Public Safety

North County Winter Homeless Shelter Opens Its Doors

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published December 1, 2009 at 3:00 AM PST

This story was published more than 15 years ago.

Almost 200 winter homeless shelter beds will open tonight in communities around North County. The goal is to prevent people who have hit hard times from joining the ranks of the chronically homeless.

Almost two hundred winter homeless shelter beds will open tonight in communities around North County.

The North County Winter Shelter program is not designed to be a place where the chronically homeless who live on the streets year-round can come out of the cold.

Laurin Pause of the Alliance for Regional Solutions says this program is designed for people who have hit hard times and need intensive support to get back on their feet.

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“Our winter shelters are not for the chronic homeless,” Pause said. “This model is around your transitional and episodically homeless. The episodically homeless have not been homeless in the past. They are all-of-a-sudden in a homeless situation, not where they’ve ever been before. It’s tough to get help from the system when you don’t know which questions to ask.”

Pause says the program helped more than 600 people last year.

She says this year the number of families recently made homeless has grown, and the number of jobs available to help them recover has shrunk.

Nine north county cities, plus several churches and non-profits contribute to the program, which is in its third year.

Doors open tonight in Oceanside, Vista, Escondido and Carlsbad. Most locations expect a line of people to be waiting for the beds.

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.