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City Makes Room for Homeless as Freeze Threatens

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Times Staff Writer

Faced with plummeting temperatures, San Diego city officials on Friday declared a housing emergency and began scrambling to make room for hundreds of homeless people they hope to keep off the streets and out of the freezing night air over the weekend.

City officials will open the Balboa Park gymnasium tonight and Sunday at 7 p.m. to accommodate up to 350 homeless people, who will sleep on blankets and army cots donated from local shelters, said Amy Roland, a consultant to the Regional Task Force for the Homeless.

In addition, the shelters will be allowed to exceed their legal capacities and take in additional transients during the anticipated cold snap, said Roland.

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The housing emergency is the first declared by city officials, said Roland, and it has been triggered by the anticipated nose dive in temperature below 35 degrees in the downtown area over the weekend.

Unusually Cold Air

Weather forecasters said the sudden drop in temperatures will be caused by an unusually cold Arctic air mass, which is expected to send thermometers falling to below freezing in the outlying areas of San Diego County during the weekend.

The prospect of unseasonably cold weather caught city officials by surprise, and the Office of Emergency Management Friday afternoon was scrambling to follow through on a newly adopted municipal policy that calls for temporarily expanding services to the homeless during inclement weather, said Boland.

The office had already determined that the expanded services were needed when the temperature dipped to 40 degrees when it was raining, or 35 degrees when it was dry, she said.

Since the last time the temperature actually dropped to 35 degrees downtown was in 1978, city and task force officials thought there was no hurry to put together a detailed emergency plan.

“Once everyone got the feeling that this wasn’t going to happen very often, it took a lot of the steam out of it,” said Roland.

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Shelters, City Joined

On Friday, however, the network of homeless shelters joined with the city in a race to beat the arrival of the Arctic air.

Tim Lum, a residential intake aide at the new St. Vincent de Paul shelter, said his shelter was making plans to take in 100 more people over the weekend than its 250-person limit.

In addition, Lum said, St. Vincent’s will provide blankets and cots and soup to the homeless people expected to fill the Balboa Park gymnasium. The California Conservation Corps will be in charge of the operation at the gymnasium, said Lum.

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