San Diego's Operation Shelter to Home has helped find over 100 people housing during the holidays. | Pixabay
San Diego's Operation Shelter to Home has helped find over 100 people housing during the holidays. | Pixabay
Over 100 San Diegans moved from living at the San Diego Convention Center and other shelters into permanent housing during the holidays through an effort called Operation Shelter to Home.
Launched on April 1, 2020, Operation Shelter to Home is an initiative in which people living in shelters were moved to the convention center to help with social distancing in mitigating COVID-19’s spread and to centralize the shelters’ staff, The City of San Diego website reported.
Homeless people living on city streets were brought to the convention center beginning on April 10, the website said.
“Over the past several weeks, teams from Operation Shelter to Home have worked to transition 165 individuals from the Convention Center, Father Joe’s Villages’ Paul Mirabile Center and People Assisting the Homeless (PATH) Connections Interim Housing Program to two hotels purchased and transformed into 332 new units of permanent housing with supportive services,” a Dec. 24 press release said.
Up to 400 people can be housed in the two furnished hotels – “one in Mission Valley and one in Kearny Mesa,” the press release said.
“Nearly half of the units are now occupied, and the (San Diego) Housing Commission is working with the two contracted service providers, PATH and Father Joe’s Villages, to continue to move people into these new homes, with the intention of having all apartments filled by mid-January,” the press release said.
Operation Shelter to Home has a mission of finding people permanent housing, The City of San Diego’s website said.
Over 1,050 people and 43 families moved to permanent and “longer-term housing” during the pandemic, the press release said.
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria tweeted on Twitter on Dec. 29, 2020, that “our homeless neighbors” are having especially difficult times during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I visited @SDConventionCtr to listen to residents of our interim shelter and thank the workers who have cared for them throughout the pandemic. Let’s keep working until all have permanent homes,” Gloria tweeted.
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