Down by the river

A breakfast forum last Thursday on the subject of homelessness included Rob Hutsel, executive director of the San Diego River Park Foundation. Hutsel, who’s headed the nonprofit for eight years, has become an unlikely expert on the people who call the river banks home: The organization’s twice-monthly trash pick-ups and bi-annual “river blitz” clean-ups have somewhat become field studies of the living conditions of river-bank dwellers.

“When we first started, there really was an area [where] people were told, ‘Just go down to the river and get out of here,’” Hutsel said in a phone interview.

Mixed in with what he refers to as “legacy trash”—old, abandoned cars and other large items—were homeless encampments. The area had been left alone for so long that its inhabitants had formed a makeshift community, Hutsel said; they even had their own mayor.

“On one side of the river, it was the tweakers, and then on the other side it was the non-tweakers,” he recalled. “There were two-story structures down there. They had taken a lot of the vegetation and cut it down and built little structures. It was really quite amazing. You’d see [car] batteries all lined up; they’d have a nice little stove set up and a kitchen area.”

Each camp or a spot with a substantial amount of debris was deemed a “site.” As Hutsel and his volunteer clean-up crews whittled down trash sites along the 30 miles of river (starting last year, each site is photographed and mapped via hand-held GPS devices), the number of camps they were counting increased—in the nine-month period between August of 2008 and April of this year, they noted a 41-percent increase. Another count last month put the one-year increase at 68 percent.

Hutsel—who was part of a panel that included Brian Maienschein, the former City Councilmember and current commissioner of the United Way’s Plan to End Chronic Homelessness, and Cissy Fisher, who handles homeless-services programs for the San Diego Housing Commission—told CityBeat that his organization has been getting “more and more” phone calls from homeowners who are concerned that homeless encampments pose a safety threat. Some callers, Hutsel said, have suggested that the River Park Foundation should simply remove all the vegetation to make the area less attractive to campers.

“That, for us, isn’t the best solution,” he said. “It’s not even an option, quite frankly.

“As you can probably tell, I’m very conflicted on the whole thing,” Hutsel said. “I want people to be helped. I’m not one of those that think they should just be kicked out—I don’t think that’s a solution. But there is a conflict between the idea of a healthy community and a healthy ecosystem and a healthy river and folks living in the middle of it.”

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