To look at the official record, you\u2019d have thought Mayor Jerry Sanders\u2019 latest call for suitable homeless shelter locales had gone in one ear, slipped on the wax and exited butt-first down the same canal. Not a single one of the eight City Council members had offered the mayor a potential site in their districts by the end of business on Monday, Sept. 21, Sanders\u2019 original deadline. Since then, seven of \u2019em, including downtown representative Kevin Faulconer, managed a reply to the mayor, which is at least something \u2014 still, the councilmembers had no suggestions for an appropriate permanent location, and that\u2019s a dismaying state of affairs indeed. It\u2019s dismaying because council has been grappling with this question for a decade and then some. Back in the \u201990s, when Susan Golding was mayor, San Diego County\u2019s homeless numbered about 5,000, and Golding was instrumental in establishing a shelter at that time. But just as she allegedly didn\u2019t mention homelessness in her 2000 State of the City speech, the issue has been punted between the mayor\u2019s office and council chambers since then, with no clear outcome. Meanwhile, according to the Regional Task Force on the Homeless San Diego, the county\u2019s homeless population has doubled \u2014 this amid council\u2019s latest round of inaction. In opposing a temporary shelter downtown this year, Faulconer reportedly wrote in his reply that “I look forward to offering lasting services that will benefit the homeless population, as well as our neighbors and business owners downtown.” That\u2019s fine and dandy for the intermediate and long term \u2014 but winter and its attendant rains will be here in about 15 minutes, and that leaves precious little time to approve a site, forge a plan, find the money and get 10,000 people (or a portion thereof) settled in. But since downtown serves as a regional city center, it seems the most expedient locale in which to address this immediate, very regional issue (remember, the current 10,000 homeless exist throughout the county, not just in San Diego\u2019s core). Faulconer noted that downtown has a “disproportionate” number of services of which the homeless can take advantage \u2014 but disproportionate or not, those services are already there and can serve in part to alleviate homelessness. There\u2019s an insidious benefit to a downtown shelter as well: The vast concentration of city-center businesses will grow as the recession heads out and full-scale development resumes, and the able-bodied homeless would thus have a tailor-made infrastructure at their doorstep through which they could extricate themselves from their plight. Sanders has said that his office will now propose several sites in each district, picking up where the reluctant councilmembers left off \u2014 but the shelter\u2019s importance to the community, of course, trumps any decision on its locale. Just ask Dr. Jim Dunford, city medical director and UCSD emergency physician, who in 2006 reportedly told The New Yorker magazine all about the people such a shelter often serves: ” . . . [I]t\u2019s the guy who falls down and hits his head who ends up costing you at least $50,000. Meanwhile, they are going through alcoholic withdrawal and have devastating liver disease that only adds to their inability to fight infections. There is no end to the issues. We do this huge drill. We run up big lab fees, and the nurses want to quit because they see the same guys come in over and over, and all we\u2019re doing is making them capable of walking down the block.” Unless, of course, the shelter\u2019s placed downtown. The center city\u2019s glut of services will give the shelter\u2019s patrons a fighting chance at mainstream life, at least theoretically. And in any event, by the time you read this, that 15-minute window between now and the day the rains set in has just dwindled to 12. \u2014 Martin Jones Westlin is the editor of San Diego Downtown News, a sister publication to the Village News.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To look at the official record, you\u2019d have thought Mayor Jerry Sanders\u2019 latest call for suitable homeless shelter locales had gone in one ear, slipped on the wax and exited butt-first down the same canal. Not a single one of the eight City Council members had offered the mayor a potential site in their districts […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11560","_seopress_titles_title":"Put shelter downtown, and be quick about it","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11560,11593,11552],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-la-jolla-village-news","category-no-images","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}