Commentary: Put the homeless shelter downtown, and do it quickly

To look at the official record, you’d have thought Mayor Jerry Sanders’ latest call for suitable homeless shelter locales had gone in one ear, slipped on the wax and exited butt-first down the same canal.

Not a single one of the eight City Council members had offered the mayor a potential site in their districts by the end of business on Monday, Sept. 21, Sanders’ original deadline.

Since then, seven of ’em, including downtown representative Kevin Faulconer, managed a reply to the mayor, which is at least something — still, the councilmembers had no suggestions for an appropriate permanent location, and that’s a dismaying state of affairs indeed.

It’s dismaying because council has been grappling with this question for a decade and then some.

Back in the ’90s, when Susan Golding was mayor, San Diego County’s homeless numbered about 5,000, and Golding was instrumental in establishing a shelter at that time. But just as she allegedly didn’t mention homelessness in her 2000 State of the City speech, the issue has been punted between the mayor’s office and council chambers since then, with no clear outcome.

Meanwhile, according to the Regional Task Force on the Homeless San Diego, the county’s homeless population has doubled — this amid council’s latest round of inaction.

In opposing a temporary shelter downtown this year, Faulconer reportedly wrote in his reply that “I look forward to offering lasting services that will benefit the homeless population, as well as our neighbors and business owners downtown.”

That’s fine and dandy for the intermediate and long term — but winter and its attendant rains will be here in about 15 minutes, and that leaves precious little time to approve a site, forge a plan, find the money and get 10,000 people (or a portion thereof) settled in. But since downtown serves as a regional city center, it seems the most expedient locale in which to address this immediate, very regional issue (remember, the current 10,000 homeless exist throughout the county, not just in San Diego’s core).

Faulconer noted that downtown has a “disproportionate” number of services of which the homeless can take advantage — but disproportionate or not, those services are already there and can serve in part to alleviate homelessness.

There’s an insidious benefit to a downtown shelter as well: The vast concentration of city-center businesses will grow as the recession heads out and fullscale development resumes, and the able-bodied homeless would thus have a tailormade infrastructure at their doorstep through which they could extricate themselves from their plight.

Sanders’s office has proposed several sites in each district, picking up where the reluctant councilmembers left off — but the shelter’s importance to the community, of course, trumps any decision on its locale.

Just ask Dr. Jim Dunford, city medical director and UCSD emergency physician, who in 2006 reportedly told The New Yorker magazine all about the people such a shelter often serves: “ . . . [I]t’s the guy who falls down and hits his head who ends up costing you at least $50,000. Meanwhile, they are going through alcoholic withdrawal and have devastating liver disease that only adds to their inability to fight infections. There is no end to the issues. We do this huge drill. We run up big lab fees, and the nurses want to quit because they see the same guys come in over and over, and all we’re doing is making them capable of walking down the block.”

Unless, of course, the shelter’s placed downtown. The center city’s glut of services will give the shelter’s patrons a fighting chance at mainstream life, at least theoretically. And in any event, by the time you read this, that 15-minute window between now and the day the rains set in has just dwindled to 12.

Martin Jones Westlin is the editor of San Diego Downtown News, a sister publication to the Village News, an SDNN media partner. This commentary originally appeared in the La Jolla Village News.

Tags: Dr. Jim Dunford, kevin faulconer, Regional Task Force on the Homeless San Diego, San Diego City Council, San Diego homeless shelter, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, San Diego winter homeless shelter, SDNN, Susan Golding

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