A proposal to turn an empty warehouse near the San Diego airport into one of the nation’s largest homeless shelters had many opponents.
The Independent Budget Analyst said leasing the property might divert money from other needed services. The City Attorney’s Office worried about legal risks. A crowd of residents decried the idea last summer during an hours-long public meeting that ended with skeptical council indefinitely delaying a final decision.
One of the plan’s few fans was Mayor Todd Gloria. On Friday, his office announced that he was moving on.
“After a year of negotiations and multiple hearings, we have come to the conclusion that the proposed homeless shelter campus at Kettner and Vine can no longer advance,” Gloria said in a statement. Instead, staffers on Feb. 10 will present alternative properties to the City Council, including an unnamed privately owned spot on Second Avenue as well as the Old Central Library and the City Operations Building. At least the latter two are downtown.
“While I continue to believe the proposed shelter at Kettner and Vine was the best and most cost-effective option for a permanent shelter program, I remain firm in my commitment to expand shelter” Gloria added. “Getting people off the streets and out of the riverbed and canyons is not optional.”
Thousands of residents are estimated to spend each night in tents, cardboard and vehicles, and there are nowhere near enough beds for everybody asking. In recent months, only around 1 out of every 10 requests for a spot in a traditional shelter succeeded, largely because most facilities are full, according to the San Diego Housing Commission.
The warehouse at Kettner Boulevard and Vine Street in the Middletown neighborhood is owned by San Diego businessman Doug Hamm.
“While I’m disappointed in this outcome, I’m proud of the thoughtful effort we put forward,” Hamm said in a statement. “‘Hope at Vine’ was an ambitious idea grounded in a genuine desire to do what’s best for both the property and the neighborhood.”
The mayor first pitched the warehouse as a place to hold up to 1,000 beds at a triumphant press conference last April. The property was both an opportunity to fulfill a pledge from his recent State of the City address to add 1,000 beds to the region’s strained shelter system and give San Diego a more permanent spot for homeless residents after relying for years on temporary structures.
The pushback was immediate.
The original lease could have cost the city $1 billion over the next three-plus decades. Records showed that the site had not been checked for asbestos or lead while environmental tests found potential toxins in the air. Only a handful of other cities have even tried housing 1,000 people in one spot, and most, if not all, had far more space to work with than the warehouse’s nearly 65,000 square feet.
Leaders of the housing commission and the Regional Task Force on Homelessness eventually questioned whether 1,000 beds could even fit.
Council member after council member blasted the plan during the marathon hearing in July before demanding a host of changes to the agreement.
Negotiators came back with a revised lease, leading the City Council to meet behind closed doors late last year about the new . Yet in the following weeks there were no public statements or celebratory press events. Nor were the renegotiated details publicly released.
There was only silence and speculation.
“Every day, homeless people ask for shelter but are turned away and forced to live outdoors because there are no beds available,” Councilmember Stephen Whitburn, one of the mayor’s few allies on the warehouse proposal, said Friday in a statement. “I look forward to a robust discussion on potential shelter options, particularly at the site of the old Central Library.”
Even if most of the requested changes had been met, the city now faces down a deficit worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars. Speaking to reporters Thursday, Councilmember Henry Foster questioned whether the city’s entire homelessness budget needed to be rethought.
Mayoral spokesperson Rachel Laing declined to immediately identify the location of the Second Avenue property mentioned in Gloria’s statement “pending initiation of negotiations.”
However, a multi-story office building at 1515 2nd Ave. near Little Italy appears to fit the bill. The property is for sale and the broker is Derek Hulse, a managing director at the real estate firm Cushman and Wakefield. Hulse confirmed that city officials had expressed interest in the site several months ago but said there were no active talks about turning the place into a shelter.
A sales brochure says the building comes with more than 25,700 square feet, 62 parking spots and solar s on the roof.
Staff writer Jennifer Van Grove contributed to this report.
