A new shelter opened Monday in Vista, offering North County dozens of new beds at a time when high numbers of people continue to lose housing countywide.
The Buena Creek Navigation Center can hold up to 48 individuals near a Sprinter rail line. The facility is low-barrier, meaning participants can still be struggling with addiction, and serves Vista and Encinitas.
“If your child needed a place to sleep, this would be a good place to send them,” Vista Mayor John Franklin said in an interview.
State Sen. Catherine Blakespear and Vista Mayor John Franklin helped announce the new Buena Creek Navigation Center, a homeless shelter for Vista and Encinitas, on March 1.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
He and Encinitas Mayor Tony Kranz said they hoped the additional space would also give police more flexibility to clear encampments, as a federal court has said cities generally can’t force people off public land when there aren’t beds available.
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on the issue later this year.
North County has long struggled with a shelter shortage. Oceanside opened its own navigation center last August and Escondido is eyeing one focused on sobriety. Vista leaders have been frustrated that residents were sometimes denied access to facilities outside the city because of a lack of space and initially hoped to open the new site by the end of last year.
One unit at Vista’s Buena Creek Navigation Center on March 1, 2024.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Vista’s shelter is at 2148 S. Santa Fe Ave.
The facility has two dozen rooms and offers residents security, meals, mental health and addiction support as well as assistance finding permanent housing, officials said.
Individuals, couples and pets are welcome, according to one organizer. More than a dozen people had already moved in as of Wednesday.
The goal is to limit stays to 30 days, though that limit can be extended to 120. Franklin, Vista’s mayor, said he thought the shelter would likely fill within weeks.
The center was paid for by the two cities and $5 million secured by state Sen. Catherine Blakespear.
One unit at Vista’s new Buena Creek Navigation Center on March 1.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
A new organization called Retread Housing Services will oversee the shelter.
Retread formed last year as a more secular offshoot of Green Oak Ranch Ministries, a faith-based nonprofit in Vista.
Hannah Gailey is executive director of both. “If we get people in a safe environment,” she said in an interview, “they will be able to receive help and they will be able to see a good future for themselves.”
The navigation center will cost about $1 million a year to operate, not counting rent or utilities, Gailey said.
Retread has an annual budget of around $1.3 million while Green Oak’s is about $1.6 million, she said. (Tax records were not immediately available because Retread is so new and Green Oak’s affiliation with a Christian church limits the amount of information it’s required to post online.)
Franklin said Green Oak’s long-running addiction recovery program had given him a “high degree of confidence” that they were the best people for the job.
Vista and Bonsall had nearly 90 people living on the streets or in vehicles at the beginning of last year, a dozen more than in 2022, according to one-day counts conducted by the Regional Task Force on Homelessness.
There were around 75 unsheltered people found during each of the last two years in Encinitas, San Dieguito, Solana Beach and Del Mar.
