North County’s Affluence Masks Homeless Problem

North County’s upscale, suburbanite image belies an escalating homeless problem overshadowing that of the rest of San Diego County. What’s more, the community has dragged its feet in addressing the situation.

All of that is according to social service providers and the latest U.S. Census figures.

The rural nature of the homeless in North County, the fact that the area is split among a variety of county and local jurisdictions, the invisibility of the canyon-dwelling farm worker and bias against a largely Latino migrant population all contribute to preventing the area from taking responsibility for a growing problem, officials say.

North County, despite its suburban family image, has more people out in the cold than the rest of the county, according to the latest census figures, but only a 12th of the number of emergency shelters for the homeless.

The figures point to what has been widely known among those trying to help the homeless--that although urban homelessness may be a smaller problem in suburbia than downtown San Diego, the rural homeless of North County are a larger problem that has been all but ignored.

The lack of shelters in North County led the Census Bureau to count 1,389 people without shelter in Encinitas and only seven people in emergency shelters. In Oceanside, 792 people were spotted outside by census takers, while only 46 were found in homeless shelters. In Carlsbad, 936 people were seen on the streets and in the canyons, while only five people found a bed in a homeless shelter.

The only cities in the county where more homeless people were found inside a shelter than out in the cold were San Diego and Escondido.

But some cities are taking steps to address the problem.

Earlier this month, the Escondido City Council gave its approval to opening the National Guard Armory in the city as the county’s first continuously operating inclement weather shelter, which will be open every night this winter.

Also this month, the Carlsbad Planning Commission gave preliminary approval to Catholic Charities and Caring Residents of Carlsbad to establish a 50-bed emergency shelter for men that would target migrant workers. An appeal of that decision by landowners neighboring the site, which is in an industrial area near Palomar Airport Road and El Camino Real, will be heard by the City Council in January.

“I don’t think people in Carlsbad realized how bad it was. We just didn’t put it together before then,” said Kathy Wellman, president of Caring Residents of Carlsbad, the main supporters of Carlsbad’s proposed emergency shelter.

Wellman said it wasn’t until recently that North County coastal cities put together the ingredients needed to establish a homeless shelter.

“You need a partnership of local residents who want to see this happen, you need an experienced provider of services, and you need the approval of the local government,” Wellman said.

Encinitas and Solana Beach, for example, did not become cities until 1986, and local homeless advocates say the county never paid much attention to the homeless problems in the area. The new city councils have been more responsive, they say.

But community support for homeless shelters in some coastal cities has yet to materialize.

“There is a lot more sympathy for people who are victims of, say, domestic violence . . . than there is (for) an able-bodied man who is a victim of the economy or of political borders,” said Sara Rosenfield, executive director of the Community Resource Center based in Encinitas, which has no homeless shelters.

Rosenfield’s organization recently received a $1.1-million grant to open and run a shelter to house about 25 battered women and homeless women with children in crisis. The shelter is planned to open sometime in the summer.

“There is just not the political will to address the issue as a whole,” said Roberto Martinez, director of the San Diego chapter of the American Friends Service Committee.

Martinez pointed to San Marcos’ recent approval of a 38-unit housing project for agricultural worker families as an example of the slow but steady progress in getting cities to address the problem of migrant worker homeless.

“The resistance is from the residents more now than the city officials. To them, homelessness breeds crime, and (that idea) is exacerbated when the homeless are migrant workers. It’s a combination of things with the agricultural workers as opposed to the rest of the homeless; there is more xenophobia and racism involved,” Martinez said.

Paul Malone, deputy city manager of San Marcos, agrees that some cities in North County both avoid using their redevelopment funds for unpopular programs such as emergency shelters and dealing with their homeless.

“The money is there, and the responsibility to spend the money is there,” Malone said, referring to redevelopment funds collected by most cities, 20% of which must be spent on economic revitalization and assistance to low- and moderate-income housing.

But “some decisions are easier than others, and that’s a reality,” Malone said.

The $4.25-million San Marcos housing project, to be funded by federal, state and local monies, is expected to open within the next two years, Malone said.

Although North County has its share of urban homeless, the often faceless bodies huddled on the sidewalk against downtown buildings, the bulk of the homeless are migrant farm workers who live in makeshift tents and hovels in hillsides and canyons.

“We don’t see where they live. We can see people in the urban areas, and we may see these people on the streets as we drive to work if we happen to drive by a field, but we don’t see where they live,” said Molly Roth of the North County Interfaith Council.

That invisibility allows the community to ignore the problem, Roth said.

And there are many who do not regard the thousands of illegal migrants who work in the farms and canyons as part of the homeless population, but rather as voluntary, transitory migrants who gave up homes in other countries.

“A lot of people just have a gut feeling that the migrant workers are here for economic reasons, they choose to come up here and live the way they live and work here and send the money back home, and because they choose to do that, they should not receive the attention that others get,” said Dick Goodman, Oceanside’s housing director.

Goodman estimates that, during peak seasons, there are as many migrant homeless people in Oceanside as there are in the city of San Diego.

But the funding that comes from federal grants does not recognize Southern California’s migrant workers as homeless, said Karen Potts, a program manager with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

And, when a large city such as San Diego says it needs more money for housing the homeless, it is more likely to be heard than any city in North County dealing with a homeless problem, Goodman said.

“It’s always harder for the smaller cities to compete with the bigger cities for almost everything. Politically they have more clout, and they almost always have a much larger statistical basis with which to compete, and they get much more attention with their state legislators,” Goodman said.

The only federal program used to fund emergency shelters in cities is based on factors such as population, poverty and the age of the housing stock but not the number of homeless in the area, Potts said. Thus, San Diego received $258,000 this year and the county got $119,000, but other cities in the county received nothing.

Goodman said it would make sense for the cities of North County to band together to create a homeless shelter, but no such effort is in the works.

“It makes sense to do a regional approach on this. We would love to cooperate, as long as the housing ends up in someone else’s city. Somebody will have to bite the bullet and accept the housing in their city,” Goodman said.

Finding a site for a homeless shelter is “90% of the battle,” Goodman said.

“Finding a site in downtown San Diego is much easier. There’s not that much of a residential area downtown, and people there are just exposed to the homeless problem every single day,” Goodman said.

And, when a city such as Oceanside applies for state funding for housing migrant workers, plans more often than not get bogged down in bureaucratic red tape.

“When you go for state funding, it’s tailored for a migrant farm worker camp in the northern part of the state, and that’s not the same situation here,” Goodman said.

Unlike the fields of Northern and Central California, where workers are transient, in North County migrants tend to be here year-round, Goodman said.

Also, with the fast-paced growth in North County, housing developments and rows of Spanish-tile roofs continually are sprouting where strawberries once grew, compounding the difficulty of finding adequate farm-worker housing.

“Growers in North County are not willing to make long-term commitments to farm worker housing because they know that their property is not going to be farms in the long term,” Goodman said.

But a lack of money isn’t the only problem. Although it is easier for a large organization such as St. Vincent de Paul, with a proven track record, to win grants, money isn’t everything.

“Part of the picture needs to include the response of local officials and their own willingness to acknowledge that homeless populations live in their areas to a significant level,” said Frank Landerville, chairman of the Regional Task Force on the Homeless in San Diego.

“You can’t drive by a feeding line in San Diego and see 700 people and not have that image affect you. Those images are not available in such large numbers in other parts of the county,” Landerville said.

1990 U.S. Census of the Homeless

Homeless Population City In Emergency Shelters On the Street Carlsbad 5 936 Chula Vista 0 14 Coronado 0 0 Del Mar 0 0 El Cajon 13 76 Encinitas 7 1,389 Escondido 134 19 Imperial Beach 0 7 La Mesa 0 0 Lemon Grove 0 0 National City 0 10 Oceanside 46 792 Poway 2 45 San Diego 2,846 2,101 San Marcos 0 20 Santee 0 5 Solana Beach 0 0 Vista 35 260 Unincorporated North County 0 913 Other Unincorporated 7 10 North County 229 4,374 Rest of the County 2,866 2,223

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Where Are the Homeless Shelters? North County Inland: 166 North County Coastal: 180 East County: 122 South Bay: 26 Central Region: 1,435 Source: Regional Task Force on the Homeless