Flooding forces hundreds to flee homeless shelter in San Diego

For the third time in seven years, hundreds of people had to flee a homeless shelter in downtown San Diego this week after a heavy storm dropped a month’s worth of rain, causing floods.

The area received 2in of rain on New Year’s Day, which broke local records and forced multiple water rescues, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Officials evacuated the Bridge shelter, a massive gray tent, on New Year’s Day, and about 325 men and women moved to a gym in a local park, the newspaper reported.

Southern California has seen heavy storms in recent weeks – causing the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, to declare a state of emergency – and the rainfall was expected to continue through the weekend.

The winter storms come less than a year after wildfires devastated much of the area. The Los Angeles fire department issued an evacuation warning in a burn-scarred area because of potential debris flow due to the rainfall, and the National Weather Service issued a flood watch and stated that areas near burn scars are prone to flash flooding.

Such extreme weather events are expected to increase because of climate change and the people most affected by such disasters are often those experiencing homelessness, according to recent research.

“Not a great start to the new year,” Bob McElroy, CEO of Alpha Project, the nonprofit that runs the shelter, told the Union-Tribune.

Hundreds staying at the shelter also had to evacuate in 2018 and 2024.

“We’re definitely seeing more homelessness, more housing disruption, as a result of these disasters,” Steve Berg, of the Washington-based National Alliance to End Homelessness, told NBCNews in 2023.

Such events often reduce the housing supply and make it more difficult for people who lose their homes to find affordable housing. In 2024, 11 million people in the United States were displaced from their homes by natural disasters, Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, an international nongovernmental organization, reported.

After wildfires broke out in 2023 in Maui, Hawaii, the state saw an 83% increase in homelessness, according to a US Department of Housing and Urban Development report.

“Disasters like wildfires and hurricanes cause the displacement of housed and unhoused people alike,” a Georgetown Environmental Law Review report stated. “In short-term events, like evacuations, stop-gap measures like temporary housing and camping may be sufficient to meet needs. But when disasters damage or destroy housing, survivors may seek permanent solutions, like new housing, only to find such additional housing unavailable because it was also destroyed and other scarcity at play in the real estate market broadly.”

In 2024, flooding forced Bridge shelter residents to flee through waist-deep water, the Union-Tribune reported. About five years earlier, a flash flood hit the same shelter.

“It takes a lot to scare me, and that scared me,” one person staying at the shelter told the Union-Tribune.

This week’s storm again ravaged the property, at a time when the city already did not have enough beds for people needing shelter.

Michael Coats, 68, who had been staying under the tent with his wife, remained optimistic despite being homeless and having to flee the shelter.

“I call him God,” Coats told a local NBC affiliate. “It gives me my inspiration to keep trudging through this, from being on the street to where I am today and where I will end up one day” with “my wife and I back into another apartment”.