No place to go

SAN DIEGO—When the San Diego Padres open their home baseball season on April 7 at Petco Park, many fans will drive through a homeless encampment in East Village a few blocks from the ballyard and near Interstate 5. Hundreds of homeless men and women who sprawl in that desirable location are in the crosshairs of city planners and developers. While neighbors worry about drugs and crime, Christian ministries try to help their homeless neighbors.

Twenty-four years ago, Curtis Bernstein walked into God’s Extended Hand, a ministry in San Diego’s warehouse district, and announced that God was calling him to live with the homeless. The minister in charge greeted Bernstein as if he had been waiting for him: “Let me show you your room.” Today, Bernstein still lives upstairs—only now he’s the minister.

Over the past quarter century he’s seen the homeless problem worsen. Single room occupancy (SRO) apartments have closed, and housing prices have skyrocketed. A patchwork of tents and tarps has spread like cobwebs over sidewalks and bicycle lanes. The city says hand-built structures increased 69 percent last year. Trails of refuse stretch for blocks, and drug use on the streets has spiked.

Before the All-Star Game last summer, city officials swept hundreds of homeless people out of the blocks adjacent to Petco Park. Most of them simply moved east, concentrating the population. Other cities have sent their homeless here: Denver has given to the homeless hundreds of one-way Greyhound tickets out of town, including one to Austin Blitzer, 27. According to Denver’s NBC affiliate, Blitzer decided to go to San Diego and said his new life there included riding around and smoking marijuana.

The numbers tell part of the story: Officials counted 1,162 homeless people living on the streets in downtown San Diego last summer, with 1,500 more elsewhere in the city. Overall, the region’s homeless population jumped 19 percent in a year. The San Diego Housing Commission spent $44 million in 2015-16 addressing homelessness, and the city continues to hire staff to deal with the problem. In January, Mayor Kevin Faulconer declared it a crisis.

Nowhere is the problem more acute than in the East Village. Across the street from God’s Extended Hand, a 21-story building is under construction with plans for 368 new luxury apartments and 19,000 square feet of retail space. A few blocks west, the Alexan nears completion. It’s an 18-story luxury tower with 2,200-square-foot penthouses. The 45-story Pinnacle on the Park looms over the East Village and recently started leasing apartments from $1,800 a month.

Curtis Bernstein knows the luxury-apartment dwellers won’t want to look at his old building or ragged clientele. He suspects the city is trying to evict his homeless ministry: “With this development going on, we’re under tremendous pressure.”

On a cool, sunny morning in January, hundreds of people emerged from their makeshift tents, oblivious to a brewing storm off the Pacific coast that meteorologists predicted could bring 5 inches of rain. Jerry Johnston spoke with a smoker’s rasp: “If you’re going to be homeless, this is the place to be homeless.” He blamed crystal meth and other hard drugs for the spike in homelessness: “You can’t walk 20 feet without running into the stuff.”

Wearing an inside-out sweatshirt and constantly scratching or fidgeting, Marty Hayes denied using drugs himself, but said, “If you’re going to be sleeping on the street, it helps to have a little vodka.” With leathery hands he took frequent nips from the bottle of Crystal Palace he kept in the front pocket of his jeans. He explained how he’d hoped to be a telemarketer: “I talk well on the phone. I e-nun-see-ate. But times are tough, you know? Not a lot of jobs out there.”

Joel Rocco—a stout Long Islander and former bare-knuckle boxer—owns the Mixed Martial Arts gym across the street. He doesn’t have much sympathy for the homeless. The “No Loitering” signs hooked to his chain-link make the point. So do the Belgian shepherd and pit bull who live with him upstairs. If the signs and the dogs aren’t enough to keep vagrants away, he counts among his customers a number of Navy SEALs and one Army Ranger who warms up by sprinting around the block twice. A mural inside boasts, “San Diego’s Toughest.”

Rocco serves on the board of Clean & Safe, a neighborhood partnership that works with the city to keep his corner free of tents and litter. When his connections don’t work, he sometimes takes matters into his own hands: He says he’s been in five or six fights with homeless men, mostly in self-defense: “A lot of these people, they’ll tell you they’re not homeless, they’re street people, and that’s the life they choose. … I tell ’em, ‘Ain’t a badge of honor. You’re a drain on society, is what you are.’”

He says the homeless bring problems: “They’ve found guns in the tents. Knives. Needles. There used to be a huge encampment down here on the right, and it was all heroin and meth. Then you’d have families parking a mile out for baseball games, and I’d have to tell ’em, hey, walk on that side of the street.”

This particular morning, Rocco had been roused by the sound of glass breaking downstairs. Before sunrise, someone had shattered one of his front windows. Standing in front of the gaping hole midmorning, he said he can’t wait until the homeless people are gone.

In years past, the city used eminent domain to seize buildings like the one where God’s Extended Hand is located, which is at least 130 years old and shows its age. Curtis Bernstein says the city is now using more subtle tactics. Last fall, an inspector from the city left Bernstein a list of required repairs costing $30,000—the third time that had happened, he said. If the mission couldn’t afford the repairs, Bernstein would lose the building to the city, which would turn around and sell it to the developer who already owns the rest of the block.

A board member organized a fundraiser, and Bernstein’s church, a Korean Methodist congregation that supports him as a missionary, kicked in with a special offering, but he still came up $4,000 short. Then he got the mail. “Three days before Christmas, there’s a letter from a law firm in Tucson. I said, ‘Now what?’” A previous supporter of the mission had passed away, leaving 25 percent of his estate to God’s Extended Hand. It came to more than twice what Bernstein needed for the repairs.

When the rains started on Jan. 20, Father Joe’s mission opened its two dining halls to shelter an additional 250 people. Father Joe’s is the largest homeless mission in the East Village, with an annual budget of $34 million. The ministry fills gaps in city services, offering short- and long-term housing, feeding programs, and $1.8 million in medical care. On the first floor of the flagship building is a small, tidy room full of toys and crafts where therapists work with toddlers who’ve spent so much time strapped into strollers that they can’t walk or talk properly.

In an old house half a mile from the East Village, Raul Palomino and his volunteers at Presbyterian Urban Ministries serve 45 people a day, focusing on helping homeless persons establish their identities in order to find jobs and housing. Palomino, a married father of two, gives an example of the problems facing many of the homeless and how his group tries to help. When a 72-year-old woman left prison after serving 35 years, she entered “a totally new society.” She told Palomino: “No one wants to employ me, I have no ID, no birth certificate, no way to identify myself. ... I just want to go back to jail.” Palomino and his staff pulled strings to get her a photo ID and a room.

It had been raining for five days when Bernstein assembled his staff for Tuesday morning devotions. God’s Extended Hand has no case managers or million-dollar programs. But breakfast was on the stove: 300 scrambled eggs and 20 pounds of beef and potatoes.

The sound of water cascading off the roof mingled with voices outside the metal doors. Inside, the room was set up with folding tables and chairs for 80. A volunteer named Johnny set out 5 gallons of milk, and Bernstein read to the staff from Isaiah 6. The doors opened at 8 a.m., and volunteers from a church preached and served the meal. By 9 the doorman was turning people away.

Outside, Gary Peterson, 64, watched the construction workers and cranes piecing together the new apartment building. The frame was only 30 feet off the ground so far, but it would eventually reach 250 feet, topped with a pool deck that Peterson will probably never see.

“This is what it’s all about,” he said without taking his eyes off the construction. “These high-rises. Something that people out here can’t afford. San Diego’s for the rich and famous, not the ordinary people.”

—Tom Pfingsten is a graduate of the World Journalism Institute mid-career course