SAN DIEGOSAN DIEGO — The city of San Diego has terminated its contract with the service provider running its Housing Navigation Center downtown.
City officials said they will take it over next month and rename it and they will base its homeless services on programs they said have been successful in the temporary shelter in the San Diego Convention Center.
Family Health Centers of San Diego, which had run the Housing Navigation Center for about a year, is not leaving quietly.
Last month the organization’s CEO, Fran Butler-Cohen, lambasted the city’s handling of the center in emails to Mayor Kevin Faulconer, saying the city’s involvement with the facility was more about public relations than a real commitment to housing homeless people.
“After much consideration, we’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that we cannot be successful in the Housing Navigation Center given the shortcomings in systems, lack of understanding of the root causes of homelessness, and conflicting bureaucracies outlined in the enclosed documents,” Butler-Cohen wrote in a three-page email to the city.
Aimee Faucett, chief operating officer for the city, issued a pointed response Thursday in an email to The San Diego Union-Tribune.
“The allegations made by the CEO of Family Health Centers are laughable given the progress the San Diego region has made to reduce homelessness over the past three years, and even more so during a global pandemic,” Faucett wrote.
“She created a toxic work environment, resisted basic oversight on a high priority initiative, and made ridiculous demands that were out of the scope of the contract. City and Housing Commission staff went above and beyond to make the relationship work.
“Given the constant struggle of working with the CEO, we have decided it’s in the best interest of everyone to part ways,” Faucett wrote.
Officials from the San Diego Housing Commission and the Regional Task Force on the Homeless said they want to move past this. They predicted a bright future for the Housing Navigation Center under its new name, the Homeless Response Center.
Others see it as another controversy for a project that was controversial from its start.
In January 2018, the City Council unanimously agreed with the mayor’s plan to buy a closed indoor skydiving building at 14th Street and Imperial Avenue for $7 million and convert it into a one-stop center to help homeless people.
That November, the city entered a contract with Family Health Centers of San Diego to run the center.
By then Democratic City Council Georgette Gómez, Chris Ward and Barbara Bry all had expressed doubts about the approach.
There also were questions about whether the city paid too much for the building, which was purchased before an appraisal was conducted. One finally was completed last month and found the building was worth $7.2 million at the time of purchase, or $200,000 more than the city paid.
Some homeless advocates say the Navigation Center is part of pattern of stumbles as city leaders try addressing homelessness.
“The mayor’s facade of homelessness solutions is beginning to unravel, just like we knew it would,” said Michael McConnell, who often documents San Diego police confronting homeless people and seizing their property.
“Constantly investing in Band-Aids and boondoggles wasn’t ever going to end well, and no amount of spin by his deep PR bench was going to change that,” McConnell said.
Tamera Kohler, CEO of the Regional Task Force on the Homeless, announced the plan to take over the Housing Navigation Center at Tuesday’s City Council meeting.
About the time the meeting began, someone showed up at the Family Health Centers of San Diego office and
delivered a notice that the city was terminating its contract, said Anthony White, Family Health Centers director of community and government relations.
“I guess they may claim it’s a coincidence, but it’s odd to me,” he said about the timing.
After receiving the notice, White called into the council meeting and brought the issue to the attention of council .
White said the notice took him by surprise, but a September email from Butler-Cohen to Faulconer and other city officials shows Family Health Centers of San Diego wanted out of the contract.
“Sadly, we have learned it is not possible to work with city staff to effect change and create data-affirming solutions for persons experiencing homelessness that can arrest the growing number of homeless in San Diego, and to ‘get them off the streets.'” Butler-Cohen wrote.
In another email, Butler-Cohen wrote that Family Health Centers of San Diego had learned from reliable sources that the Housing Navigation Center was more of a “‘public relations undertaking’ for the city than a needed and important component of a homeless continuum.”
White agreed that the city often seemed overly concerned with the image of the project. For example, he said, San Diego Housing Commission officials asked to see minutes of their neighborhood advisory committee meetings to edit out any comments about raising concerns about the center.
Keely Halsey, the city’s chief of homelessness strategies and housing liaison, said she did not want to get into a point-by-point rebuttal of Butler-Cohen’s claims but she disagreed with her characterization.
“I don’t think it would be productive to engage in a back-and-forth over that,” she said. “The parties have agreed to move on.”
It is unclear at this time how many homeless people gained homes through the Housing Navigation Center.
A Sept. 15 report by the San Diego Housing Commission said 1,360 people have received services at the Housing Navigation Center since it opened April 2019 through last July. From June 1 to July 31 this year, 464 people had enrolled at the center and 398 had been connected to a “housing navigator.”
Since the shelter at the San Diego Convention Center opened in April, it has found permanent housing for 668 people, city officials said.
White said he is skeptical that the city would be able to replicate its success at the Convention Center when it takes over the Housing Navigation Center. People at the Convention Center were easier to work with because they also were living at the shelter, he said, but clients at the Housing Navigation Center came and went.
Lisa Jones, the Housing Commission’s senior vice president of homeless housing innovations, said it’s true that having everyone under one room helped make the program successful, but case workers at the shelter also successfully found housing for people who were in other shelters outside the Convention Center.
She also said there have been several improvements to the system, including better coordination among partners and the ability to work with many homeless people at once to help find housing.
“We’re driving folks through the system and problem-solving until we get them housed,” Jones said. “And that’s what’s really unique.”
White said there are physical problems with the old indoor skydiving building, which has leaks and faulty air conditioning. He said that Family Health Centers of San Diego has asked to be reimbursed about $227,000 in expenses.
Halsey said the city has sent contractors to examine the maintenance complaints, and eligible expenses will be reimbursed.
The San Diego Housing Commission will be the director operator of the Homeless Response Center and will contract with People Assisting the Homeless as a service provider, Jones said.
The San Diego Housing Commission will hear the proposal for the new Homeless Response Center on Oct. 16, and it will go before the San Diego Housing Authority on Oct. 27.
Jeff McDonald contributed to this story.
