Affluent Area of San Diego Battles Plan for ‘Tent City’

Residents of Rose Canyon, whose expensive bluff-top homes overlook scenic hiking, biking and nature trails, are joining in opposition to a plan to erect a nearby “tent city” for the homeless within view of their affluent neighborhood.

“Suddenly, Rose Canyon is becoming an embattled area,” said Sandra Boyce, who helped organize a meeting of worried homeowners Wednesday night. “I know it sounds like, ‘Not in my back yard,’ but. . . . “

Boyce said she was concerned the city’s plan could affect the entire city--and spread throughout the state--if unchallenged.

On Oct. 5, the San Diego City Council will decide whether to invoke a rarely used state law that would declare a “state of emergency,” allowing the city to erect five shelters without facing full legal liability. The Rose Canyon site is the most hotly contested.

Officials say the action is necessary because an estimated 19,000 homeless people wander about San Diego County, more than 7,000 of them in the city of San Diego. If law is put into effect, thousands of people could take up residence in the canyon alone.

City Councilwoman Valerie Stallings, whose district encompasses the Rose Canyon site, several miles south of the $500,000-plus homes of La Jolla Colony, expects the measure to pass.

The legions of outraged homeowners--300 of whom signed a petition, and the hundreds who Stalling aides say have phoned her office in a panic--expect it to pass too.

And then, Boyce predicts, “the other shoe will drop,” meaning sites throughout the city proposed as tent shelters will one by one open their gates to the homeless, changing San Diego’s landscape.

To set up the shelters, municipal leaders would need to use a state law that renders the city immune from liability, except for “grossly negligent or reckless or intentional conduct.”

Both sides say the Oct. 5 council meeting figures to be, in the words of one combatant, a “doozy.” Mayor Maureen O’Connor, staunchly opposed to tent cities, recently made a highly publicized stand against them.

A short-lived tent city in Balboa Park was torn down Aug. 26 after the mayor objected to the encampment being located near one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions, the San Diego Zoo.

Nick Johnson, an aide to Councilman John Hartley, believes the Save Rose Canyon forces are misguided.

“When people hear the term tent city, they go crazy,” Johnson said. “They have visions of millions and millions of unwashed homeless just lingering around near their neighborhoods.”

John Moody, who lives in nearby Villa Morena and whose home served as the site of Wednesday night’s meeting, said the city has plenty of other sites to consider.

Moody said he is also strongly opposed, as are most of his colleagues and Stallings, to a proposed self-governing tent city, run by and for the homeless, who would use the area as a large, outdoor way station.

“The concerns we have are the ones you might imagine--about alcohol, drugs, crime. . . . We don’t believe the homeless are capable of running these facilities themselves, and to compound the problem by the city not accepting responsibility just sounds real ominous to us,” Moody said.

Part of the problem, Stallings said, is that increasing numbers of homeless men, women and children are gathering not just in Balboa Park and downtown San Diego, but at the city’s beach areas and in parts of exclusive La Jolla.

Frank Landerville, project director for the city’s Regional Task Force on the Homeless, said that, as the nation’s sixth largest city continues its population explosion, “pressure points” involving the homeless multiply as fast as growth figures.

“We now have so many more homeless than emergency shelters,” Landerville said. “We have more and more people who need places to stay--tonight--but places aren’t available. And as the city grows, the problem will only get worse.”