A venue that hosts some of Hollywood’s biggest and most glamorous stars each summer became San Diego’s largest single homeless shelter on Wednesday.

“The Convention Center is a welcoming beacon for people from around the world, and during this pandemic, it will be a beacon of hope for our community,” San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said in a morning press conference outside the Harbor Drive facility.

The venue, once one of the city’s main economic drivers, is being used as a shelter to help stop the spread of the coronavirus among the homeless population. It will be filled in phases, beginning with people now in other shelters and later taking in people who are living outdoors, Faulconer said.

Ultimately, the Convention Center could shelter and serve up to 1,500 people.


Throughout the day, buses carried 260 men and 170 women from the Alpha Project’s two large tented bridge shelters to the Convention Center as part of “Operation Shelter to Home,” which Faulconer described as an effort to not only shelter homeless people, but find them permanent housing.

While three local unsheltered homeless people are known to have COVID-19, no cases have been detected at area homeless shelters. Still, county health officials were concerned that the tight living conditions at several shelters presented a potential breeding ground for the highly contagious disease.

People nationwide have been told to keep a distance of at least 6 feet from one another, but beds were about 3 feet apart at one Alpha Project bridge shelter

The new Convention Center shelter will be in Hall H, a major attraction at San Diego Comic-Con International, which is scheduled for July 23-26 this year. Fans spend the night outside the hall each year to see film stars and to be the first to watch clips of blockbusters movies.


That hall, along with Halls F and G, now is filled with 750 fold-up cots with thin mattresses, with a partition separating men from women.

San Diego Convention Center President and CEO Rip Rippetoe referred to Comic-Con International and other events while standing in front of what he called “The famous Hall H.”

“When the time’s right, we’ll go back to hosting conventions and trade shows,” he said. “But we’re committed to lending our operational expertise to this urgent, large-scale effort.”

San Diego County Supervisor Nathan Fletcher referred to the Convention Center as an incredible asset that on any given day showcases entertainment or the latest innovations in technology or automobiles.


“And starting today, this Convention Center will showcase the latest in humanity and compassion,” he said.

While no groups of homeless people with COVID-19 have yet to be identified, county health officials have reported there have been several clusters of infections.

Dr. Nick Yphantides, the county’s chief medical officer, said during the health department’s daily public COVID briefing Wednesday that a total of 11 different clusters of cases have now been identified throughout the county.

Those include one at an unnamed skilled nursing facility in El Cajon that saw one confirmed case and five people who are under investigation after showing COVID symptoms.


A second grouping, which Yphantides called an “outbreak” involved just two people: a San Diego police officer and his partner.

At the Wednesday morning Convention Center press conference, Alpha Project President and CEO Bob McElroy choked up as he recalled talking with clients the morning of the move.

Alpha Project President and CEO Bob McElroy stands in front of the San Diego Convention Center to discuss the move of clients from his shelter into the venue Wednesday. (Gary Warth)

“I’ve been crying all morning,” he said. “When I walk in, they’re always asking me how I’m doing, because I’m the old guy. And they’re so happy that we’re taking all of them. And we’re all moving together. We’re not a shelter. We’re a community.”


San Diego City Councilman Chris Ward said using the Convention Center will help contain the spread of the virus and save lives.

“Keeping San Diego safe means keeping all San Diegans safe,” he said. “Opening the Convention Center and transforming our existing shelter network for this crisis is a perfect example of how we must use everything in our control to meet this challenge.”

At an afternoon press conference, Faulconer said other public buildings and even parking lots now closed to the public could be repurposed during the health crisis for health officials.

Recreation centers and libraries may be used by hospital workers as cases rise and hospital space becomes limited, he said.


“As we are seeing in New York, which has not even hit its apex yet, we need an all-hands-on-deck approach,” he said. “And if we need city properties to help battle COVID-19, whether it be for a field hospital, for staging equipment or for conducting medical tests, my order ensures that the city of San Diego is ready to help.”

Tamera Kohler, CEO of the San Diego Regional Tasks Force on the Homeless, said there is no set move-in date for other shelters to transfer clients to the Convention Center, but she expected the 200-bed Veterans Village of San Diego bridge shelter or the Paul Mirabile Center interim shelter at Father Joe’s Villages could be next.

Kohler said she also has reached out to Operation Hope, which recently announced it may close its 45-bed shelter in Vista because of a funding shortage.

While the Convention Center will be the largest single homeless shelter ever operated in San Diego, it could not accommodate all unsheltered people in the county. A count from 2019, the most recent data available, found about 4,500 homeless people were unsheltered countywide.


Faulconer said expanded efforts to find housing for people at the Convention Center shelter will lead to sheltering people now living outdoors, as one cot will become available for every person who moves out.

The city/county effort includes an Operation Shelter to Home Incident Command team, which is focused at finding housing housing for people at the shelter. Its strategies include enhancing the Family Reunification Program operated by Downtown San Diego Partnership, waiving regulations to create more room-sharing opportunities, prioritizing people with benefits such as social security and disability income, using flexible spending pool funds and providing rental assistance.

Faulconer said more than a dozen government agencies, nonprofits and stakeholders were involved in creating the Convention Center shelter, which was first discussed just 10 days before.

Two large mobile showers with eight stalls each and another mobile shower for disabled people are on the site along with a large trailer that holds 15 washing machines and 15 dryers for laundry.


John Brady of the homeless choir Voices of Our City said his organization would provide an audio system that will play white noise at night to help people sleep and drown out noises such as snoring from their neighbors.

Not all shelters will need to use the Convention Center to help create more space between their beds.

In Escondido, Interfaith Community Services Executive Director Greg Anglea said the nonprofit moved about half the residents at its 40-bed Haven House shelter into motel rooms provided by the Regional Task Force on the Homeless to enhance social distancing

The San Diego Rescue Mission also has been affected by the outbreak, but doesn’t have plans to use the Convention Center.


Donnie Dee, president and CEO of the San Diego Rescue Mission, said the nonprofit closed its nightly emergency shelter for women and children Wednesday out of concern that the people coming in and out could infect the 250 residents who are part of a year-round program.

“We just realized that this was inevitable,” he said. “At some point, someone who has contracted the virus is going to come back to the emergency shelter.”

Dee said the 250 residents at the mission have been quarantined since March 13 and are not allowed to leave the building. Some families who had stayed at the emergency shelter were transferred to Rescue Mission residential programs, some have found shelter with the Salvation Army or other agencies, and 34 women have transferred to a Golden Hall shelter operated by Father Joe’s Villages, Dee said.

On a positive notice, Dee said that during the outbreak, so many donations have come into the Partners for Hunger Relief food distribution program that the mission is distributing meals to 20 agencies a day, while it used to distribute to 20 a week.


In other steps being taken to protect the homeless population during the outbreak, 1,925 hygiene kits have been distributed to unsheltered people and 282 handwashing stations and 10 portable toilets have been installed for public use.

The county also has acquired about 2,000 motel and hotel rooms for people to use during the outbreak. Of those, 441 have been allocated to the Regional Task Force on the Homeless to provide to homeless people at risk of contracting the virus. Of those, 183 rooms are occupied by 306 guests as of Wednesday.

Also on Wednesday, many people in the tight-knight Chaldean community in El Cajon said they were on edge after learning that a young pharmacy technician at PalmCare on North Mollison Avenue in El Cajon had died from complications of the coronavirus.

“Everybody’s upset,” said Dr. Noori Barka, president of the biochemical testing company Calbiotech and president of Chaldean League of California. “We acted right away. When we got the news, I contacted the health department on March 22 so we would know we needed to close down. I knew about (PalmCare) pharmacy and that they had almost 20 employees, delivering medications to people at their homes, delivering to seniors.


Barka said he told county health officials that employees of the pharmacy still were delivering to the community.

“The recommendation was to stay home for two weeks in isolation,” he said. “This is the law. The pharmacy said they disinfected (the business) and told their employees if someone had symptoms to stay home.

“I told them from beginning, to say the truth to (customers). We are not blaming you because something happened; this disease could affect any one of us. We must bring awareness to the community. I know in San Francisco where there was one infection, they closed the whole Home Depot. I don’t understand why they didn’t close. They should stay in quarantine. I don’t understand whey the health department has to enforce these things.”

Barka said he heard that one of the employees at the pharmacy went to a birthday party with a group of people and he is concerned “now things are going to explode.”


“People are worried, they are upset, they want to know why (the pharmacy) didn’t act in time,” Barka said. “There are four cases now from there. We don’t know if they infected others. It’s a cluster and so we don’t know how many people. Are we maybe going to see more cases? I understand there are nine people in the ICU at Grossmont Hospital, and seven of them are Chaldean. Seven are very sick.”

Paul Sisson, Karen Pearlman and Lyndsay Winkley contributed to this article.