SAN DIEGO — San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria stands by comments he made previously that shelter beds for unhoused individuals are always available in the city.
The mayor was asked about it at his monthly media briefing after CBS 8's reporting found that isn't always the case.
CBS 8 has been following the journey of two different individuals who said they could not access shelter beds in San Diego, despite getting up and standing in line outside the city's Homelessness Response Center for hours.
"I’ve seen some of that reporting. These are individual circumstances. It’s difficult to know from the outside, just based on the limited reporting that was provided, what the individual circumstances are," said Mayor Gloria. "What I would tell is you can look at the city’s dashboard for our shelter system, you can see on any given day, we do have some shelter beds available. Not always a lot. On certain days, very few."
However, Mayor Gloria told reporters it is never the case that across the system, which includes the 20th and B Street safe sleeping site, safe parking, and congregate and non-congregate shelters, that all beds are taken.
"We use a coordinated entry process. Meaning to say, you can't just show up at a shelter and be accommodated. We ask people to go through housing navigators and case workers to make sure that have the housing with the services that we know address the underlying causes of homelessness," said Mayor Gloria.
"Many people get there through our San Diego police department HOT team, others come through our coordinated street outreach efforts, generally led by PATH but also involving organizations like the downtown San Diego partnership and others," he added.
"We encourage people to utilize those processes to get into the system and get housed. It’s often not as fast as we want, there are a lot of challenges on all sides where this is concerned. The truth is we continue to readily expand the amount of shelter beds we have in our city and my expectation is they get used," said Mayor Gloria.
He said another safe sleeping site will open at the "O Parking Lot" in Balboa Park soon. It will hold 400 tents. It has the capacity to house up to 800 people.
The two people CBS 8 featured in a series of news stories, eventually did find a place to stay, but it wasn't at city-run shelters. Both found housing through private organizations.
Meanwhile, the mayor was also asked to respond to recent criticism made by local NBA legend Bill Walton about his handling of the homelessness crisis
"I don't pay a lot of attention to critics and criticism, I get the job done," said Mayor Gloria. "We're not 'mission accomplished,' far from it. This mayor comes to this building, every damn day, working my butt off, making sure we get more people off the streets."
According to the mayor's staff, 45 shelter spaces were available yesterday.
Thursday afternoon, the San Diego Housing Commission told CBS 8 there were 28 shelter beds as of this morning.