The San Diego City Council voted unanimously April 11 to award Father Joe’s Villages a $4-million Community Development Block Grant to build a new affordable-housing development to help alleviate the homelessness crisis.
The grant will be used to fund land-acquisition costs for the future housing community, which will be located at 17th and Commercial Streets and is expected to be completed in 2026. It will provide 107 units of affordable housing in proximity to Father Joe’s Villages’ comprehensive services.
This community will bring Father Joe’s Villages closer to its goal of providing 2,000 units of affordable housing in San Diego through the Turning the Key initiative. Other communities, such as St. Teresa of Calcutta Villa, have already helped hundreds of individuals, families and veterans leave homelessness.
As the crisis grows, housing remains a critical component to supporting the health and safety of the homeless.
“The growing homelessness crisis in San Diego is, at its core, a housing issue,” said Deacon Jim Vargas, president and CEO of Father Joe’s Villages. “Together, we can address this crisis head-on with new affordable housing and by offering communities like this, which represent a tangible hope for the most vulnerable among us.”
Original story on Southern Cross
Are there any “strings” attached to that grant?
Good news to help a lot of folks. Great. Now control the southern border and stop all of the fentanyl from coming up and fanning the flames of pandemic opioid addiction which is at the root of the homelessness crisis.
I am encouraged by the announcement last week that the DOJ has a multipart action against the Mexican cartel at the heart of the fentanyl problem. Too late, and hopefully not too little, but an encouraging start.
Hopefully the crackdown on US opioid prescriptions is having an effect on that aspect. I know getting pain killers even for cancer pain is extremely watched over by federal and California authorities. Again, hopefully not too little but definitely too late for thousands ofnpeoplemwhosenlives have been ruined just because they thought they were taking safe meds for chronic and devastating pain.
I ditto that sentiment.
You can conquer drug addiction and restore your life to normal. Put your intention into the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Drug addiction is an injury to the brain and it can heal. Please have hope.
This is a willful suspension of intellect that the Gov. of California and the president of the US stand by and let this happen. The progressive media industrial complex is complicit and leaving human debris behind to achieve their goals.
https://voiceofsandiego.org/2022/11/21/fentanyl-plagues-san-diegos-homeless-population/
At its core, the growing homelessness issue is a drug addiction and mental illness issue. How affordable will any housing be for people who are irresponsible, who don’t want a job, couldn’t hold down a job, who are antisocial, and who really don’t have any chance at a normal life? Rather than housing units in the city, something like a camp many miles away should be built where they can be corralled, kept away from the general population, permitted to use their drugs, given meals and showers, but other than that left alone to live in the squalor that is truly all they are capable of. You’re not going to civilize many of those people. Better to shoo them away.
Show me someone who’s homeless, and 4/5 times it will be someone addicted to drugs with severe brain damage as a result. Drug addiction and homelessness are usually intertwined.
Excellent comment. I just shake my head in disbelief at Deacon Jim Vargas’s comment that “the growing homelessness crisis in San Diego is a housing issue”. It’s the growing crisis of drugs, mental illness due to drugs, and the concomitant violence. That’s the issue. The genuine homeless will eventually be housed, and will abide by the rules of living in a temporary shelter until housing is found. That’s how it should work, and women and children first, by the way. The drugged up, boozed up misfits wouldn’t set foot in a shelter because they are just profoundly anti-social.
Here’s a link to San Diego news today: https://www.kusi.com/criminal-homeless-forcing-downtown-san-diego-homeowners-to-move-out/
Those who work with drug addicts and mentally ill homeless always say “Housing first.”
Homelessness is not caused by drugs. Drug users, people with mental challenges, and others can be housed.
The cause of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing.
If a family loses a job and doesn’t have the money to keep paying the mortgage, they will be homeless.
Our church has housed families that fathers and mothers that work full time, but can’t afford the first month’s rent for a new place to live, or lost the car that allowed them to keep their old job, and the list goes on.
Drug use is the plague of the country right now, but many users don’t have a place to live.
Shipping them to camps out of site isn’t the answer either.