Gathered in the same place at the same time, several of San Diego’s leading experts on combating homelessness were asked the same question:

What needs to be done?

From Amy Gonyeau, chief operating officer at Alpha Project, came an answer that many found surprising:

Stop giving homeless panhandlers money, she told 380 people gathered for a recent forum at the Balboa Theatre in downtown San Diego. Stop feeding them in parking lots.


“It’s not helping,” she said.

Gonyeau wasn’t being cold-hearted. Her non-profit, founded more than 30 years ago, is one of the city’s oldest and largest homeless-assistance agencies, with programs that provide housing, drug and alcohol treatment, job training and other services.

Her point was that street handouts, however well-meaning, don’t move the homeless toward permanent solutions. They make it easier for them to stay where they are, she said. Better to have them go places where they’ll be empowered, not enabled.

With her comments, Gonyeau waded into an ongoing controversy about how best to help the homeless, especially when it comes to food. More than 70 cities across the country have proposed laws limiting street feedings, according to a tally kept by the National Coalition for the Homeless, which opposes the restrictions.


“Meals should not come quid pro quo,” the Washington D.C.-based advocacy group says on its website. “A need so basic must be addressed in any way it can be.”

The issue has flared locally in recent weeks. The El Cajon City Council unanimously passed an emergency ordinance last month banning food distribution on city-owned property in response to the outbreak of hepatitis A that has killed 20 people and sickened more than 530 in the county, many of them homeless.

In Pacific Beach, a resident named Matt Phillips has started a petition asking for an end to the free weekly meals given to the homeless by a handful of churches there.

The dinners contribute to the “habitual state” of the participants’ homelessness, according to the petition on change.org. It blames meal attendees for bringing crime to the neighborhood.


Bob Rhodes, the pastor at one of the churches, Pacific Beach United Methodist, said its Wednesday gatherings started more than 20 years ago and are open to the community, not just the homeless. Some who come have housing, but are struggling financially, he said. Others attend for the fellowship.

Along with the meals, there are medical clinics and referrals to agencies that help the homeless find housing. “What we are really trying to do is provide a comprehensive service,” he said.

By late Friday, the petition had attracted almost 480 signatures. And in a sign of just how emotional this issue can be, it had also triggered a second petition on change.org for Phillips “to go (bleep) himself.“

That one had five signatures.


More visibility

There are dozens of churches and charities that distribute food regularly in the city of San Diego, where, according to a street count last January, almost 62 percent of the county’s 9,116 homeless congregate.

Of the 5,619 people counted as homeless in the city, 3,231 of them were unsheltered — sleeping in parks or canyons, on the sidewalk, in their cars.

That’s up from 2,745 in 2016. There was also an increase, 64 percent, in the number of tents and hand-built structures in the city, from 411 in 2016 to 674. (Downtown, the number of structures soared 104 percent, to 418.)

That’s made the homeless more visible to many people, and has helped spur the efforts to feed them. There are programs that hand out burritos on Sunday mornings and others that make enchiladas on Monday nights. Churches that open their fellowship halls to serve spaghetti. Volunteers who walk around downtown and hand out sandwiches. Some homeless people arrange their days and weeks around where they can find food.


For those providing meals, especially churches, helping the poor is part of their calling, part of their mission. “As Christians, as people of faith, we find a great deal of inspiration in sacred text,” said Rhodes, the pastor in Pacific Beach. “Jesus said to his disciples, ‘You feed them,’ and we take that to heart.”

Others see their programs as a hands-on way to give back to the community or to teach young people empathy for the less fortunate.

Even critics of the feedings applaud the underlying compassion. “People are doing it with the best of intentions,” Gonyeau said at the recent downtown homelessness forum.

But increasingly the focus by government and homeless-assistance agencies is on long-term solutions, not stop-gap measures. That’s why more money is being directed away from temporary housing into an approach known as “housing first,” which gets people off the street quickly and into apartments and then provides services designed to keep them there: substance-abuse counseling, mental-health care, job training.


That’s why providers like Alpha Project, St. Vincent de Paul, the Salvation Army, the San Diego Housing Commission and others that want federal money for the dozens of programs they operate in the county are graded on how many of their beds are being used, how many nights the homeless are in them, and how many of those helped wind up back on the streets.

And it’s why there’s renewed debate about whether street-feeding programs are effective.

Addressing the causes

Robert Marbut is a consultant in San Antonio, Texas who by his count has helped hundreds of communities and agencies across the country dramatically reduce homelessness. His focus, he said, is on the “core conditions” behind homelessness, including poor mental- and behavioral-health, domestic violence, and post-traumatic stress in military veterans.

“I’m all about getting people into 24/7 programs that treat the root causes,” he said. “Lack of food is not a cause of homelessness. Never has been, never will be.”


He encourages churches and other charity groups to align their feeding efforts with agencies that steer the homeless into recovery and rehabilitation. “Don’t just cook hamburgers on a barbecue in a parking lot,” he said. “Don’t hand out sandwiches in the park. That’s probably the least-productive thing you could do.”

But the National Coalition for the Homeless says it’s a “myth” that feeding programs enable the homeless to remain homeless. “Food-sharing programs often represent the only way some homeless individuals will have access to healthy, safe food on a given day,” it said in a 2014 report. “Due to illness, disability, or a lack of access to transportation, many rely on food being distributed in areas near them.”

The report was the third the group has done since 2007 on street feedings amid a surge in cities around the country proposing laws restricting the meals. Some of the laws banned feedings in public parks. Some required new food-safety permits. Others moved them away from residential neighborhoods.

Problems such as trash, thievery and vandalism were often cited by those backing the laws, but the coalition believes the real goal has often been to push the homeless out of sight.


“If cities continue to restrict or ban the compassionate act of food sharing,” the coalition report says, “homeless individuals’ physical, mental and emotional health will suffer and deteriorate over time.”

While the debate about their value continues, the feedings remain popular with the homeless. As part of the countywide street count last January, volunteers surveyed more than 1,000 people who were unsheltered. They were asked what services they regularly use. Thirty-two percent said they accessed health care; 16 percent used bus passes,; 14 percent, drop-in day centers; 10 percent, emergency shelters.

By far the most commonly used, at 61 percent: Free meals.


john.wilkens@sduniontribune.com