Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer on Tuesday passed a policy, with the support of her colleagues, for an evaluation of County sites for emergency housing options, focusing on sleeping cabin villages, sprung shelters, safe parking, or repurposing existing structures for homeless services. The 5-0 vote also authorized County Staff to seek potential partners interested in bringing homeless services to the sites.

“We did the right thing today by agreeing to examine possible sites where we could stand up more infrastructure for emergency shelter options,” said Supervisor Lawson-Remer. “There is precedent for our County doing this in 2022 when there was the 150-person Rosecrans Shelter opened in the Midway neighborhood of my district. The locations in my policy have utilities on site, will help to minimize public costs and provide a greater return on our investment in helping the homeless.”       

As part of Supervisor Lawson-Remer’s policy, her team did research on existing sites for the County to explore but asked others to be considered. Many of the sites have long-term disposition plans that are in various stages of planning and approval to support affordable housing construction but may have a window of several years that the site could support an interim use.

“Homelessness is a crisis affecting people across all our communities and we must consider all available locations,” Supervisor Lawson-Remer continued. “I am confident our County workers will do the required due diligence to include or eliminate potential sites.  They will take all factors into consideration.”

Since joining the Board of Supervisors, Supervisor Lawson-Remer has worked to implement a Senior Shallow Rent Subsidy Program to help 400 seniors and implement a homelessness Diversion program that is expected to keep up to 800 people off the streets.    

Also, the County of San Diego in November developed a sleeping cabin program. It is acquiring about 100 Pallet shelter cabins that it will make available to qualifying organizations and has designated $1.5 million to purchase, deliver and assemble the sleeping cabins at partner sites. These cabins by Pallet, which were on display at the County Administration Center earlier this week, could be used for the County locations outlined in the policy passed today.      

The analysis of County-owned sites available for possible shelters and safe parking to help the homeless will return to the Board of Supervisors in 120 days.   

 To learn more about the Pallet shelters, click here, and to read more on the Supervisor's policy, click here.