More than 18 months ago, San Diego Unified pitched the city of San Diego on a plan: The district would offer up its former Central Elementary campus for a safe parking lot for homeless families if the city could get a contractor to run it.
That safe parking lot now appears unlikely to materialize.
For months, school board members publicly questioned why a project they saw as a win-win wasn’t moving forward.
The city, meanwhile, said it concluded last year that it couldn’t proceed after receiving far less money from a grant than it needed for the project. A spokesperson said city officials shared that news with district staff last August. The city also quietly inquired about potentially using $342,450 awarded by the Regional Task Force on Homelessness to the Central Elementary project to help fund its planned H Barracks safe parking lot.
The school district project hit another impasse last month after City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera’s last-ditch effort to pull together the city’s housing agency and other players to try to work out a plan.
Housing Commission Senior Vice President Casey Snell told Voice of San Diego that her agency, which Elo-Rivera looped in to try to save the project, ultimately decided it couldn’t deliver after weeks of discussions with safe parking provider Jewish Family Service, the district, the Task Force and city staff.
“Insufficient funding is available to launch and sustain a safe parking program at this site, especially with the budget constraints the city and SDHC will be experiencing for the upcoming fiscal year,” Snell wrote in an email.
Indeed, after the failure of a November sales-tax measure and an increased pension bill, the city is facing a massive budget deficit that could threaten new homeless-serving projects.
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When district officials first floated the partnership with the district in June 2023, it seemed like an easy win for both local governments. The Central Elementary project was meant to support homeless families with children, a broadly sympathetic population. Throughout the period the proposed safe parking site was discussed publicly, it received no public pushback, a notable departure from the usual furor surrounding homelessness projects.
The district planned to eventually welcome an affordable housing project on the site, leaving the space open to serve homeless families in the district for a couple years.
After analyzing the site, the city and the district envisioned opening a roughly 40-space safe parking lot for families living in vehicles. District officials also offered up the use of vacant classrooms and restrooms in Central Elementary as well as play areas.
The city began looking for money to make it happen.
District leaders saw the concept as such a sure thing almost a year later that they pledged in a deal with the teachers union to work with the city to open at least one safe parking lot for homeless residents at one of its campuses – and agreed to a June 2025 deadline.
Yet the project had already faced a setback by last spring.
Around then, the Task Force formally notified the city that the project had only been awarded a $342,450 grant, far shy of the nearly $1 million the city sought in its application.
City officials projected they’d need $996,463 to operate the program in its initial year, city spokesperson Matt Hoffman said.
Task Force CEO Tamera Kohler said the conditional award to the city followed more than $58 million in funding requests across the county for $9.1 million in state Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention Program funds it had to dole out.
Getting far less than the nearly $1 million they sought for the Central Elementary project left city officials convinced the project was no longer possible.
“Bottom line: If the full grant funding was received, the city would have proceeded with the old Central Elementary project and worked with the district to try and expand the [safe parking] program’s footprint,” Hoffman said.
Yet Kohler told Voice the Task Force rarely – if ever – fully funds projects via its grant processes and that counting on a major onetime funding source for a project isn’t considered a best practice.
Hoffman defended the city’s ask and said the city team had been under the impression its request was reasonable based on the grant materials.
Emails obtained by Voice after a public records request show city officials started asking Task Force staff by early May 2024 if they could repurpose the grant they conditionally received for the Central Elementary project.
“As we’ve discussed previously, while the original location we applied for is not completely off the table, it is possible that this program will operate at a different site than originally anticipated,” Kimberlee Zolghadri of the city’s homelessness department wrote in a May 8, 2024 email.
The other site the city inquired about backing with the grant was H Barracks, a larger safe parking lot now expected to open this March – after a state and Task Force deadline to spend grant funds by the end of 2024. The project is expected to serve homeless populations including families.
Spokespeople for both the district and the city confirmed that district officials weren’t informed of these inquiries.
On Aug. 13, Task Force COO Lahela Mattox emailed city officials that the nonprofit was rescinding its grant offer after conversations about possibly using funds for H Barracks.
The project timeline and location no longer matched the 2024 spending deadline, Mattox wrote.
Throughout the process, Hoffman said staff in the city’s homelessness department “explored every opportunity to try and allocate additional funding” for the Central Elementary project as they also grappled with a tight city budget and tried to move forward with other new homelessness projects.
“Staff tried to make it work from a budget perspective but could not,” Hoffman wrote in a statement.
Hoffman also said the city’s attempt to move grant funds to another project reflected their hope to not lose funding that could support a homeless-serving program rather than an attempt to hamper the district’s safe parking plan.
Hoffman said that the city told the district it couldn’t make the Central Elementary project work late last summer.
“City staff notified district officials during a meeting last August that the partial grant funding was pulled back — and in any case not enough to operate the program for any substantial amount of time — and thus this project could not proceed with the city’s involvement at that time,” Hoffman wrote.
District spokesperson James Canning also confirmed that the district learned that the Task Force funding was rescinded in August.
School board members, however, apparently didn’t get the message.
Elo-Rivera, whose district includes Central Elementary, said he got a call from school board member Richard Barrera last summer. Elo-Rivera recalled Barrera, who also represents Central Elementary, asking if he could find out “what was holding up the contracts that needed to be signed to get this off the ground.”
Elo-Rivera said he eventually learned that the city had tried to reallocate Task Force grant funds for another project. The councilmember came away convinced the city didn’t approach the project with the same urgency the district did.
Barrera said he was caught off guard by what Elo-Rivera learned.
“I thought we were in the process of going back and forth on the licensing agreement, and we hadn’t heard from the city,” Barrera said. “When (Elo-Rivera) looked into it, that was the first time that I had heard that, that the city didn’t have money for the project.”
Barrera said he doesn’t question city officials’ need to balance tricky budget questions. What frustrates him is what he views as a breakdown in communication, particularly regarding the attempted reallocation of funds. Had that been communicated more clearly, he feels district officials could have begun to explore other funding options earlier.
“If the city just wanted to reallocate that money for another project that gets pretty frustrating, because we think this is a good project and an important project,” Barrera said. “But if that was the intention, the city should have just made that clear.”
Realizing the Central Elementary project was stalled after he heard from Barerra, Elo-Rivera said he pulled in the city’s housing agency and urged other players to try to work something out. He hoped that the Central Elementary site could accommodate families as soon as the 2024 holiday season.
That didn’t happen – and the failure of Measure E likely cemented the deadlock.
Elo-Rivera still holds out hope the project might come together. He’s disappointed the city hasn’t delivered already and wishes the City Council had been looped in after city officials learned the Task Force grant wouldn’t fund as much as hoped. He thinks the City Council should have gotten a chance to vote to direct city funds to the project when it voted on the city budget in June.
“I share the sentiments and the goal of the school district and the school board members to provide safe places for family experiencing homelessness to sleep and I think it’s a total shame that space that could be made available to do that is not being utilized,” Elo-Rivera said.
Both Canning and Barrera also say the district is still eager to partner with the city, other governments and nonprofits to try to open a safe parking lot at Central Elementary.
Both said the district can’t go it alone.
“The district is not funded, nor does it have the expertise to offer our students and families experiencing homeless shelter,” Canning wrote.
Barrera also argued that financing a safe parking site was not “an appropriate or legal use,” of district funding. So, he said, officials will continue to look for other partners willing to step in, as it feels clear to him there’s a need for this resource.
“The fact that there’s families driving around tonight not feeling like they can be in a location where their kids are safe and they’ve got access to any sort of facilities, access to any sort of resources is a shame, and it’s a shame for our city that that continues to be the case,” Barrera said.
Excellent journalism.
City leaders are failures. Turning schools and parks into homeless shelters is shameful. Who raised you?
I’m curious how much time government staff put into allocating such a tiny grant?I probably shouldn’t think of government labor the same way I think of hourly contractor. But I’d imagine the cost of labor by staff from the school district, the city council, the regional task force, and the housing commission easily exceeded the $342k they were wrestling over?