Barrio Shelter Should Transcend Politics : Support: Any objections lose their punch when the plight of homeless women and children is considered.
This coming Tuesday, the San Diego City Council can help reduce the number of homeless on our streets.
The opportunity rests in its approval of a conditional-use permit for the 100% privately funded, 97-bed Rachel Grosvenor Family Center for Women and Children.
The Family Center, at 16th Street and National Avenue, is a project of the San Diego Rescue Mission, an organization involved in the care of this city’s homeless for the past 36 years. The center’s entire program will be dedicated to helping battered, abused, handicapped and economically deprived women regain personal health and dignity, gain a faith, become educated, learn job skills and return to a productive life with a realistic capability to care for themselves and their children.
And while they get back on their feet, their children will be able to stay with them and receive schooling at the center. All of these activities will take place within the home-like setting of the Family Center.
The center has significant support in the community. The most important support comes from the Barrio Logan Project Area Committee, the duly elected community group charged with the development and administration of the Barrio redevelopment plan--a plan approved by the city Planning Commission and City Council. The committee gave its approval after two public hearings.
In addition, several adjacent Barrio businesses and residents support the Family Center because they believe it will reduce crime in the area and restore and preserve a rapidly deteriorating property.
But the Planning Commission chose to listen to opponents, whose reasons are far removed from concern for the homeless.
When you hear the allegations and see these “leaders” in action, you have to wonder if there isn’t a second agenda, if someone isn’t hoping to gain, possibly, a political advantage from organizing opposition based on falsehood and fear.
The opponents’ charges have included the long-voiced one of “dumping”--the idea that all the bad social service programs get placed in their community by city government.
One quoted that some 44% of social service agencies are in Barrio Logan and Southeast San Diego. Without being facetious, if that is all, I would complain.
What are these agencies for? Who are they designed most to help? Who best can benefit from their proximity and the services rendered? These services are, for the most part, intended to help low-income people, and, to work most effectively, they should be located in their communities.
We often hear the flip suggestion that such agencies should be built in Point Loma and La Jolla. Why? Why take these mostly government-underwritten services, which include health clinics and services for the elderly and youth, and give them free to people who can well afford to pay for them?
Furthermore, only one community is at issue here: Barrio Logan. And only eight recognized agencies operate in the Barrio, according to the 1991 United Way directory and records of the county departments of aging, health services and social services. None provide shelter for the homeless. To include Southeast San Diego, a much larger community, which goes out past 65th Street, is unfair.
In Barrio Logan today, there are homeless women and children. And some of them will find help in our program. We will be helping residents of the very community that opponents say will be harmed by our presence.
Another argument is that there is a residential-care facility within a quarter of a mile of our site, and opponents claim that city regulations prohibit that.
It’s true that a work furlough program is within a quarter of a mile, but that does not rule out granting us a permit. The quarter-mile “rule” is not mandatory. It is simply a guideline to be considered along with the merits of the project, according to the city attorney.
Opponents also point to the nearby St. Vincent de Paul homeless shelters. But those are very different programs and they affect the community in very different ways. They provide mostly short-term emergency shelter, with considerable turnover. At the Rachel Grosvenor center, women will live, work and go to school for about 12 months at a time.
The most fallacious argument has been that the site is dangerous, because one of the buildings was once used as a toxic treatment facility. That is untrue. Pacific Treatment had its offices on the property and their trucks on adjacent land, but there was never any processing or storage of toxic materials. And extensive tests have shown there to be no hazardous waste on either property.
The Rescue Mission chose this site for good reasons: The buildings are sound and can be converted relatively easily into first-class accommodations, saving money and, we thought, time.
The vast majority of San Diego’s homeless are on the streets each night. And there are only 277 beds in the entire county for homeless women and children. The city is not obligated for one cent of the Family Center cost; the land was purchased, in large part, through a $1-million grant from Judson and Rachel Grosvenor. Other funds came from foundations, individuals and businesses.
It is our hope that the City Council will see the immense good of this project, direct its attention solely to the issuance of a permit and not try to set or reset planning policy with this project.
The Rachel Grosvenor Family Center for Women and Children should be above politics, above the “not in my neighborhood but yours” mentality. It represents a clear-cut choice for each member of the council to step forward for something that is so very good, that is absolutely necessary.
When so many lives, so many children’s lives, are the prize, this is one time politics should be set aside for the common good.
