Throughout San Diego, neighborhoods are struggling to balance police enforcement, homeless camps and homeless solutions. One proposed homeless shelter in Point Loma is alarming some residents — due, in part, to its size.
The city of San Diego identified H Barracks as a safe campsite or parking lot site. It’s a mostly unused five-acre plot next to the San Diego International Airport, about a mile from the bougie Point Loma area where you went to whats-her-name’s birthday lunch.
And about the size: H Barracks could accomodate 300 to 700 unhoused individuals. So it has massive potential to alleviate our region’s foremost crisis and house those in need, operating as long as five years, as our Lisa Halverstadt reported.
Point Loma residents started online petition to push back against the plan. This week on the VOSD Podcast, hosts Scott Lewis, Andrea Lopez-Villafaña and Jakob McWhinney discuss that push-back, details of the H Barracks plan and the state of the crisis.
Lopez-Villafaña also shares a dispatch from the neighborhood of Stockton, a largely Latino neighborhood cornered by the 15 and 94 freeways. Unlike some communities, they want more police. And they want better streets, more stop signs, sidewalks, streetlights and parking enforcement.
The Schools We Skirt
In the final segment of the show, McWhinney recaps some of his reporting from the week — highlighting San Diego Unified schools neglected by families that live nearby. The trends remain much the same from years past. Wealthy neighborhoods retain their students. Schools in poorer communities with lower test scores see locals choice-out.
On the show, our crew reviews the data at large, what’s happening at specific schools and the trends that have persisted despite San Diego Unified’s efforts to put a quality school in every neighborhood.
To move 400-700 homeless people and you pretend its no big deal? Why didnt these same City reps make it public from the get-go? Like always, lets keep the public out of public business until “we” get our marching orders from our donors! Sooo sad; the same sad song same tune same result! And just how do you propose to handle the typical drugs & crime (the very same one youre moving from downtown? What, because youre buying the tents and areas its going to change? Get a grip! Thats pure politics and doomed to fail! You need to spread them out where they have a chance… otherwise its a pathetic joke!
Wow, VOSD wants to paint Point Loma as a haven of the rich when it is heavily impacted already by snarled traffic and plenty of homeless near most busy streets. How insensitive of VOSD and whoever Nate John is. “Journalism” with an agenda.