Naturopathic Doctor in National City, CA

CHULA VISTA, CA — Two South Bay cities will consider Tuesday adopting bans on homeless encampments on public property, the latest in a move to criminalize homelessness following a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year.

The City Councils of Chula Vista and National City will consider the bans and could follow the county and cities of San Diego, San Marcos, Escondido and others.

"In the last four years, the unsheltered crisis has grown with a number of unsheltered doubling from prior years," a city staff report from the city of Chula Vista reads. "Unsheltered persons frequently occupy public spaces and other places not meant for human habitation."

The ordinance to be considered at the 5 p.m. meeting in Chula Vista would "prohibit campsites and sitting, sleeping, lying, or storing personal property on public property" at specific locations in the city.

National City's ordinance is similar, even acknowledging the cascading impact of San Diego's ban.

"The city's homeless outreach team has seen an influx of unsheltered individuals in National City from the City of San Diego since San Diego's encampment ordinance has gone into effect," a staff report from the city read. "As the number of unsheltered individuals increases, so does the health and safety risks from unregulated human activity when tents or encampments are set up in public areas."

The number of homeless in the region increased by around 20% between 2022 and 2023, according to the Regional Task Force on Homelessness' annual Point-in-Time Count. National City saw an increase in homelessness of 9.4% between 2023 and 2024 -- from 159 to 174 people -- while Chula Vista saw a whopping increase of 58.2%, from 318 to 503.

However, the number of shelter beds in the county is woefully under what is needed. In the city of San Diego alone, future developments at Golden Hall, Father Joe's Paul Mirabile Center and the Rachel's Promise Shelter, along with the scheduled closure of several temporary shelters, means that the city's current shelter bed count of 2,508 could drop precipitously in coming months.

There are 3,489 unsheltered homeless in that city, as of January's count.

The rise of these bans follows a June decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the so-called Grants Pass case that authorized governments to enforce anti-camping laws even if no alternate housing is available. The decision allows punishments for violating anti-camping laws, including citations or arrests.

The Supreme Court's 6-3 decision on June 28 reversed a ruling by a San Francisco appeals court that found outdoor sleeping bans amount to cruel and unusual punishment when there is no available shelter space for the homeless. The ruling of the Supreme Court's majority found the 8th Amendment does not apply to outdoor sleeping bans.

The case originated in the rural Oregon town of Grants Pass, which appealed a ruling striking down local ordinances that fined people $295 for sleeping outside after tents began crowding public parks. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over nine Western states, ruled in 2018 that such bans violate the 8th Amendment of those who are in areas where there are not enough shelter beds.

The three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.

In July, Gov. Gavin Newsom followed the Grants Pass case with an executive order for the removal of homeless encampments in the state while adding that local authorities will decide on the removals.

The guidance follows a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this summer allowing cities to enforce bans on sleeping outside in public spaces.

"The state has been hard at work to address this crisis on our streets," Newsom said in a statement. "There are simply no more excuses."

Newsom's order directs state agencies to move urgently to address encampments while supporting and assisting the individuals living in them. It also provides guidance for cities and counties to do the same.

"We must act with urgency to address dangerous encampments," Newsom said.

Deacon Jim Vargas, president and CEO at Father Joe's Villages, commented on Newsom's executive order.

"People -- no matter their circumstances -- have the right to safe and adequate shelter. But thousands of individuals and families across California have few options when they come to lay their head down for the night," he said. "As one of the largest homeless services providers in Southern California, we know that jail is not a solution to this growing crisis. It is critical that any efforts to remove encampments are coupled with efforts to increase the availability and diversity of shelters in our cities and regions, including shelter options that focus specifically on unique needs, such as addressing substance use.

"Along with shelter, we must also prioritize increasing the supply of affordable housing and the ability to access comprehensive services that help people achieve and maintain self-sufficiency," Vargas wrote in a statement. "Homelessness is a crisis we can solve in our communities, but the solutions must be grounded in our shared humanity. We must meet this moment with both compassion and action for our neighbors in need."

— City News Service

OBITUARY

IN THE CARE OF

Funeraria del Angel National City

Dora Maria Valencia Magaña was born in Tijuana, Baja California, to parents Elia Magaña and Alfonso Valencia Arellano. Her early life was marked by both tragedy and resilience; after being orphaned as a child, Dora and her sister, Judith Valencia Magaña, were taken in by the Lily of the Valley Orphanage in Playas, Baja California. Despite the hardships, Dora’s beautiful voice and unwavering faith shone brightly, especially as she sang praises and worshipped Jesus.

It was through her singing in the orphanage choir that Dora met her husband, Paco Villanueva, who was captivated by her spirit and voice. They married on September 22, 2001, and soon welcomed their first son, David Villanueva, born on October 14, 2002. The family moved out of the orphanage and settled in their own home in Playas, Baja California. In 2009, they relocated to San Diego, California, where they welcomed their second son, Edwin Villanueva, born on December 26, 2009.

Dora and Paco faced the unimaginable grief of losing their third child, Josiah Villanueva, who was stillborn on February 17, 2014. Although, Dora and Paco eventually separated, they remained friends, united in their dedication to raising their two amazing sons, David and Edwin.

Recently, Dora had moved to Boulevard, California, where she continued to embrace life with her characteristic love and positivity. On June 28, 2024, Dora’s life was tragically cut short in a car accident. Her absence leaves an immense void in the hearts of all who knew her, but we are blessed to have such beautiful memories of her life.

Dora’s life was a testament to her strength and determination. She faced many battles with courage and grace, always finding ways to overcome the challenges before her. Dora will be remembered for her loving nature and her ability to show love in countless ways—through her warm hugs, her generous hands, and the delicious meals she lovingly prepared. She was an exceptional cook, finding joy in creating dishes that brought people together. She also found peace and solace in nature, especially loving the ocean and mountains. Her connection to these natural wonders was a source of profound comfort and inspiration.

Dora carried the grief of losing Josiah with her throughout her life, yet she also carried an unwavering hope and love for her family.

Though we deeply mourn her loss, we find comfort in knowing that Dora is now at peace, reunited with her beloved Josiah, and cradled in the arms of Jesus. Her legacy of love, strength, and faith will forever remain in the hearts of her sons, David and Edwin, her sister Judith, and all who were blessed to know her.

Rest in peace, Dora Valencia Magaña. You will be forever missed and forever cherished, beautiful butterfly

A visitation for Dora will be held Friday, July 12, 2024 from 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM at Funeraria Del Angel Chula Vista, 753 Broadway, Chula Vista, CA 91910.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held Wednesday for National City's first shelter for unhoused.

NATIONAL CITY, Calif. (KGTV) -- National City officials and other leaders on Wednesday introduced the city’s first homeless shelter.

The shelter, located at 2400 Euclid Avenue, will be run by the San Diego Rescue Mission and is named the South County Lighthouse Center.

The South County Lighthouse Center is a part of San Diego Rescue Mission's expansion project in the region, and is one more location along with shelters in Bankers Hill and Oceanside.

Formerly a charter school, the facility is being transformed into a center with 162 beds available for unhoused men, women, and children. It includes a separate space for women with their children.

The shelter is opening at a critical time when National City's homeless population is steadily growing.

According to the city’s 2024 “Point-in-Time” data charts, 179 unhoused people are currently accounted for.

San Diego Rescue Mission Vice President of Operations Edvin Liku said they are determined to help every single one these unhoused individuals.

Liku said oftentimes a shelter's first challenge is convincing the unhoused community come into the shelter, because he said shelters are known to be run-down. He added it can take months of convincing, so successfully bringing people off the streets starts with the facility.

"If the facility is something like this, that smells good, that has the best furniture, that has the best bathrooms, in their mind they are saying, 'This is nice, they will take care of us,'" Liku said.

Liku said after members join the shelter, they will stay for about a month and will be paired with services that will help them transition into stable housing.

Many of those services, according to Liku, will start with a trauma-informed approach, meaning the center will address abuse, mental illness, addiction, and more.

After the official opening on Thursday, the shelter's outreach team will hit the areas in National City where many of the unhoused stay, and they will start extending invitations to the shelter by offering their mobile shower services.

"We have a shower trailer that's designated for National City," Liku said. "We bring the shower to where homeless individuals are. Outreach can be complicated, and changing people's minds to come to a center like this is complicated. It starts with taking a shower, changing clothes, and providing some food."

One major donor for the shelter is the Padres Foundation.

In Wednesday's ribbon cutting, Tom Seidler, President of the Padres Foundation, said that after late team owner Peter Seidler's passing, the foundation wanted to continue his passion for the community and one of the biggest issues on his heart was homelessness.

The Peter Seidler Legacy Project was established, and the South County Lighthouse Center is officially the first project in the portfolio.

Seidler said they made a $350,000 donation to build the shelter's community center, and it's also the largest contribution in the Padres Foundation history.

Copyright 2024 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Contributors: Charlotte Radulovich / Video Journalist

Officials in National City announced the opening of a new homeless shelter Wednesday morning, marking a major expansion of the number of beds and services available for people experiencing homelessness in the South Bay.

The shelter, called the South County Lighthouse, is located in a former church building on Euclid Avenue and is run by San Diego Rescue Mission. The faith-based, Christian nonprofit also operates three other shelters in the county, along with one of the city of San Diego’s inclement weather shelters.

The Lighthouse will offer hot meals, showers, laundry, job training, case management and a temporary place to sleep for 30 days. It will also accept pets. At the end of that term, officials said the shelter will give clients options to move on to somewhere else, like the Rescue Mission’s long-term recovery center in downtown San Diego.

The organization plans to hold Bible studies and other religious activities as well. But officials said they won’t require anyone to take part in those activities.

Rescue Mission CEO Donnie Dee said the new shelter is part of his organization’s efforts to take a regional approach and prevent people being pushed from city to city.

“That’s a part of what we’re dealing with,” Dee said. “People are moving around because we’re harassing them and we’re saying ‘you can’t stay here,’ and so they’re going to some other place where they’re not going to be harassed as much.”

For years, cities in the South Bay have offered few resources for people who need temporary shelter. The only other homeless shelter in the region is Chula Vista’s tiny homes project, which focuses on transitional housing and has faced operating challenges.

“You could call 211, and they couldn't give you anything locally other than going to a completely different city,” said Rosy Vasquez, an advocate and former CEO of Community Through Hope.

National City’s new shelter expands those options significantly. Vasquez said she’s particularly hopeful because Rescue Mission is already operating two other emergency shelters in Oceanside and San Diego.

“What's great is we're not looking at a pilot program,” she said. “We're looking at a programming that's already been implemented and that they've been able to find success. I think that's very encouraging.”

National City has around 174 residents living on the street according to the January point-in-time-count, although experts say counts like that under-represent the true number of people experiencing homelessness.

That count found that the South Bay is home to around 8% of the county’s unhoused community. The city of San Diego accounts for the vast majority of unsheltered residents.

The South County Lighthouse has been three years in the making. In late 2021, the National City City Council voted to approve a conditional use permit for the project under then-Mayor Alejandra Sotelo-Solis.

City Councilmember Marcus Bush lives just down the street from the new shelter. When permits for the project came before the City Council, Bush said he rallied his neighbors to increase support.

“You don't really find too many elected leaders that live right next door to a homeless shelter that actually support it,” Bush said. “But this is what we need to do, because this is a homeless crisis and this is something that is needed in our community.”

The new shelter is funded entirely by private donors and won’t rely on any public dollars for construction or operations, according to Dee. He also said Rescue Mission has not made any agreements to prioritize National City residents. But Dee said shelter staff are working closely with National City’s outreach team to admit new clients.

Some advocates don’t agree with Rescue Mission’s focus on religious activities, including advocate Rachel Hayes, who moved into permanent housing last year after decades of living on the street.

“Faith-based is not for everybody,” Hayes told KPBS earlier this spring. “Nobody knows what they need more than the person themselves.”

Other projects to address homelessness are also underway in the South Bay. The city of Chula Vista is hoping to turn a motel on Palomar Street into a new permanent, supportive housing complex, although that project has faced delays.

The South County Lighthouse is currently starting to add guests and will be accepting up to 75 people for now. By the end of the year, they hope to be offering temporary housing to more than 160.

To learn more about getting admitted to the South County Lighthouse, visit San Diego Rescue Mission’s website or contact National City’s HOME Team at (619) 336-4537.

After many decades of being divided by highways, community members in National City, CA are building capacity to reconnect their community in a project that will also acknowledge their community’s heritage and future.

The National City Southeast Greenspace Corridor Project is receiving support from the Community Connectors Program, led by Smart Growth America in collaboration with Equitable Cities, the New Urban Mobility Alliance, and America Walks with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Learn more about the Community Connectors Program.

Often romanticized in the media, Southern California has been the home and the template for the modern US highway that we know today. Media portrays these highways as facilitating economic growth and safer and speedier commutes for area residents. However, the underbelly of that media portrayal fails to acknowledge the divisiveness those highways create, separating communities, destroying cultural and economic assets, and exposing many vulnerable road users to deadly conditions.

However, Southern California, especially the greater San Diego region, didn’t have divisive highways when those communities were initially developed. For San Diego and the greater Southern California region, one only has to look to the Robert Moses of the West, Mr. Caltrans, Jacob Dekema. Dekema came to the San Diego region in 1955 as its first Caltrans district director. At the time, the region was home to only 25 miles of highways. When Dekema retired in 1980, he had overseen that network growing into 485 miles of highways and entrenched a culture dependent on the car.

One of those communities in the shadows of, and sliced by the intrusive, life-sized sculpture dedicated to the car, is National City, CA. This diverse community of 56,000 as of the 2020 census, had its community sliced and diced by the sprawling highway creation. I-5 divides the city from it’s waterfront to the west, and I-805 runs through the heart of the city’s east side.

The 805, like many highways across the country, came into consciousness around 1956, with its construction in the late 1960s that wrapped up by 1975. Parallel to the highway’s construction, efforts in National City in 1969 revisited zoning to facilitate auto-oriented strip mall development, further setting up a concrete jungle for residents.

The most disruptive and obsolete highway construction for I-805 is Exit 11A. This exit was built to facilitate a highway to future highway transfer (what was to be known as the El Toyon Freeway or SR-252). Through intense community advocacy and opposition, the Toyon Freeway project was canceled in 1980 and removed from consciousness in 1994. However, Exit 11A remained, today serving as the 43rd Street exit, which drops a driver off at the auto-oriented Southcrest Park Plaza.

The multicultural tapestry that connects National City and Southeast San Diego (SESD) today has been left with a disproportionate share of challenges. The community lacks green space, has high levels of diesel particulate matter exposure, faces transportation barriers (due to the intricate web of highways around it), plus more and bigger cars zooming by community streets. These challenges have eroded the community’s quality of life, health outcomes, and well-being, particularly for those living in low-income households.

There is considerable acreage lying fallow under the shadow of the 43rd Street ramp. The land under the freeway occasionally is used by Caltrans as a highway maintenance and operations storage space, but otherwise remains a living scar for the community, overlapping National City and Southeast San Diego and preventing them from being fully connected to their fellow neighbors. With the economic decisions made in the 1960s, economic development opportunities remain poor in the area, with value generated in the area not fully captured and invested back into the community.

Even in the midst of an overbearing highway structure dividing various neighborhoods in northeast National City and Southeast San Diego, members of the community have worked to bridge infrastructure divides through cultural activities and streetscape beautification. One of those efforts, Joe’s Pocket Farm, has served as a catalyst for area advocates to push for a holistic community vision to reconnect the community.

Starting as a vacant land plot by I-805 and Division Street, Mr. Jose Nuñez cultivated a pocket garden near his home for many years before moving away from the area in 2008. This pocket garden fell into disrepair and turned into a dumping ground until community members organized to save the garden and turn it into a community asset. In late 2009, community members engaged the National City City Council to reclaim the vacant and dilapidated garden into what is today the Joe’s Pocket Farm. This advocacy and organizing ultimately led to the creation of a local-area nonprofit, community garden, and social justice organization, what is Mundo Gardens today, which is aimed at empowering youth and community members on cultivating solutions to address social determinants of health.

Not long after Mundo Gardens’ founding, the Urban Collaborative Project (UCP) was formed. Created in 2013 as a nonprofit organization serving redlined communities in National City and Southeast San Diego, UCP leverages a data-driven, community self-healing approach to tackle key issues, including building social infrastructure and capital, transportation and infrastructure equity, health disparity and environmental justice, cultural beautification, and housing and community development.

Mundo Gardens and UCP are pieces of a larger community-driven movement that has been in the making over the past two decades on reconnecting their community and mitigating social determinants of health. Community conversations have scoped out the Greenspace Corridor Project, which would unify National City and Southeast San Diego through reforestation, cultural art, and community. This project aims to accomplish various tasks, including but not limited to, 1) dismantling the 43rd Street exit ramp from I-805 and the defunct SR-252 built segment, 2) creating a community park on the reclaimed highway land centered on community culture, community health, and the natural environment, 3) stimulate social equity investment in the community, and 4) reconnecting the greater community to its culture and heritage.

The National City / Southeast San Diego community coalition, which is advancing the Greenspace Corridor Project, has made great strides in building its community network, which now includes city staff from National City, Council of Equity Advocacy San Diego, Kumeyaay Community College, Tocayo Engagement, SANDAG staff, Caltrans District 11 staff, among others.

This coalition joins other community coalitions around the country selected in July 2023 to be part of the Community Connectors program. This program has allowed the National City / Southeast San Diego community coalition, alongside their peers, to access technical assistance and capacity building support to advance their community project. In November 2023, the coalition met alongside their peers in Atlanta for a Community Connectors convening. At that convening, the National City / Southeast San Diego community coalition was able to map out project challenges and possible wins, plus flesh out a preliminary implementation plan.

In March 2024, the community coalition received double good news: two major wins in their collective advocacy and outreach efforts to support and fund the Greenspace Corridor Project. On March 12, 2024, Caltrans announced the coalition as one of three grant winners of the state’s Reconnecting Communities: Highways to Boulevards pilot program, totaling around $50 million for planning and implementation efforts that advance the project. The very next day, USDOT announced the coalition also won a $2 million Reconnecting Communities & Neighborhoods Program planning grant.

The Greenspace Corridor Project holds much promise with a strong and emboldened coalition that now has seed funding to actualize their project. However, the work is only beginning, as the coalition will now begin the figurative and literal cultivation of their community garden. Later in 2024, the National City / Southeast San Diego community coalition will organize and deliver a community convening aimed to advance the conversation held in Atlanta and more fully flesh out a project implementation plan. The coalition also aims to enhance community engagement, storytelling, and outreach to raise awareness on the project and broaden stakeholder support. Lastly, the coalition aims to continue to pursue additional local, state, and federal resources to realize the community park that is centered on community health, culture, and economic opportunity, expanding what started as a small pocket farm from the hands of Mr. Nuñez.