Inside a cavernous, tent-like structure in Venice, beds had been made up this morning, with welcome cards and baskets of toiletries placed on the mattresses for residents of a new 154-bed homeless shelter.

It took almost two years, but the emergency housing center is now officially open.

“If we do not want people living and dying outdoors, we need to bring them indoors,” said Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin.

Called Pacific Sunset, the shelter is located at a former Metro bus yard in the neighborhood's northwest corner, just a block from the Venice Boardwalk.

It includes 100 beds for adults in the hangar-like tent and another 54 for young people in temporary trailers. A central courtyard serves as a community dining space, and colorful murals adorn the sides of the trailers.

Service providers with shelter operators People Assisting the Homeless and Safe Place for Youth were on hand to start moving people in today.

Mayor Eric Garcetti joined an emotional Bonin in a ceremonial ribbon-cutting for the new shelter. Both officials acknowledged that the road to the project’s completion had been tumultuous.

In 2018, when the project was still in the planning stages, neighboring residents petitioned to block the project and jeered at a town hall meeting attended by Garcetti and Bonin; a lawsuit filed by a neighborhood group opposed to the shelter delayed the start of construction for months; and at the beginning of the year, authorities discovered a device resembling an explosive placed close by the site.

Garcetti said today that the town hall had been “the most traumatic public meeting” he’d experienced as an elected official.

“I knew that if we just got to today... once this [shelter] isn’t filled with the abstract fears people have, but with the material flesh and blood of our brothers and sisters, it becomes a totally different struggle,” he said.

The shelter is the tenth to open as part of Garcetti's temporary housing initiative, called A Bridge Home. Launched in 2018, the effort is aimed at bolstering the city's supply of short-term housing where homeless residents can be connected with services like counseling and healthcare, as well as resources needed to find permanent housing.

In 2016, Los Angeles voters approved a ballot measure funding construction of up to 10,000 apartments for homeless residents, but most of those units won’t be ready for people to move into for at least another year.

Meanwhile, the number of unhoused residents continues to rise. Last year, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported a 16 percent citywide increase in the number of people identified in an annual homeless count.

Still, proposals for new shelters haven’t always been popular. Local officials scrapped plans for a housing site in Koreatown after residents and business owners marched through the streets in protest. A shelter at an alternative site a few blocks east is now under construction.

At the 2018 town hall meeting, most residents opposed to the project complained that it would draw more homeless people to the area. But Garcetti’s program has also drawn criticism from homeless advocates, who argue that the shelters provide cover for “intensive enforcement” of laws that restrict how much people are allowed to keep with them when living on the sidewalk.

Bonin argued today that effort spent overcoming community opposition to the shelter had been well worth it.

“It’s true. There’s been a lot of controversy,” he said. “It has not been pleasant, and it has not been easy. But the alternative is knowing that we did nothing while people continued to die on our streets.”