Controversy Dogs Plans for Shelter Near Barrio Logan : Housing: Proposal to build a $4-million facility for the homeless upsets residents, who discover project was OKd almost 2 years ago.

Father Joe Carroll, San Diego’s best-known advocate for the homeless, said the complaint he heard from a group of Barrio Logan residents was a familiar one.

Barrio residents, concerned about an influx of transients in their poor community, complained that droves of homeless persons walking the streets were a spillover from the large number of shelters built in and near their neighborhood.

The St. Vincent de Paul Center, which is run by Carroll at 16th Street and Imperial Avenue, already provides overnight shelter for 500 homeless people. And now, Carroll wants to build another $4-million, 350-bed, 54,000-square-foot, three-story shelter across the street from St. Vincent de Paul, at 15th and Commercial streets.

According to the latest figures from the city Planning Department, almost half of the 182 residential-care facilities in the city, for the homeless and drug offenders among others, are in Barrio Logan and Southeast San Diego. Fourteen of those are within a mile of the St. Vincent de Paul Center.

Concerned Citizens for Safe Neighborhoods, a group formed to fight what local residents call the “dumping” of homeless facilities in Barrio Logan by the city, pleaded with Carroll to reconsider plans for the new facility.

“Many of our residents are low-income, Catholic Hispanics who are struggling to live a normal life among the hundreds of homeless bestowed upon them by the city.” The group “is requesting that you not add more beds for the homeless in our area. . . . Father, we were neighborly when you opened your first shelter in our area. Please support our cause now,” said a letter written earlier this month by the citizens’ group to Carroll.

Although Carroll said he sympathizes with the group’s concerns and offered to “work with them to solve these problems,” he also said city zoning laws leave him and other social service organizations little choice about where to build homeless shelters.

“It’s a fact of life in large cities that homeless people are drawn to the downtown areas. In San Diego, zoning laws limit us to where we can build shelters. We have to live with these limitations, and our neighbors have to live with them too,” Carroll said.

Besides, he added matter-of-factly, his shelters border Barrio Logan but are not in the community.

“All of a sudden they’re complaining about something that’s not in their neighborhood. . . . Look, I didn’t vote to put Tijuana in my back yard. But it’s there, and I don’t have a choice,” the 50-year-old priest said.

Carroll, a self-described “wheeler-deal er” and “Reagan Republican,” has raised close to $30 million in private contributions since 1982 for St. Vincent de Paul’s homeless facilities.

In a contentious meeting earlier this month in Carroll’s office, the Barrio Logan group accused the priest of being insensitive to their poverty-stricken community and vowed to fight him.

“He was very arrogant. He talked down to us and basically said, ‘If you don’t like it, too bad.’ He said it was a done deal,” said Alfredo Hueso, a member of the citizens’ group.

Leaders of the group, joined by Councilman Bob Filner’s office, hoped to persuade the Planning Commission not to give Carroll a permit for the new shelter. Or, if that failed, block the shelter through City Council action.

In a recent interview, Carroll acknowledged that he told the Barrio Logan residents that “they were a day late and a dollar short” if they wanted to stop the shelter.

What he did not tell them, and what the group and Filner’s office did not know, was that the Planning Commission had already approved a conditional-use permit for the shelter in 1990.

Although the permit was issued almost two years ago, construction on the shelter has not started, and Carroll said he was uncertain about a construction timetable. He has until August, 1993, to start building the facility.

Since there was no opposition to the facility three years ago, the City Council was never required to review the commission’s decision to issue the permit.

Opponents of the new shelter, including Filner’s office, did not know that Carroll had already been issued a permit until they were told by a reporter.

The news that they were powerless to stop the new shelter was a frustrating but familiar twist for Barrio Logan residents. The citizens group also failed last year to stop the 130-bed Rachel Grosvenor Family Center for homeless women at 16th Street and National Avenue.

The Grosvenor center was approved by the San Diego City Council, which overruled a decision by the Planning Commission not to issue a permit for the facility. The shelter, which is under construction by the San Diego Rescue Mission, is located less than two blocks from the St. Vincent de Paul center and the new facility planned by Carroll.

“We don’t count in Barrio Logan. We vote, but the politicians don’t care what we say or what we think. They do whatever they want in our community. It’s like we’re invisible,” said a barrio resident who did not want to be identified because she is a city employee.

For barrio residents, the disclosure that a permit for the new facility was issued three years ago also served as an example of how far they still have to go in order to influence decisions made at City Hall.

“It’s kind of disheartening. We would have to work 24 hours a day just to keep up with the city, Father Carroll and the rest of these poverty agencies trying to dump all these shelters here,” said Al Ducheny, a Barrio Logan activist. “It’s tough enough keeping track of them and what they do.”

“Stopping them is even harder. It seems like they’ve got everybody on their side. The wealthy benefactors give them money so they can keep the shelters in Barrio Logan and out of their back yards.”

Hueso, a lifelong Barrio Logan resident whose family owns USA Cab Co., echoed Ducheny’s complaints.

“We’re not opposed to the shelter. God knows that the homeless need help. But we oppose Father Carroll and anybody who continues to dump these additional burdens on a community that is already overburdened. . . . Many in our community are on the verge of homelessness themselves. But, just because they’re poor doesn’t mean you should force on them a situation that’s going to push them deeper into poverty,” Hueso said.

“This community needs jobs. But how are you going to attract businesses to this economically depressed area if you have homeless people standing on the streets, going through trash cans and wandering into private yards,” Hueso added.

Carroll said he knows that many Barrio Logan residents are poverty-stricken.

“You don’t think I know that? Come by the St. Vincent de Paul Center some time and see how many people who live in Barrio Logan we feed. I know they’re not homeless, but they need help. And how can I turn them away if they need our help?” Carroll said.

Besides, the community did not oppose the new shelter three years ago. Why are they so opposed to it today, he asked.

“It was a different situation then,” Hueso said. “Three years ago there weren’t large numbers of homeless walking around our community. But, since then, the city has been dumping all these shelters in our community. When is it going to stop?

“Father Carroll is very arrogant and self-righteous. His mission in life is to provide shelter for the homeless. But what he fails to understand is that there are people in Barrio Logan who are on the fringe of being homeless themselves. Some of these people, including me, donate to his shelter. But he doesn’t care what we think,” Hueso said.

Carroll was unapologetic about his efforts on behalf of the city’s homeless.

“Sometimes you may speak for the future,” said Carroll, referring to the community’s concerns about the large number of facilities in Barrio Logan. “But you’re a little late for the present.

“Homeless shelters require conditional-use permits that are reviewed periodically. Homeless people have no right of being like the rest of us. They don’t enjoy the right to go wherever they want to go, like the rest of us. . . . I sympathize with the people from Barrio Logan, but their opposition has become more emotional than thought out,” Carroll said.

“Look, Barrio Logan has bigger problems with drive-by shootings and drugs than they do with the homeless,” he added.

It would appear that a city ordinance requiring a quarter-mile separation between shelters and residential-care facilities could be used to block Carroll’s new shelter. Although it is in the books as an ordinance, the city attorney ruled last year that the law is only a “guideline.”

Opponents of the Grosvenor center tried to use the ordinance as a tool to stop the shelter from opening. However, Planning Commission officials said they were advised that the ordinance is not mandatory.

“It’s just a guideline for the commission to determine whether a neighborhood is getting an over-concentration of these facilities or not,” Corey Braun, a Planning Department staff member, said last November.

In the case of Carroll’s new shelter, the quarter-mile ordinance is probably a moot point, said Francisco Estrada, a Filner aide.