DOWNTOWN SAN DIEGO – Downtown's Neil Good Day Center, where homeless people go to collect mail and get a shower, won't be open weekends anymore.
The center has a new operator, Father Joe Carroll, whose homeless services charity won a city contract to run the day center for up to five years.
It had been operated since 1991 by the Alpha Project, which bidded unsuccessfully to stay.
The city is paying Carroll's St. Vincent de Paul Village nonprofit group $400,000 a year to run the program at 17th and K streets. The city also has allocated a $38,000 federal grant to rehabilitate the site.
Carroll says it will offer more services, as counselors from his three-block campus nearby will be working there.
However, the center will only be open five days a week, though Carroll said clients can still get services daily at his main facility, two blocks away at 15th Street and Imperial Avenue.
Also, the Neil Good site has offered showers, but won't anymore. Clients will have to wash up at St. Vincent de Paul's main campus for homeless services, where there is more capacity.
Alpha Project President Bob McElroy said he's still trying to figure out why his group lost the contract, as they offered to remain open seven days a week.
“We've requested a copy of the winning bid proposal to find out how that can be most cost effective for the city, when they are open 104 days a year less,” McElroy said.
Carroll touted the benefits of his approach.
“The staff now has access to all the programs at St. Vincent de Paul so they can better move people up the ladder into education, into drug rehab, into medical or dental,” Carroll said. “So with the connecting link being direct, more services ultimately are being provided.”
He also promised to clean up the neighborhood by adding security officers around the site.
The Neil Good center has long drawn complaints from nearby merchants and residents, who said it attracts homeless to the area but does little to keep them inside.
The East Village Association even got an investigator to film the impact on the neighborhood, which included people lining the streets in the morning to enter the center and performing criminal acts outside its gates.
“I think the neighbors will notice a change in how it's operated,” Carroll said. “You can make sure the security staff monitors the immediate neighborhood, like we do at St. Vincent's. You don't see people sleeping in the 3½ blocks we control down there.”
McElroy countered that the center was always the target of criticism from people who didn't want it in rapidly gentrifying downtown San Diego. But, he said, it provides a service for people who would otherwise sit on the streets all day.
McElroy and Carroll agree on one thing: Eventually, the Neil Good center should be rolled into a year-round homeless shelter that a city task force is working to create, they said.
Jeanette Steele: (619) 293-1030; jen.steele@uniontrib.com
