SAN DIEGO — The city of San Diego has nowhere near enough shelter for everybody asking.

Yet an ongoing dispute between city and county officials has reduced the number of available beds even more.

The Rosecrans homeless shelter, a large tent in the Midway district that helps residents with mental health issues, has stopped accepting new people, leaving 14 spots open as of Wednesday, according to Alpha Project CEO Bob McElroy. The San Diego Housing Commission has also halted intakes at 8 other programs in anticipation of Rosecrans’ possible closure at the end of June, and two staffers at the tent recently quit to take other jobs.

“I’ve never had this happen in 40 years,” McElroy said in an interview. While other facilities have certainly shut down, the process had never been this sudden or uncertain, he added. “The tragic thing about this whole thing is: It’s the first true partnership between the city and county.”

The Rosecrans tent opened in 2022 next to the San Diego County Psychiatric Hospital. The city of San Diego hired Alpha Project to oversee the site’s 150 beds while the county, which owns the property, paid for substance-use counselors, mental health clinicians and a nurse practitioner.

The relationship between the two publicly fell apart last month.

The city

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria in mid-April released a budget proposal that would have the city stop paying $4 million-plus a year on the shelter. While that could help reduce San Diego’s deficit, city officials have said the decision was largely influenced by a county plan to demolish a neighboring building. Debris may float into the air. Dump trucks will fill the roads. Leaders have said the risk of flooding might increase once the building’s diversion drains are gone, and losing the structure complicates efforts to keep the tent’s utilities running.

“Do we really need to do this?” Gloria said about the demolition at a press conference earlier this month. “I don’t believe that they do.”

San Diego is in the process of opening new shelters for women, children and young adults, as well as a safe parking lot by the airport for people to sleep in their vehicles, and city officials have repeatedly pressed the county to fund more of their own projects.

The mayor added that if county leaders really want to keep Rosecrans open, they could foot the bill themselves. “A lot of the folks at that shelter have severe mental illness and addiction issues,” Gloria said. “That shelter operates as a behavioral health facility, and that is why the county should take on more of a responsibility for operating because that is their jurisdiction.”

The county

Many county officials bristle at that take.

“I think it’s very easy for the county to get out of its lane and start doing other people’s work,” Supervisor Joel Anderson said during a public hearing Tuesday. It wasn’t worth cutting other services, such as road repairs in unincorporated areas, to “backfill the city because they have not chosen to put their priorities in the right place.”

The county, like the city, faces a deficit, and an effort to free up hundreds of millions of dollars in reserves is in limbo until at least later this year when South County residents elect a tie-breaking fifth supervisor.

The board did vote unanimously this week to set aside $800,000 for Rosecrans. The tent currently gets its utilities, including water and electricity, from the soon-to-be-demolished building, and the supervisors said the money could help build new infrastructure to keep the lights on. (Ironically, the funding was available because another shelter supported by both the county and the city, the Casa Mariposa Domestic Violence facility, ended up being cheaper to operate than expected.)

The full cost of new utilities, however, is unknown and may be as high as $2 million. Some county leaders have suggested that philanthropists should step in to fill the gap. allowing the tent to remain open for several more years.

Rosecrans is “necessary for our region,” said Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer.

The building

The building scheduled for demolition is already falling apart.

The County Health Services Complex, which sits between the psychiatric hospital and the Rosecrans tent, features large holes in the outside walls. Chunks of fraying wood are visible to anyone passing by. The roof partially collapsed several years ago and columns had to be installed to keep it from getting worse, according to Marko Medved, the county’s director of general services.

“It’s trying to demolish itself right now,” he said in an interview.

The complex has long sat empty. But the county is nonetheless annually paying between $600,000 and $700,000 to keep the air conditioning running, officials said. Otherwise, mold might grow and make a cleanup even more expensive.

The county still needs to hire a contractor for the demolition, which is expected to begin in March 2026. Medved believes workers will need four to six months to strip out the building’s insides, a timeline influenced both by the structure’s massive size (approximately 150,000 square feet) and the likelihood that walls and tiles contain asbestos, since the complex dates back to the 1950s.

Excavators would then spend about a month pulling down the outside walls, followed by another two weeks or so of dump trucks carting off the wreckage. Medved said they’d take precautions to protect those in the area, including hosing down debris to reduce dust and directing trucks away from the shelter.

A new stormwater system is to be designed to lower the risk of flooding, he added.

All in all, around three acres should be free again by late next year. County leaders hope to use the land to expand the psychiatric hospital, and Medved thinks that construction could begin in about two years.

The shelter

The future of the Rosecrans shelter now rests with the San Diego City Council.

The agreement dividing up responsibilities at the tent expires in July, and council members must agree on a final budget before then.

During a hearing Tuesday, Council President Joe LaCava called the $800,000 for new utilities “woefully short” of what was likely needed, and many of his colleagues have similarly pressed the county to do more on the homelessness front.

Yet there seems to be some interest in keeping Rosecrans open, at least a little longer. Councilmember Jennifer Campbell previously suggested that the program should continue until demolition begins.

More than 5,700 people countywide were living out of vehicles, tents or sleeping bags as of January, which was actually an improvement over the year prior, according to the latest point-in-time count. During some recent months in the city of San Diego, only around 1 out of every 10 requests for shelter succeeded, often because facilities are full.

A housing commission spokesperson said the programs that have stopped taking new residents are the bridge shelter at 17th and Imperial, the Bishop Maher Center, the single adult shelter run by Father Joe’s Villages at the Veterans Village of San Diego campus, Connections Housing, the Lighthouse Interim Shelter, the single women section of the Haven Interim Shelter, the updated Rachel’s Promise project downtown and the O Lot designated camping area near Balboa Park.

McElroy, the head of Alpha Project, lamented that the dispute may have already damaged vulnerable residents’ confidence in the very people trying to help them. “These clients trusted us, maybe for the first time,” he said.

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