Homeless in San Diego : New Shelter May Not Be a Home, but to Many It’s the Next Best Thing

Spacious, clean and as tightly run as a philanthropic boot camp, the San Diego Life Ministries homeless shelter and church is packed to capacity nearly every night.

After eight months in its new building at J Street and 11th Avenue, the mission continues its 31-year tradition of serving the city’s least fortunate with food, beds and religious counseling.

Formerly called the San Diego Rescue Mission when it was located in a decrepit 17,000-square-foot building on 5th Avenue, the mission was nudged eastward by downtown redevelopment and now offers three times more space and more than twice as many beds.

“The new facility is 100 times better than the old facility; you can’t even compare them,” said Neil Good, administrative assistant to San Diego County Supervisor Leon Williams. Williams heads the Regional Task Force on the Homeless, a group of 14 city, county and United Way officials who have worked to help the homeless since April, 1985.

Frank Landerville, task force project director, said, “I think it’s remarkable what they have achieved in such a short amount of time. There’s nothing else like it in the community. You can hit rock bottom and you always have a place to stay at the mission. Except for the parks or abandoned cars, there is very simply nowhere else for these people to go.”

“For 30 years, the mission has quietly been surviving on $25 contributions,” Landerville said. “I personally think the Rescue Mission has done a fine job in the last 30 years of taking care of the people no one else wants to take care of.”

The mission now stands out as a model facility. It features 200 beds, a recreation room with pool table and television, nutritionally balanced free dinners for more than 300, washing machines, showers and secure lockers.

The medical clinic, open three times a week, has treated more than 1,000 transients in the last six months. Jim Flohr, director of Life Ministries, is even working on getting a rowing machine and stationary bicycle for the exercise room. People who come in from the streets are called “guests.”

All services come with a Christian message, and dinners are preceded by a required church service. Sixty former transients live, worship and work at Life Ministries as clerks, ushers and maintenance workers for six months to a year while they look for permanent jobs. “Our main goal is motivation,” Flohr said. “We urge them to help themselves; that’s why we don’t run a flophouse.”

Although thankful for the meals and shelter, many transients view the religious emphasis and strict rules as oppressive. At the nightly service, only program members can sit in the back row and food may only be eaten in the dining room. All sleepers must shower and wear nightwear, and people may sleep at Life Ministries a maximum of five nights every 30 days, although extensions are occasionally granted. Women are not permitted in the live-in program because they are “a distraction that just doesn’t enhance spiritual growth,” Chaplain John Anderson said.

“A lot of them (transients) don’t choose to come in,” said Anderson, who monitors the service and dinner six nights a week. “They don’t like people saying, ‘You have to go to bed now,’ ‘You have to do this,’ ‘You can’t smoke here.’ But it’s a Christian operation.”

“When you handle as many people as we’re handling you need rules, but we have the least amount of rules that we can have,” Flohr said. “Many of them (transients) have grown up under their own rules or have been away from them for quite some time. You have to have some rules, just as you do for a family, to prevent chaos.”

Life Ministries is among a number of organizations providing meals and shelter. God’s Extended Hand, the Salvation Army, the St. Vincent de Paul Center, City of Angels, the Senior Community Center and the Catholic Worker dining room are some of the leading providers of immediate needs downtown, and numerous agencies provide mental health care and job assistance. Among them the downtown organizations provide daily perhaps 1,500 meals and 600 beds a night. In the 1987 city budget, $676,000 is set aside for homeless referral service, after-hours emergency food and shelter, portable public restrooms and assistance to the church relief programs.

Flohr said San Diego deserves its national reputation of progressive care for the homeless.

“Today there’s more people with a heart for the homeless than I have ever seen,” Flohr said. “It used to be so many cities used to hide that problem, but today they are beginning to realize--and thank God San Diego has realized this--that there’s a segment of society that they need to pay attention to and take care of.”

But that commitment has yet to translate into corporate and individual contributions for the $130,000 center sought by the task force to house the homeless during the day, and Life Ministries has about $500,000 still to pay on the new building.

Meanwhile, the problem of the homeless appears as widespread as ever. “Has the situation for the homeless changed since a year ago?” Landerville asked. “The change is negligible.”