Ramona Debates Opening Door to Homeless Shelter

Francisco, Guadalupe and the others quietly finish eating the donated salads and bread, fold up the battered tables and begin to settle in on lumpy cots and couches crowded into three rooms. It is another night in the Ramona homeless shelter.

It’s peaceful inside, but outside, many residents of this rural community of 30,000 are arguing over where to house the homeless, and whether homeless illegal immigrants should even be helped at all.

Some say St. Vincent de Paul Village, a Roman Catholic charity that runs a downtown San Diego shelter, will make Ramona’s homeless situation worse if it is allowed to move the shelter just down the road, near new, expensive homes.

“What it all boils down to is (St. Vincent) has found some cheap land” and is trying to “steamroller” residents, said George Boggs, chairman of the local advisory body that recommended rejection of the shelter permit.

St. Vincent officials say they became involved only after local activists asked them to run the community’s downtown shelter a year and a half ago. That 60-bed shelter must move from a downtown warehouse next year anyway, and besides, they say, there are more than enough homeless people in the area to expand a new shelter to 100 beds.

“The need is there now. . . . (The homeless are) in La Jolla, they’re in Pacific Beach. It’s just the nature of a community,” said Father Joe Carroll, head of St. Vincent de Paul in San Diego.

The charity group, with the support of local churches, wants to buy a 10-acre complex on California 67 just south of downtown Ramona that used to be a school for troubled girls. Some $400,000 in improvements, funded largely by government grants, would have to be made.

Opponents of the new site, who claim they speak for most Ramona residents, agree that a small downtown shelter may be needed, but they object to the proposed project’s size and location. They say they have collected signatures of 1,800 residents who agree.

“It does not belong in the middle of 4-acre-minimum homes,” said Barbara Myrick, who owns nearby property.

Up to 300 homeless people live in the Ramona area, shelter organizers say. If the outlying agricultural areas are included, it’s more like 750, said Deacon Ray Skupnik, a former member of the Regional Homeless Task Force. Both figures include the large migrant farm-worker population.

Harvey Mandel, in charge of the project for St. Vincent de Paul, says the 17,000-square-foot complex is bigger than necessary but that it was “a steal” at $500,000.

Project opponents say the charity overestimates the need for the shelter and that one that size just doesn’t belong in the neighborhood.

The latest U.S. Census figures indicate that North County has more homeless people than the rest of San Diego County, but only a fraction of the emergency shelters.

At a recent Planning and Environmental Review Board meeting, county planners echoed many neighborhood concerns about the site, asking St. Vincent to show how the new shelter would affect traffic, police, wildlife and water and septic use, and whether it is compatible with the residential light-agricultural neighborhood. The board will weigh the Ramona Planning Group’s vote against the new shelter when it makes its own recommendation on the project.

St. Vincent officials recently submitted some $12,000 worth of studies on those topics. But another planning hearing is expected in a couple of months, and both sides say that whatever the decision, it will probably be appealed to the County Board of Supervisors.

As the proposal wends its way through the county bureaucracy, friction in the community grows.

According to its permit application, the shelter is intended to “serve (primarily) homeless migrant farm workers and their families.”

Many residents don’t consider the migrants, particularly the undocumented ones, truly part of the community.

“I just don’t see the desire of these people to change,” Myrick said. “What I don’t want to see is a handout given to someone who is a perpetual homeless person. . . . I don’t see that we owe them anything. Someone who is here illegally has no rights as far as I’m concerned.”

“We’re not our brother’s keeper to the degree that the good father wants it to be,” Boggs said.

Carol Close, who at a quarter of a mile away would be one of the project’s closest neighbors, said she is embarrassed by what she described as the bigoted attitudes of some of her neighbors.

“I volunteer at the shelter, I know what the people are like,” she said. “When you communicate, you find they’re not that different from you and me.”

But she admitted that the new shelter project at times has divided even her and her husband.

Debate over the project was heated at two meetings of the Ramona Planning Group.

“It got real nasty,” Brenda Foreman said, adding that supporters of the project “act like we’re not Christian” for opposing it.

“I just didn’t realize that people could be so, I guess vindictive is the word,” said Helen Conklin, a Ramona resident since 1929 who supports the proposed shelter.

Organizers say most of those who stay in the existing Ramona shelter are legally working in the United States. At any rate, they are prohibited by federal law from asking about shelter residents’ immigration status, they say.

Keeping undocumented migrants out of the shelter will not make them disappear, Mandel said. “If you don’t want migrant workers here, tell people not to hire them.”

Skupnik, of Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church, where the first shelter opened, said many of the homeless migrants have been coming to work in the Ramona area since before he arrived 14 years ago.

“If you were hungry and in their country, what would you want?” said Skupnik, who serves on the shelter’s advisory board.

Conklin has a simple answer: “People are hungry. It doesn’t make any difference to me” about their immigration status.

“It’s certainly needed in our community,” said Conklin, vice chairwoman of the Food and Clothes Closet, a local nonprofit agency that provides supplies and some of the shelter’s funding.

The shelter opened in the old Immaculate Heart of Mary church building on Dec. 16, 1990. Since then, about 18,000 people have been sheltered--1,700 in June alone, Skupnik said.

The church eventually needed the building again, so the shelter moved from its rent-free location to a $1,400-a-month warehouse on Main Street. The lease expires in March. Organizers vow to keep a shelter open somewhere in Ramona, no matter what happens with the current permit application.

Some 300 volunteers from 22 area churches take turns cooking, delivering and serving approximately 85 dinners nightly.

About 65 people stay in the shelter every night, with men in the warehouse and women in the tiny shelter office and meeting room, said Carolyn Lewis, director of emergency services for St. Vincent de Paul. Nearly a fifth of those housed are women and children, Skupnik said.

Men frequently must be turned away at the overcrowded shelter, Lewis said, but she has squeezed as many as 10 women and five children into the two offices rather than turn them away.

The new shelter would especially benefit women and children because it would provide more space and privacy, Lewis said. Eventually, organizers would like to open a medical clinic and hold English classes and job training. The facility will cost an estimated $250,000 a year to maintain.

Among those who wrote letters to county planners were neighbors of the current shelter, who said they’ve had no problems with homeless people trespassing on their property. Nor has the shelter diminished their property values, they said. Those two issues were among those cited most frequently by opponents of the new site.

St. Vincent officials say they would screen homeless people at two or three sites in downtown Ramona, turning away those who are drunk or on drugs.

Lewis and other shelter workers said alcoholic transients tend to stay away from shelters. “We’ve been here long enough that they know not to come here if they’re under the influence of any drugs,” Lewis said.

Those staying at the shelter would have to first go to a referral site for a pass to get in, then be driven in on shuttle buses, preventing foot traffic on busy, frequently foggy California 67 and across private property.

Many residents are skeptical that will work.

“If they’re working at the chicken ranch on Dye Road (near the proposed shelter), and the transportation is downtown, why would they walk downtown to get the shuttle?” Lee Weddington said.

Some opponents contend that the large male migrant population would repel many homeless women and children. But one shelter resident, Guadalupe Rodriguez, 18, said she feels much safer in the shelter with her 8-month-old daughter than she would on the streets.

Rodriguez and her brother have been staying there since arriving--without proper papers, she acknowledged--from Ensenada about four months ago. Her brother is trying to go to school, and until recently Rodriguez worked three days a week caring for the children of a Vista family.

When the shelter is closed during the day, she walks through the air-conditioned supermarket and plays with her baby at the park. When it rains, she sits in a Laundromat. Her meals are the shelter dinner and light breakfast.

Even this is better than conditions in Mexico, she said. “This is my home,” she said. “It’s like a big family.”

Another regular at the shelter, Francisco Melesio, 56, considers the Ramona area his second home. He’s worked on horse ranches and landscaping projects about nine months out of the year annually since 1981. He is a resident alien, and goes back to his family in Mexico a few months each year.

He used to live in a trailer on the farm where he had worked for many years, but that property was sold and the workers turned out, he said through an interpreter. Many farmers do not provide housing for the migrants, he said.

Boggs, Myrick and Foreman, who led the signature drive against the shelter, all fear that the shelter will attract many more homeless people and that St. Vincent will use the large shelter for its overflow from downtown San Diego.

But St. Vincent officials say they will never bus people in. Lewis acknowledged there had been a problem with well-meaning workers at other full shelters referring people to Ramona, but said other shelters have been told not to do that.

Myrick and others also fear that the shelter could eventually house far more than 100 guests a night.

But St. Vincent would have to go through another review process to increase capacity or add any buildings, Mandel said. The septic system beneath much of the parcel’s vacant land precludes any construction there, he said.

Myrick is afraid that once the permit is granted, it could easily be abused.

Mandel said some people will not be satisfied no matter what solutions he offers.

“We have the same thing everywhere we go,” he said. “It’s much ado about nothing. We’ll be here in a year and it’ll never be mentioned” again.