Others including Bill Walton are thinking the Miramar open space would be ideal for housing – an excerpt:
San Diego has the nation’s best year-round weather and ample adjacent federal lands, making it the perfect site for the start of a national solution to homelessness. Sunbreak would soon prove successful in San Diego and could then be quickly replicated up the West Coast and across America.
We need help in three ways to launch the Sunbreak initiative:
1. We need our President and federal government to lease 2,000 acres of MCAS Miramar land to Sunbreak Ranch at $1 per year, and to designate this land as a temporary “federal emergency homeless help zone.” This will eliminate local red tape and opposition.
2. We need our President to deploy the military and security services to build a tent city for Sunbreak Ranch on this site with surplus equipment from the Afghan and Iraq deployments. Our military and security services have the manpower, expertise, and equipment to build out this entire tent city within weeks.
3. The cost of this Sunbreak experiment is minimal compared to the untold tens of billions of dollars currently being spent (to no avail) on homelessness annually.
To prove the viability of Sunbreak, we need significant individual philanthropists or organizations to step up and seed-fund this three-year Sunbreak initiative with up to $275 million.
This funding would include the proviso that when the first Sunbreak Ranch succeeds, the federal government will step in and begin fully funding a ranch outside of every major U.S. metropolitan center that agrees to return to the Rule of Law on their streets.
Homelessness is ultimately a public sector responsibility, but we first need the private sector and philanthropists to illuminate the pathway forward.
OMG! Can’t we just reopen the Japanese internment camps?
None of the drug addicted and alcoholic homeless will agree to go and the homeless families will want to remain in town too. Make it mandatory? You will be tied up in expensive legal battles for decades.
Boondoggle of the century…
Maybe so but I hope they just bring attention to the 21,000+ acres of vacant land in the middle of town that sits idle – except for the couple of jets that fly over daily.
When is that Care Court signed into law by Newsom last year going to start being enforced? Allowing courts to order people in crisis to submit to treatment plans — including those living on the street who may be too sick to accept care voluntarily.
How is it legal to shoot up drugs openly and defecate on the streets or block city sidewalks with tents and violate the Americans with Disabilities Act ?
I would ship them all out to the desert and not in a coastal paradise so there was a desire to actually get sober. Lets be real, the majority of the homeless are drug addicts & mentally ill, they will never accept housing where there are rules and they can no longer do their drugs.
five years into the 100 year lease, they will develop it as market-rate suburban housing
What we do know is that the status quo isn’t working. Our leaders should look to other states and other countries to find out what does work and then find a way to duplicate that here.