After five years, La Mesa’s Homeless Action Plan, adopted in Feb. 2021, expires this year.
The city touts having met the plan’s core goals while developing an outreach model that other cities have copied.
Creating the plan was not an easy task.
Beginning in 2019, a citizens’ task force developed a plan with four main goals: Improve public communication, provide direct outreach, expand housing access and identify funding opportunities.
La Mesa officials say it met those goals, while admitting that it has a ways to go before eliminating homelessness.
“The city has met all goals, but we understand there is more work to do,” said city spokesperson Grecia Aguilar.
The city credits much of its success to the Homeless Outreach and Mobile Engagement (HOME) program, which relies on social workers armed with resources rather than police for day-to-day homeless outreach.
Since its inception, the HOME team has found permanent housing for 380 people who would otherwise be unsheltered. During its five years, the team grew from two contracted workers to an in-house team of five, including a housing navigator.
“It’s a model that’s working,” said Bonnie Baranoff, who chaired the citizens task force that wrote the Homeless Action Plan. “Whether you like it or not, homeless people are there. And I feel it’s just gonna get worse.”
The population today
In the annual 2026 point-in-time count, volunteers counted 39 unsheltered people throughout La Mesa, including unincorporated areas. An additional 36 were in the Vista Sands emergency shelter for transitional-age youth, with three others in transitional housing.
It was a 25% drop from the year before.
While the total fell compared to recent years, La Mesa’s HOME team still has work to do.
In the first quarter of 2026, the HOME team engaged with 52 clients per month on average. Three-quarters of those clients were first-time contacts. That’s largely due to La Mesa’s access to transit and its services.
La Mesa has the most trolley stops of any city outside San Diego. And one such stop is an easy, flat walk to the La Mesa Library, which has maintained hours and weekend services cut by city of San Diego libraries.
Large numbers of those experiencing homelessness also travel to La Mesa for medical care, as Sharp Grossmont is the only emergency room in East County.
“They’re not unhoused or precariously housed in La Mesa. They come (to La Mesa) because they’ve been coming for years,” Baranoff said.
As an example of how variable La Mesa’s unhoused population is, Baranoff points to La Mesa First United Methodist Church’s Fresh Start program. It attracts over 250 people to the church site on the first Saturday of the month for breakfast, hot showers, clothes and to connect with service providers.
“Transit centers and trolleys bring individuals into and through La Mesa, but they aren’t necessarily staying long,” said Tyler Renner, a spokesperson for People Assisting the Homeless (PATH). He noted there are only a couple of known camping spots, something local outreach workers confirmed.
Other metrics put the homeless population much higher by including those precariously housed, meaning they might not sleep on the sidewalk, but are couch surfing, staying in hotels, or sleeping in cars.
When factoring those numbers in, the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District reported that 500 students lacked consistent, safe housing in the previous school year.
The HOME team
La Mesa’s HOME team began with just a one-year contract with the local nonprofit, PATH. But in November 2021, the team was transferred under the purview of the police department.
Before the HOME team’s formation, 3.3% of calls to police were related to homelessness.
“Everything’s just been dumped into our lap because we’re 911. We’re here 24/7, 365 days a year,” said La Mesa Police Chief Ray Sweeney. “It’s expensive to send an officer on a homeless call for service when there’s no crime. All it is is the person experiencing homelessness.”
Past outreach initiatives had failed. Years before becoming chief, Sweeney oversaw a program where county services rode along with police officers twice a week to do proactive outreach to unhoused people.
“What we noticed is that we didn’t house anybody; we really didn’t get people signed up for service. The question was always why?” Sweeney said. “The answer to me right now is extremely clear: that the badge and the uniform were a barrier.”
Former La Mesa police Captain Matt Nicholass was the first to come up with the idea for an outreach team inside the police department, one that did not include uniformed officers.
Nicholass, now retired, visited Eugene, Ore., where he learned about the CAHOOTS initiative, in which outreach workers and mental health professionals deal with non-criminal social issues, rather than officers.
“When you want to become a police officer, it’s probably not to try to help people with social services,” said Baranoff, from the citizens task force. “You see the burden that it has on first responders, as far as police and fire, but we didn’t know what outreach would look like.”
La Mesa adapted the program, keeping the same approach that trained service providers were better equipped than police to be the front lines of the homeless crisis.
After failed homeless approaches in the past, Sweeney was unsure the HOME Team would work, but he described the results as “absolutely amazing.”
The HOME clinicians agree.
“Us going out instead of police intervention allows us to build rapport with people,” said Matthew Smiley, a HOME clinician. “Us being able to do that without a police presence has really been able to allow us to buy some goodwill with people and reach some people that might not be open to working with police for one reason or another.”
Smiley has worked on the HOME team since its creation. He says the biggest benefit of the team’s transfer to the police department was giving outreach teams access to dispatch.
When non-emergency calls come in, dispatch navigates whether the call is best responded to by police, the HOME team, the county’s psychiatric emergency services, the Mobile Crisis Response Team (MCRT) or the Psychiatric Emergency Response Team (PERT).
In its outreach efforts, the HOME team connects unhoused people with existing county services.
But connecting people to resources doesn’t just mean handing them a pamphlet with a shelter address and walking away.
The outreach team will make appointments, transport the client, then sit with them.
At times it means filling out paperwork with the client at the DMV or translating what a doctor says into plain speech.
“It’s much more than just giving them a ride. We’re going into these places with people,” Smiley said.
Compared to PERT or MCRT, they remain in contact with clients much longer to keep offering services.
The long-term intervention is part of a model called progressive engagement, where trust starts with something small, like securing IDs, and is built through constant contact.
“It’s really important that we treat people with unconditional positive regard and try to solve the small problems that we can immediately to build trust and rapport, and then ultimately solve the big problems of housing, medical stability, things like that,” Smiley said.
The work seems to be paying off.
In the most recent quarter, 23 households, a total of 45 people, exited homelessness to permanent housing thanks to HOME team efforts.
One woman and her dog had experienced homelessness off and on since 2010. She was initially rejected from a permanent supportive housing unit in the city of San Diego due to her ties to La Mesa, but the HOME team successfully appealed that decision on her behalf. In April, she moved into the unit.
“Her journey was not simple or immediate, but her resilience and willingness to keep moving forward helped her achieve a life-changing step toward safety, stability, and hope,” the report reads.
National City and Chula Vista have both modeled programs after the HOME team.
The other three goals
The HOME team is largely funded by the state’s Permanent Local Housing Allocation (“PLHA”) entitlement grant. The five-year grant of $1.13 million expired this year, with the city intending to apply again.
“I definitely want to see the program continue because the reality is, if they weren’t here and we were sending police officers to those calls, we wouldn’t have our police officers available when they were truly needed,” Sweeney said.
The city also received one-time funding during the pandemic that went towards programs like utility and rent assistance meant to prevent residents from becoming homeless. The funds have since run dry.
While city officials say the action plan will undoubtedly lapse at the end of the year, they hope to find funding to keep the HOME team intact.
Another difficult task is showing the public that shelters are part of the solution and should not be viewed as a neighborhood nuisance. That’s why the number one goal of the plan was public communication.
Members hoped being proactive in educating the public could help bust myths about unhoused people and lead to opening new shelters or building affordable housing projects.
That has not entirely gone to plan.
A county proposal to convert a hotel into permanent supportive housing was shot down in 2020.
A different hotel was converted into a youth shelter in November 2021. Vista Sands, a joint project between Urban Street Angels, San Diego Youth Services and Home Start, was in the works before the plan was adopted.
It remains the only shelter in La Mesa.
But Baranoff is hopeful that future efforts, with a long and transparent proposal process, would fare better than the 2020 county proposal, thanks in part to improved education on homelessness.
For now, the majority of unsheltered people in La Mesa are routed to the East County Transitional Living Center, a high-barrier shelter in El Cajon, when space is available.
In terms of creating new affordable housing stock, not those with special services, there has been success. The old police station was converted to 147 deed-restricted apartments for middle-income households.
City spokesperson Aguilar said that, between other projects either approved or under review, the city will receive another 70 very low-income units and 40 extremely low-income units.
“The problem remains the same. It’s the cost of housing,” Smiley said. “Especially when you’re talking about over the last five or so years, the cost of housing has absolutely exploded.”
