In the Christ Lutheran Church parking lot at Cass Street and Chalcedony, six temporary homes for unsheltered neighbors are finally standing after a years-long battle with bureaucratic red tape.
In late June, Shoreline Community Services unveiled Compass Commons, a collaborative housing project that offers a first-of-its kind approach to addressing homelessness in San Diego.The set of six shelter cabins are designed to offer dignified, transitional shelter to working, unhoused residents. The project was a collaborative effort between neighboring town councils, local churches, businesses and governmental offices, and it positions Pacific Beach as the first neighborhood in San Diego to take this community-driven approach to homeless solutions.
Shoreline Community Services began as a meal service at the Pacific Beach United Methodist Church in 2015, before expanding into an independent nonprofit. By 2020, Executive Director Caryn Blanton recognized that meals alone weren’t enough.“A meal service is a relief service,” she said. “It’s necessary, it’s important, but it’s not solving the problem. We need relief services, but we also need to connect people to services and resources.”
In 2022, Shoreline opened the Compass Station, a drop-in resource center in the Christ Lutheran parking lot where an average of 75 unhoused people receive support every day. The following year, Shoreline launched its Community Care Crew, a transitional employment program that pairs unhoused workers with local businesses. The crew of six workers handle trash removal, janitorial services, landscaping, graffiti removal and more.“They’re out there in the community, making our community better,” Blanton said.
The idea for Compass Commons grew directly from the work of the Community Care Crew. The county awarded Shoreline a grant through its emergency housing initiative, offering Pallet shelter cabins to help people transition out of homelessness and into permanent housing. Shoreline took the first six of 100 available cabins, hoping to establish a process that other organizations could easily replicate.But two and a half years later, the county’s other 94 cabins remain unclaimed.
Getting the first-of-its-kind project built was anything but easy, with a development timeline that hardly projects emergency action.
Blanton said the city’s permitting process caused most of the delays. Because the project didn’t fit neatly into any existing regulatory category, each step forward uncovered a new obstacle.
“At the very beginning, they started treating it as if we were building six single-family dwellings on our property, which, of course, we weren’t,” Blanton said. “We were trying to figure it out as we went along…it’s the thing that we’re most proud of, but that was our biggest challenge.”
Temporary housing cabins at Compass Commons. (Photo by Ashlyn Liporie-Russie/Times of San Diego)Now three weeks after the ribbon cutting, Compass Commons still hasn’t received its occupancy permits, necessary for residents to move into the cabins. It’s not clear when that will happen.
And amid the years of paperwork and regulatory delays, the cabin’s future residents have remained unhoused.
“They’ve been staying on the concrete, in the sand, in a vehicle, if they’re lucky,” Blanton said.
The cabins offer privacy, security and autonomy that can provide a stable foundation for folks to get back on their feet.
Each 64-square-foot unit includes a locking door, heating and air conditioning, fire sprinklers, a mini fridge, dry food storage, a twin bed and a desk. The window drapes were handmade by a community member. Outside each door sits an Adirondack chair and a solar-lit planter. Across the parking lot, the Compass Station provides 24/7 access to restrooms. The Compass Station also offers laundry, computers, daily support services like document recovery, family reunification, mental health and substance abuse support, nursing care and acupuncture. All residents receive a local gym membership for showers, and private security monitors the lot nightly from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
While the cabins are new to San Diego, Pallet has already built 145 other shelter sites, with cabins in 136 cities across 29 states. Each cabin is built within a matter of hours, designed as a quick shelter solution for those experiencing homelessness or natural disaster.
“This is not permanent housing,” Blanton said. “This is not the end of the road. This is the beginning of that road.”
The six-unit project is dwarfed by the region’s need for housing. The May 2026 report from San Diego’s Regional Taskforce on Homelessness counted more than 30,000 unhoused people active with the task force that month.
“Every business owner, every resident, every community of faith, every local organization has a place in addressing the problem,” Blanton said. “Together as a community, we have the answers.”
Some might have expected local opposition, but Pacific Beach’s response has been positive.
Blanton said the neighborhood has welcomed the project, in part because Shoreline did a thorough job of educating the community about workforce housing.
“They’re concrete warriors who show up every day at 6:30 a.m. to go to work. They’re working really hard to make change.”
At the ribbon-cutting, Blanton shared words on behalf of the cabins’ future residents, who described Compass Commons as a “stepping stone to an extraordinary future” and “a genuine opportunity to begin anew.”
For Blanton and Shoreline, this work is about showing up with what she calls radical hospitality — supporting the unhoused not as a problem to be solved, but neighbors to be cherished.
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