What Storm Reveals About San Diego's Biggest Problem

The rain from a storm like the ones we’ve been having can make roads hazardous and streets flooded.  

But when the rain comes, life becomes even more miserable for those in our communities who are homeless.

The San Diego Housing Commission’s inclement weather shelter program makes a few dozen beds when it rains at the Rescue Mission for instance and at some churches, but with an estimated 17-hundred people who are living outdoors in downtown San Diego, it’s far from enough.

So if you’re homeless you do what people who are homeless do, pile up some plastic tarps or tent or seek shelter under some rooftop or stairwell. And you wait it out.

For the vast majority of us, it’s impossible to even imagine what that must be like.

A lot of us are quick to complain about the weather when it gets chilly and rainy. Many of us in San Diego of course are weather wimps, badly spoiled by America’s finest weather most of the year.

But for the homeless, when storms come, and rain falls, and temperatures drop, the weather can be life threatening.

And when these storms come, the plight of the homeless is part of the news coverage, and the homelessness problem in San Diego returns to the headlines.

We can only hope that the forecast for solving the homeless problem will one day become brighter than this gloomy weather.

(Photo Getty Images)