Mayor Pitches Balboa Park Safe Campsites

By Lisa Halverstadt, the Voice of San Diego:

Mayor Todd Gloria and other city officials want Balboa Park to house two large-scale safe campgrounds for homeless San Diegans by this fall.

Gloria revealed Monday he wants the city to for a second time use a maintenance yard on the edge of the park to house unsheltered people in at least 100 sanctioned camp sites and lots south of the Naval Medical Center now filled with weeds and wildflowers to accommodate as many as 400 tents. The campgrounds would include amenities such as bathrooms, meals and connections to services.

Leaders of Balboa Park institutions who had protested the city’s earlier consideration of Inspiration Point, an under-utilized parking lot along Park Boulevard, surrounded Gloria and other city leaders at a Monday press conference in Barrio Logan.

Gloria’s announcement came a day before the City Council is set to discuss his proposed homelessness budget, which includes $5 million to pursue multiple safe camping sites meant to coincide with a proposed ordinance banning unauthorized encampments on public property when shelter is available – and at all times near shelters, schools and in some other areas. The City Council will ultimately have to sign off on both proposals.

The city had for months eyed Inspiration Point as a potential safe sleeping site, but Gloria and Councilman Stephen Whitburn, who has championed the initiative and the controversial ordinance, said Monday that city officials ultimately decided that site wasn’t optimal.

Gloria said city officials decided to change course when they learned the city yard could be in operation by July and the vacant lot, known as Lot O, by sometime this fall.

Crucially, those sites also aren’t drawing opposition from about two dozen Balboa Park institutions who openly lobbied against a safe campground at Inspiration Point. And notably, neither site is easily viewed by park visitors.

Gloria said Lot O, a multi-level set of parking lots located near Interstate 5 and south of the Naval Medical Center that the city for years leased to the Navy, also gives the city options.

“One of the benefits of that site is that it’s digestible into four kind of separate areas which may allow us to have multiple providers or different populations,” Gloria told Voice of San Diego. “It ends up being something that we think operationally will work better and ultimately that’s our goal, is to take the limited resources we have and make them as impactful as possible.”

The mayor said the site also gives the city the ability to slowly ramp up the number of unhoused people staying there, something he said could aid in smooth operations.

The city will nail down specifics once it secures a provider or providers who may have opinions on how the site should work, Gloria said.

Before the city proceeds with the site, Gloria’s office said it will need to make a series of improvements including accessibility and health and safety upgrades. The mayor’s team could not immediately provide a cost estimate for those upgrades.

The city maintenance yard in Golden Hill and Lot O have been previously floated – and rejected – as potential camp sites.

The Golden Hill facility, at 20th and B streets, temporarily housed 200 tents during a 2017 hepatitis A outbreak, but Gloria’s team declared it unsuitable as recently as December.

“This site is currently in use by city operations and is not available,” Gloria spokesman Dave Rolland told Voice late last year. “Even if it was not in use by city operations, the site has numerous challenges, including flooding issues and conflicts with Charter Section 55 as it is on dedicated parkland.”

The Gloria administration has since decided the site’s challenges aren’t insurmountable.

Gloria said Monday that the city would communicate with workers at the site to ensure they can continue work safely.

Rolland later wrote in a statement that the city decided to use the city yard on a temporary basis after researching sites in every City Council district and deciding it could be opened most rapidly.

“The use of the property is allowable under longstanding case law on a temporary emergency basis,” Rolland said. “There has been risk of flooding; however, staff is working on opportunities to mitigate the risk in advance of the next rainy season.”

Rolland also noted that the city plans to reassess “the future of 20th and B” once Lot O opens.

The city in the past relied on an emergency declaration to welcome unsheltered people into the maintenance yard though some park advocates have long battled homelessness-related plans.

Indeed, an early 1990s plan to use Lot O as a sanctioned homeless camp was stopped by opposition.

Former City Councilman John Hartley, who pushed a tent city at Lot O in 1993, told Voice he identified the site as ideal at the time because it was close to downtown and not to neighborhoods. He cheered Gloria’s announcement on Monday.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Hartley said.

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