Keaten Carrier and her family became homeless after they moved back home to San Diego in the spring of 2021.
"We've been homeless for three years, four months and 13 days," she said in an August interview.
Carrier said a state welfare program that helps families with children paid for 60 nights at hotels. After that, odd jobs helped her and her partner pay for hotel stays.
Then, one day, they saw a news story on TV about Jewish Family Service’s Safe Parking Program. They spent 15 months living in a city-provided trailer at one of the program’s sites.
Carrier is a student at San Diego City College. Her sons, ages seven and eight, attended the Monarch School, which serves students experiencing homelessness.
"They had two birthdays here,” she said.
They celebrate with a visit from what they call the "birthday fairy."
"We’ve been doing it ever since we were homeless," Carrier said. "We take streamers and we decorate. They're hanging from the ceiling. We had things on the door. They woke up to it.”
Now, the family hopes to celebrate birthdays in their new apartment in Ramona. Carrier’s partner has a new construction job there, and rent is a little over $1,800 a month for a two-bedroom.
Jewish Family Service paid their deposit. They’re also buying them furniture, silverware and other things they need for their new home.
“It's almost like encouragement to continue to stay out,” Carrier said.
Safe parking programs have become a countywide method to lift people out of homelessness before they’ve lost everything. This year, the Regional Task Force on Homelessness reported a 44% increase in the number of individuals and families living in cars.
Earlier this summer, the California Coastal Commission approved a plan to turn a site in Point Loma into a safe parking lot. It’s expected to open early next year and nearly double the number of safe parking spots in the city of San Diego.
Jewish Family Service operates four safe parking sites in the city, with more than 230 parking spaces. The City is spending $4.6 million dollars on the program this year. Mayor Todd Gloria has said they fill a "critical gap" in the shelter system.
Jesse Mendez directs Jewish Family Service’s Safe Parking Program. He said it’s rare for them to have an empty spot.
"We do have a high population of older adults that are on fixed income and retired or on disability of some sort, but the vast majority of our clients work every day,” he said.
Potential clients are screened offsite before joining the program. Clients must have a working vehicle and pass a sex offender database check. Pets and service animals are allowed. Drugs and alcohol are not.
Case managers work at each safe parking site to connect people to housing and other services. They also try to reunite people with family members who can take them in.
"The benefit of safe parking is you get to intervene at a level where people haven't really lost all their hope," Mendez said. "They haven't lost all their possessions. A lot of our clients are first-time homeless.”
UC San Diego researchers studying the program in 2022 found that many clients wanted more flexible access to the lots. In spring 2023, the program expanded to include the Clairemont lot, which is open 24 hours. The Mission Village Drive lot is also open 24 hours.
Clients also wanted more access to meals and showers, more case management and help overcoming racial bias when seeking housing and employment.
The researchers found that clients of color were more likely to have positive exits from the program than white clients, possibly because white clients tended to be older. Many older adults at the sites were living on fixed incomes and waiting for housing vouchers.
They found that a monthly income of about $2,000 was the "magic number" that allowed former safe parking clients to move into housing. For those who made less than that, qualifying for housing assistance was key.
Even then, housing options were limited as rents continued to rise in San Diego.
"For clients who work, the (Jewish Family Service Safe Parking Program) allows them to more easily hold onto their most valuable resource (their vehicle) while they save enough to move into housing,” they wrote in a 2023 report. "For clients who do not or cannot work, the (program) provides a sense of safety and privacy that they feel they lack in a shelter."
Since 2018, the program has served more than 5,000 individuals and 3,000 households at six sites in San Diego County. More than a third of them have moved into more secure housing, including permanent housing, hotel rooms and shelters, according to Jewish Family Service.
“If a client misses one night at safe parking, I encourage myself to call them the next day and find out what happened,” Mendez said. “Nine times out of 10, the client was just, 'I just found a friend' or whatever. But, you know, the most response that we would get when you call someone the next day? 'I didn't think anyone cared where I was at.' And guess what? They come back, because we care.”
People at safe parking and safe sleeping sites are considered unsheltered in the annual Point-in-Time Count. Last month Gloria asked the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to reclassify them as part of the sheltered homeless population.
"If the City was able to include these individuals as part of our sheltered population, we would have seen unsheltered homelessness in the city of San Diego drop by 9.5% compared to the previous year,” he wrote in a letter.
UC San Diego researchers have recommended advocating for HUD to make safe parking programs eligible for more funding.
Gloria wrote that reclassifying them as a form of shelter would reflect the role the sites play in connecting people to services.
Mendez said part of that role is giving people hope.
"It's never over," Mendez said. "It's only over when we tap out.”
That’s Carrier’s message to other homeless parents, too.
"This is just a season,” she said. "You haven't failed those children. Just keep going because when you give up, that's when you fail them."
