Back to Streets, Drawing Board : Oceanside: Despite its success, North County’s only shelter for homeless families has shut its doors for lack of money.

North County’s only shelter for homeless families has shut its doors for lack of funding.

A little more than two years after it was founded in Oceanside, the last remaining signs of the Gateway Family Community, which took in families with both a mother and father present, was closed Friday.

The 15 two-bedroom trailers, next to Mission San Luis Rey, have been moved. Pavement and roadways have been scraped away, trees and shrubs uprooted, sewer and water lines ripped from the earth.

“After all that work, to have to remove it is kind of sad,” interim City Manager Jim Turner said.

Offering similar sentiments was Oceanside Housing Director Richard Goodman, who said, “It’s a shame that we had a project that was very successful, and we had to dismantle it.”

The center, originally planned as an interim solution to homelessness by offering short-term shelter, died because no other federal or state grants could be found to keep it alive, Goodman said.

Under the Gateway program, families were provided temporary housing for as long as 60 days.

The entire project cost about $1.5 million, about $1,500 for each of the 1,000 or so men, women and children assisted during its life. Most of that came from in-kind donations from landowners and local charitable groups, Goodman said.

Despite the program’s success, grant applications to the state to keep it alive were turned down.

Goodman said that, after start-up costs, much of which were covered by donations, about $15,000 a month was needed to keep the shelter going, including the trailer rentals and a maintenance staff.

Goodman said he had no idea why state or federal money was lacking for continuing the project.

But, as to its success, nobody seems in doubt.

Since opening in May, 1990, the shelter has helped about 150 homeless families, with everything from rent-free housing to food to counseling and job referrals, officials say.

Of those, only about a dozen have left without someplace they could call home, said Marva Bledsoe-Chriss of the Women’s Resource Center. Her nonprofit organization was in charge of running the center.

Running the center brought “a very painful awareness of the lack of affordable housing in North County,” she said.

Many cases involved families in which both the mother and father worked “at the maximum skill level they could, both getting minimum wage, and they couldn’t find a place to live.”

Gateway center workers helped not only with finding work, she said, but as intermediaries with landlords, persuading them to allow the families to move in even though the families couldn’t afford to pay the usual deposits.

Even with Gateway shut, Oceanside officials say they haven’t given up.

A 24-unit apartment project on Apple Street is planned to house homeless families for up to two years at a time, much longer than what Gateway provided.

Residents will be helped with job counseling, child care and other needs, with the goal of helping them become totally self-sufficient, Bledsoe-Chriss said. City officials hope to open the facility within a year.

The trouble, they say, is that, under federal guidelines, the Apple Street shelter--at a converted racquetball court--is limited to people who have spent time at a homeless shelter.

Shelter supporters say that presents a Catch-22 because Gateway offered the only North County shelter for families.