St. Vincent de Paul’s remains at the forefront of helping those in need

Dave Schwab

A “housing first” approach is being touted by officials these days as the first and foremost path to pursue when attempting to combat homelessness.

It’s a road St. Vincent de Paul Village in Downtown San Diego has trodden for more than 60 years.

“We were doing housing first before it was cool,” said Ruth Bruland, executive director of Father Joe’s Villages, the managing partner of St. Vincent de Paul’s.

The agency provides permanent housing and nearly 900 transitional housing beds nightly for the local homeless, including families, women, men, teens and veterans at St. Vincent de Paul Village, Josue Homes (for those affected by HIV/AIDS) and the Toussaint Academy for teens.

“We have almost as many people in permanent housing as we have in transitional housing,” Bruland said, a little-known fact about St. Vincent de Paul’s in her opinion.“Transitional housing has been around for decades and has helped a lot of people escape homelessness,” said Tom Theisen, board president of the Regional Task Force on the Homeless.

Theisen is presently involved with a project seeking to effectively house and retain 150 veterans and 100 chronic homeless individuals Downtown by Sept. 17.

“We recognize that in the past, San Diego has invested heavily in transitional housing, and we would like to find a way to utilize this resource, at least to some extent, to help end homelessness here,” Theisen said.

St. Vincent’s also serves between 700 and 900 free lunches daily — 300,000 annually — to Downtown’s homeless and hungry.

The free lunch program was one of the first services provided by Father Joe’s beginning in the early 1950s at St. Mary of the Wayside Chapel in East Village. Since then, the institution has evolved into a homeless one-stop shop.

Part shelter, part employment center, part health clinic, part classroom, part dormitory and all heart, St. Vincent de Paul Village has served as an inspiration — and model — for battling homelessness for decades.

St. Vincent de Paul Village/Father Joe’s Villages at 1501 Imperial Ave. just east of Petco Park is a one-size-fits-all campus intended to address all the rehabilitative needs of the homeless: everything from providing meals to temporary and permanent housing, child and health care, case management, even family literacy and parenting instruction.

A range of clinical services are also offered in-house, including assessments, addiction treatment, and mental health services for individual, group and children’s therapy. An on-site health clinic offers medical, dental and psychiatric care and there is a chaplaincy program as well.

St. Vincent’s Career & Education Center teaches participants job skills and computer literacy, and partners with a community college to provide on-site adult education and GED prep.

The mission of St. Vincent de Paul Village is to end homelessness “one life at a time.” Its multi-dimensional approach of housing people first, before dealing with their problems, helps do exactly that.

“Because of our size, people have a hard time wrapping themselves around the fact that we really do look at it individual by individual,” Bruland said. “We break up our services by teams. That helps us to be more individualized in our approach.”

Addressing the issues surrounding homelessness is all about getting back to self-sufficiency at St. Vincent’s.

A supported income team, for example, focusing on employment with a job developer and job-seeking skills classes, helps match clients with available services. Another team concentrating solely on housing aids the homeless in finding lodging.

“Everything here is about income and housing,” Bruland said. “We want to know what’s  the best housing for you. We want to know what kind of barriers there are to you saving enough money to do that [security] deposit.”

The formula St. Vincent de Paul’s has used for decades works.

“Ninety-two percent of the people we’ve helped place in permanent housing is unsubsidized housing, so taxpayers do not pay any money,” Bruland said, adding that the transitional housing provided by St. Vincent de Paul’s “helps street people get back on their feet.”

Bruland said people taken off the street and given transitional housing who are unable to pay rent due to various personal issues get federally funded housing vouchers. Others with less complicated issues who are more job-ready receive temporary rental vouchers which pay their rent for several months until they become self-sufficient.

Recently, Bruland led a walk-through of St. Vincent de Paul Village’s four-block campus in Downtown San Diego’s East Village neighborhood. Walking through the facility’s health clinic, the group filed past a poster board titled “Wall of Smiles,” where before-and-after photos of St. Vincent residents who’ve received complete or partial dentures are displayed, chronicling their journeys back to self-sufficiency.

“We have a dispensary here, not a pharmacy,” Bruland said. “That allows seamlessness. You don’t have to send someone out to a pharmacy and they never get their medications for a plethora of reasons.”

Bruland’s walk-through returned to an outdoor courtyard in the complex where residents line up for lunch on a meandering, red-hued sidewalk leading into the cafeteria.

“We provide a free lunch for anybody in the community seven days a week,” she said. “We are dedicated to it because we think it cuts down on panhandling. We think it’s the right thing to do — being a good neighbor.”

One of the biggest “patron saints” of Father Joe’s Village’s good-neighbor policy is Qualcomm co-founder Franklin Antonio, whose $2 million gift is paying for five years of free lunches for those in need.

Bruland said 37 percent of St. Vincent’s funding comes from grants, which she deemed “very important.”

“[But] undesignated donations are what allows us to really respond to the community’s needs,” she said.

Back on the guided tour, Bruland threaded her way through a high-rise building, one that offers permanent housing for those with serious mental illness, as well as child and family services.

“This building wasn’t even here five years ago,” she said. “A lot happens in this building other than just cute kids taking naps.”

St. Vincent de Paul’s family therapy center has psychiatrists aiding parents by helping them to “work through targeted interventions helping their child overcome a [developmental] delay.”

Due to safety reasons on the street, Bruland said that homeless children spend an inordinate amount of time in strollers. This can cause them to fall behind in their coping skills, which then need to be developed later in order for them to become well-adjusted adults.

St. Vincent de Paul’s has a staff of nearly 350 and even more volunteers who selflessly give of their time.

“We could not do what we do without volunteers,” Bruland said.

Those who find themselves homeless can apply for residential services at St. Vincent in-person at the front desk in the Joan Kroc Center from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays, excluding some holidays. The first scheduled appointment following the in-person will be a housing assessment. Applicants are then placed on a housing placement list, with wait times varying from as little as two weeks to as many as four or more weeks, depending on demand.

For more information about the organization or to volunteer, visit svdpv.org.

 —Dave Schwab came to San Diego 30 years ago with a journalism degree from Michigan State and has freelanced for numerous dailies, weeklies and other regional publications. He can be reached at [email protected].