Escondido Is Turning Up the Heat on Its Only Homeless Shelter Provider

North County homeless services provider Interfaith Community Services is worried about its future in Escondido. 

Late last month, Escondido’s chief of police notified the nonprofit’s CEO that he was referring two of their properties to the city attorney’s office for violations related to trash, loitering, increased calls for service and more. 

Interfaith is the largest homeless services provider in North County. It operates the only homeless shelters in Escondido. The Feb. 26 letter from Escondido Police Chief Ed Varso to CEO Greg Anglea lists “recurring signs of crime and disorder” associated with Interfaith’s headquarters. 

According to the letter, the Escondido Police Department’s Community Oriented Policing and Problem Solving unit, or COPPS, has been monitoring Interfaith’s properties since September 2023. The COPPS unit typically deals with calls that involve homeless people. 

The violations listed in the letter include repeated instances of trash and littering around the headquarters property; the presence of items like shopping carts, bags, bicycles, etc. around the property; repeated instances of loitering around the property; and a measurable increase of calls for service to the property. 

Varso also wrote that the properties had “repeated violations of [Interfaith’s] conditional use permit.” 

Interfaith’s headquarters and its Turk Recuperative Care Center both operate under conditional use permits. These types of permits are issued by cities to allow a business to operate under certain requirements.  

Its headquarters, located near downtown, offers case management, behavioral health services, access to medical care, free meals, showers, laundry services, as well as 49 beds of residential drug and alcohol treatment services.  

And the Turk Center helps homeless people who were recently discharged from hospitals heal and recover in a safe environment. It’s also located near Escondido’s downtown area. 

Interfaith CEO Anglea told Voice that their headquarters has been operating with this permit for 25 years, and the Turk Center has been operating with the permit since 2022.  

Anglea said Interfaith has been working with the department’s COPPS unit since September about these concerns. He said Interfaith has made numerous changes to remain in compliance with their permits.  

“We find the accusations to be unsubstantiated, and we refute the accuracy of each violation,” Anglea said in an email to Voice. “Moreover, we find the allegation that Interfaith contributes to crime and disorder in the surrounding community to be ill-informed at best and ill-intentioned at worst.”  

Chief Varso’s letter also criticizes Interfaith’s decision to move clients that were staying at the 49-bed Haven House shelter, previously operating out of Interfaith’s headquarters property, into the Turk Recuperative Care Center, saying that the move violated the terms of the conditional use permit and has resulted in increased calls for services to the Turk Center.  

But Anglea doesn’t believe that was a violation of their permits and said they made that move only after Escondido leaders decided to stop contributing funds to Haven House in August. Haven House was Escondido’s only homeless shelter at the time before Interfaith opened its family shelter in November 2023. City officials had told Interfaith they were concerned Haven House was serving too many homeless people that weren’t from Escondido.  

In order to lower costs and reduce staff, Interfaith transferred its Haven House residents into the Turk Center, Anglea said. 

Nonetheless, Varso’s letter says the “lack of communication, continual [conditional use permit] violations and the steady increase in calls for service” have resulted in the police having to refer the case to Escondido’s planning division, code compliance division and the city attorney’s office.  

If these departments decide to place Interfaith’s conditional use permits under review, it will go to the city’s Planning Commission and then the City Council, which has the power to significantly alter the permit or revoke it.  

Anglea received the letter two days before the Escondido City Council approved a new homelessness policy that indicates a significant shift in how the city will address homelessness moving forward. 

The new policy rejects Housing First and calls for a “public safety-first” approach to addressing the city’s growing homelessness crisis. It calls for tougher consequences on criminal activity among the city’s homeless population and says the city will eventually open a city-run shelter that requires sobriety and prioritizes Escondido’s unhoused residents. 

At the Feb. 28 meeting, Escondido Mayor Dane White added a significant amendment to the policy just before the council voted on it: He asked city staffers to “explore a moratorium on homeless services and shelters in the downtown specific plan area, including a buffer zone of the surrounding six blocks.”  

White said at the meeting that this is in light of the county of San Diego’s recent attempt to potentially place a homeless shelter in downtown Escondido.   

He was referring to a proposal by the Board of Supervisors last month to look into several county-owned properties that could potentially serve as emergency homeless shelters.    

One of the locations listed was a 2-acre lot in downtown Escondido, but it was removed from the resolution after White and Supervisor Jim Desmond criticized the idea.    

They argued that county leaders should have given Escondido more notice and worked with the city to identify a location together. White also said then that the proposed site, located in the city’s downtown business district, wasn’t the right fit for a shelter, but that city leaders were willing to work with the county to find a different site.   

Anglea is concerned the moratorium wouldn’t just apply to future homeless services and shelters, but to existing ones, as well.  

Interfaith’s headquarters and the Turk Center are located within the six-block radius that White talked about.  

Michael Thorne, communications manager for the city of Escondido, did not directly answer our question about whether the moratorium could apply to existing shelters and services. 

“Mayor White clearly stated that this direction was in response to the County’s attempt to utilize downtown property to establish an additional shelter downtown without consulting the city,” Thorne said via email. 

But Anglea sees it differently. 

“By threatening the conditional use permit which allows for the provision of Interfaith’s programs, and two days later directing staff to explore a moratorium on those services, Escondido City Council appears to be taking actions to reduce services and increase homelessness in Escondido,” a press statement from Interfaith read.  

Thorne said in an email to Voice that the Escondido Police Department’s COPPS Program identifies areas that experience a high level of calls for services and works on a plan with the property owners to address the issues and come to a resolution.   

“When a property owner fails to address these identified issues with a satisfactory outcome,” Thorne said. “[Escondido Police Department] will end the COPPS Program intervention at that location and escalate the violations to the city’s code compliance and city attorney’s office to seek compliance.”  

The city of Escondido currently has the highest unsheltered homeless population in North County with 304 unsheltered people, according to last year’s point-in-time count.