City was able to include these individuals as part of our sheltered population, we would have seen unsheltered homelessness in the City of San Diego drop by 9.5% compared to the previous year,” he wrote.
The math is a bit tricky here because to get an apples-to-apples comparison, the mayor’s office said it had to subtract more than 250 safe parkers from the 2023 count.
For context, overall there were 10,605 homeless people countywide in this year’s count — a slight increase from the previous year. More than 6,100 people were tallied as unsheltered, an 18 percent rise year-over-year — triple the city increase under existing rules.
Gloria maintained he’s not seeking an ing maneuver simply to make things look better, but that the count should be more reflective of what’s happening on the ground. He stressed that the overall homeless figures would not be reduced by the change.
“I’m not trying to relitigate or trying to get a better score on the exam,” Gloria said in an expansive interview on the subject Friday. “That’s not what I’m after, but I do want recognition for the work that’s being done, and recognition of the fact that this is a successful intervention. It’s so positive that the state and federal governments invest in them.”
The safe sleeping sites have had some issues, according to Blake Nelson of The San Diego Union-Tribune. Some residents have raised concerns about food quality and mold that once grew on wooden pallets beneath the tents. Dozens of people at O Lot in Balboa Park got sick earlier this year — three people have died — and the 20th and B site not far away has been evacuated during heavy rains.
Criticism aside, local media have reported people staying at the camps expressing positive experiences. The safe sleeping site concept is gaining attention, with officials from San Jose, Los Angeles, Sacramento and Phoenix recently touring the San Diego camps.
The federal government doesn’t consider legal camping in tents to be “shelter” but, perhaps somewhat ironically, allows the big tent shelters to count. Gloria considers both, and other shelter options, as part of a temporary solution, not a permanent one.
San Diego, which could lose more than 700 temporary shelter beds by January, is considering expanding safe sleeping and parking sites.
“What I’ve discovered is this is a very popular intervention — 86 percent of the folks that are in our safe sleeping sites have never touched our shelter system previously,” Gloria said. “They’ve never come in. This is something they’re willing to engage with. That’s incredible.
“It creates a situation where we know where they are, we can interact with them on a daily basis, we can case manage, we can address underlying causes and we can get them housed, eventually.
“That’s exactly what we do at Golden Hall, what we do down on Imperial Avenue in our sprung tents and various places in the city. It’s the same thing. The environment is different but the outcomes are very similar.”
Gloria acknowledges he has a “bias towards buildings” — both for shelters and for getting people permanently housed. But that’s proved to be a challenge. Each month the number of people becoming homeless outpaces the number exiting homelessness — and that’s been going on for two years.
Gloria said he was “somewhat optimistic” that the federal government will allow these facilities to be counted as shelter. He cited the federal government’s recently revamped policy allowing more homeless veterans to be eligible for housing vouchers as a sign that things can change.
The mayor suggested that counting safe sleeping and parking sites as shelter might at least give the public the sense that the city’s unsheltered population is not on the rise.
Many people view that society needs to do more for homeless people than create tent camps and allow them to sleep in cars. Gloria said he didn’t “believe the taxpayer particularly cares how someone gets from the street to permanent housing that ends their homelessness. They just want to see it happen.”
In the meantime, he said not classifying safe sleeping sites as shelter is significant.
“Something I currently sense is that there’s a fatigue that’s happening with this issue and a greater belief that this is unsolvable. And that just isn’t true,” Gloria said. “And I think that’s in part because we have created these interventions, people see them, they know they exist, but then they see the numbers and it doesn’t suggest that we’re making progress.”
“Is the progress as great as I would like it to be? Of course not. I won’t be happy until everyone is housed.”
