That Street Does Not Seem to Exist

SAN DIEGO —

Information technology'southward hard to miss.

Along city sidewalks in downtown San Diego, in forepart of malls in Oceanside, sprawled across open areas near South Bay thruway on-ramps, homeless encampments have become a more than frequent sight throughout San Diego Canton in recent months.

Why there are more, or even if the large encampments mean the homeless population itself has increased, is unclear.

The numbers of people on the street could be greater because fewer people have been arrested and jailed for minor offenses during the pandemic. Or maybe people from other states are moving to San Diego after hearing about shelters and services here.

Tents and property of people living on the street tin can be seen on Commercial Street in downtown San Diego on May 13, 2021.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Some outreach workers also doubtable many people in encampments are turning down offers for shelter considering they are in the grips of addiction to fentanyl and other opioids, and they would rather be on the street at night.

It also might be possible that the population only appears to accept grown because people have moved closer together. Another theory is that some homeless people who have hunkered down for months in the same spot during the pandemic have nerveless more than possessions, creating the appearance of a large encampment.

The California Department of Transportation this past year has been following a recommendation past the Centers for Illness Control and Prevention to non articulate homeless encampments during the pandemic because people in them may be safer if they stay in one place.

While the city of San Diego's municipal code prohibits tents on sidewalks, it has non always aggressively enforced the law in all areas. Mayor Todd Gloria this year revised the city's arroyo to cleaning sidewalks in an endeavour to exist more compassionate to homeless people, scheduling the cleaning on set up days and so people have advance notice to move their tents.

Dissimilar past years, there's no information to show how many people are living on the street this year because an almanac homeless count ordinarily taken in January was cancelled because of the pandemic. The most recent numbers from January 2022 plant 3,971 people living outdoors and iii,667 people in shelters throughout the canton on the night of the count.

The limited data that does be comes from the Downtown San Diego Partnership, which conducts a count of homeless people in the East Village, Gaslamp Quarter and other surrounding areas each month. Their April count found 873 people on the street, including 221 people who were in an area that was included for the kickoff fourth dimension.

Despite the appearance of more tents and makeshift structures on many streets, yet, the monthly count has not shown a dramatic increase in people on the street. The April count in fact was lower than some months in 2019.

Alpha Projection President and CEO Bob McElroy said he believes his own eyes.

"There'south definitely more than people," he said.

Sheryl Lee, 60, breaks down in tears while her friend hugs her in downtown on May 13, 2021. Lee said she was previously living in an Alpha Project shelter and hoped to be back in a few days. Lee said that she has noticed more tents going up on Commercial Street in the calendar month that she has been staying in that location.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Equally the number of tents lined upwardly side by side on downtown sidewalks has grown, McElroy said he is concerned that in that location could be another hepatitis A outbreak like one in 2022 the killed 40 people and hospitalized about 600, including many homeless people.

"The kids who accept to go to school, they have to walk in the street because the sidewalks are lined with tents," he said. "I think that's unacceptable."

Among other services, the Alpha Project operates two downtown tented bridge shelters and sends outreach workers on daily rounds from Rancho Bernardo to Otay Mesa. When talking with new arrivals at the shelter, McElroy said he is finding more people who take merely arrived from Los Angeles or out of country, and he suspects San Diego is becoming a draw.

"There's a reason why they're coming here," he said. "People are coming out in Greyhound buses. I have not seen this many new people."

Blastoff Projection outreach worker Craig Thomas said he frequently gets calls from people in other states asking about shelters and other services in San Diego, and officers from the Harbor Constabulary contact him four or five times a week well-nigh homeless people who are at the airport because they've recently arrived.

"We offer so much more other states," he said about why he thinks people are coming.

"I dearest helping people out," he said. "It doesn't carp me that they're coming here. I just wish we had more resources for them."

As he drives his van downward Imperial Avenue and Commercial Street near Petco Park, Thomas passes tents and tarps that stretch entire blocks.

But blocks away, an official at another homeless service provider, Male parent Joe'due south Villages, had another perspective.

A client from Alpha Projection picks up trash about Tete who is preparing to grill carne asada, sausages and corn on the cob in downtown San Diego on May 13, 2021.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The San Diego Matrimony-Tribune)

"Yous're seeing more tents, and I think that makes it wait like at that place's more homeless people, only I don't really retrieve that's the case," said Paul Sheck, program manager of the Neil Goodbye Center. "I could exist incorrect."

Sheck said a few things take contributed to the appearance of a surge in people on the street, including people being pushed out of some areas because of new development, causing people to cluster together. He said he also has noticed people from a church coming downtown each weekend to distribute large tents that accept upward more infinite on sidewalks, also contributing to the perception that there are more people.

Sheck said Father Joe's Villages has not seen an increment in the 200 to 300 new clients it receives each calendar month, supporting his conventionalities that the population on the street hasn't increased. He has, all the same, seen an increase in people who place themselves as newly homeless, but Sheck said those are non typically the people who live in tents on the street.

A study released this yr by the Regional Task Force on the Homeless constitute the number of newly homeless people jumped from 2,326 in 2022 to 4,152 in 2020.

Tamera Kohler, CEO of the job force, besides said she has seen more tents and encampments, just isn't certain the population of people has increased.

"We're seeing tents in more places," she said. "Then the claiming becomes, does that mean we have more people, or more places where people are putting downwardly tents?"

As an example, Kohler said the California Department of Transportation has left many highly visible homeless encampments virtually freeways in identify during the pandemic, which may have contributed to the perspective of more people on the street.

In some other contributing factor, Kohler said as people remained in identify, their encampments grew over time.

"Any fourth dimension you take a little more permanency, you lot tend to spread out," she said.

Greg Anglea, executive director of Interfaith Community Services in Escondido, said he believes the number of people on the street has increased over the by two years, and COVID-19 contributed considering some people lost their homes.

Anglea also suspects that the number of people on the street may be higher considering incarcerations for minor offenses had been halted during the pandemic to prevent the coronavirus from spreading in jails. That could mean more than i,000 homeless people who would accept been in jail on any twenty-four hours now are on the street.

The Regional Task Force on the Homeless' 2022 count constitute 25 percent of people surveyed in jail said they were homeless when arrested. Extrapolated to stand for the entire jail population, about 1,300 people in jail may have been homeless,

If the jail policy did affect how many people are on the street, the number could exist changing soon. San Diego County Sheriff's Department media relations director Lt. Amber Baggs said that as of April, people arrested solely for being nether the influence of a controlled substance once again volition be jailed. The Sheriff's Section had stopped jailing people for the offense, common amongst the homeless population, in March 2020.

Homeless abet Michael McConnell said he believes at that place are more people on the street, and he has some other theory for the increase.

McConnell said city and county officials focused more on putting people in a temporary shelter in the Convention Center than putting them in permanent housing. He pointed to information from the Regional Chore Force on the Homeless that showed 2,815 homeless people received permanent housing in 2020, downward from three,978 in 2022 and 4,764 in 2018.

Craig Thomas and Ionia Honeycutt, outreach specialists of Alpha Project, walk through an encampment off K and 17th Street, next to the I-5 superhighway off-ramp in downtown San Diego on May thirteen, 2021.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The San Diego Matrimony-Tribune)

San Diego native Cheryl Lee has had a starting time-paw view of the growing encampments downtown. She has been staying on National Avenue for the past month, and said she has seen the number of temporary shelters around her abound from a few to most twenty.

"They're getting run out of other places," she said. "They'll brand usa motion over again, but where are we going to become?"

Lee, who accepted an offer from Thomas to move into one of Blastoff Projection's shelters, said people around her said they came to National Avenue considering they were run out of other places. She also has met people who recently arrived from other states.

"They said they heard almost California and wanted to come because information technology's beautiful," she said.

Thomas said merely one or two people in encampments will accept an offer for a shelter bed each week. He estimates most 75 percentage of people he encounters in encampments are using some sort of substance, and many decline the offering because they don't want to abide by the eight p.m. curfew.

Alpha Project supervisor Karen Pucci said the evening hours oftentimes are when people on the street do drugs. Information technology besides is when many overdose, which has been happening more than in the by twelvemonth.

"Every time we turn a corner, someone is OD-ing," she said.

She and her girl/coworker, Brie, and others at the Alpha Project are trained to utilize the nasal mist Naloxone — also known equally Narcan or Evzio — on people who are overdosing. Pucci said they have used it 25 times on people on the street and x or 15 times on clients who were at the Convention Center shelter.

Pucci said heroin and fentanyl ofttimes are the crusade of overdoses. Information from the county Medical Examiner's office shows the number of deaths from fentanyl significantly increased in the past year.

The data showed drugs were a factor in most 190 deaths of homeless people concluding year. Of those, more than fourscore involved fentanyl. In 2019, fentanyl was involved in fewer than xx deaths.

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Source: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/homelessness/story/2021-05-15/homeless-on-the-street-appear-growing-in-numbers