A recent update on homelessness in Pacific Beach painted a grim picture of overburdened and outdated service models coping with a worsening crisis.

The good news however is that nonprofit Shoreline Community Services, whose mission is to eliminate homelessness in San Diego’s central beach area, is continuing its outreach into the coastal homeless community. PB-based Shoreline Community Services works to match up unsheltered individuals with wrap-around services provided at The Compass Station, a drop-in resource center at 1004 Chalcedony St.

The March 26 presentation was delivered by Shoreline Community Services executive director Caryn Blanton in PB Library’s Community Room, She spoke along with Marcella Teran, Pacific Beach and Mission Beach’s neighborhood watch coordinator. Their presentation, an educational forum, was given to mostly residents, with a smattering of unsheltered individuals present who frequent the library’s park-like grounds.

“Our vision at Shoreline is to create an interdependent neighborhood with one common goal: a safe and thriving neighborhood for everyone,” said Blanton, who’s worked for 20-plus years in community development, mostly with marginalized populations including 10 years with Pacific Beach’s homeless. “We focus on making sure that the most vulnerable among us, right now the homeless, are taken care of with great compassion and equity.”

Blanton noted Shoreline fills gaps by offering resources “to those who need them to help people get to a place of self-sufficiency. We’re not waiting for anybody to come into our neighborhood and fix our issues. We’re saying, ‘We (PB) have a lot of experience and knowledge, and we can come up with creative solutions that probably can work alongside the system.’”

Pointing out Shoreline logged nearly 6,000 volunteer hours assisting the homeless last year, Blanton added, “We can’t do it alone. We need our community to do this.”

Shoreline Community Services offers homeless programs including a trained volunteer outreach team that engaged over 1,100 people on the street last year; providing wrap-around services at The Compass Station including free showers and laundry while connecting people to mental health, substance abuse, and other public services; and the Community Care Group employment program hiring unsheltered to do community cleanup and beautification.

Blanton defined homelessness as “a person living in a temporary location such as a shelter or a place not fit for human habitation,” adding that includes, “Someone in a tent, a car, an abandoned building, the street, or even a shelter, because it’s not a permanent place.”

She presented numerous slides and statistics, mostly from the national 2023 Point In Time Count, depicting the true mass and scale of the homeless plight in beach areas and Citywide. Blanton said a highly conservative estimate is that there are more than 650,000 homeless nationwide, 150,000 in California, and 10,000 in San Diego.

The Shoreline Community Services executive director enumerated the enormous cost of homelessness to society which includes treatment for substance abuse, noting the chronically homeless chalk up an inordinate number of emergency responses, with some individuals requiring ambulances as often as 100 times a year.

“Then there is the social costs of people being left out, looked over, and being seen as less than,” Blanton pointed out.

Regarding the challenges homelessness poses to society, Blanton said, “This is a super convoluted system.” She added those needing housing are thrown into a pool for available spaces adding that “the more vulnerable you are” increases your chances of finding housing more quickly. She added: “It (housing) can take several months – or years – depending on your situation. Right now roughly 140,000 families are waiting for Section 8 (government) housing vouchers, basically a 12-year wait.”

Worse yet, noted Blanton, “For every 10 (homeless) people who are getting into housing, 16 (others) are falling into the system.”

Pointing out that we “Talk a lot about broken systems and not broken people,” Blanton pointed out, “I think we can all agree that many of our (social service) systems need to be revamped, and that’s hard.”

Shoreline Community Services, said Blanton, treats everyone seeking resources and services at The Compass Station as having been “traumatized.” She added, “We need people who can walk hand-in-hand with folks as they’re going through the process.”

Blanton also presented a slide showing the breakdown of San Diego’s homeless population, which closely parallels national averages. Recent statistics reveal that 29% of people living on San Diego’s streets were women, while those ages 55 and older made up 29% of the region’s unsheltered population. A total of 9% of the local homeless population are veterans and 46% of the homeless surveyed were experiencing the condition for the first time.

Concluded Blanton about San Diego’s current homeless housing situation: “Now that we see how long it takes, we say, ‘Let’s get everybody into the system so that they have the potential to get into housing.’ And in the meantime, the question is, ‘How are we going to compassionately care for these folks while they’re waiting, with nowhere to go?’”