Lakeside is cleaning up what Sacramento’s homelessness fix left behind

San Diego Affairs | The Navarro Report | July 13, 2026

LAKESIDE, Calif. — A local nonprofit has pulled nearly 10 tons of trash out of homeless encampments along the San Diego River in just four days, a cleanup effort that has drawn broad community support even as it exposes a harder truth: the encampments here are the overflow from a state-funded strategy that has already been tried, and only partly worked, a few miles downstream.

“We’ve taken out approximately 10 tons of material, just shy of 10 tons of material in the last four days,” said Robert Doty of the Lakeside River Park Conservancy, who has helped lead the effort alongside volunteers from I Love A Clean San Diego. Doty, who has worked along the river for 15 years, said the scale of what his crews found this year was unlike anything he had previously encountered, with encampments containing furniture, propane tanks, appliances and electronic waste stretched across eight identified sites.

“We’re still only halfway through,” Julie Turko of the Conservancy said, crediting the surrounding community for stepping up to help but acknowledging the work that remains. Because much of the debris cannot be safely removed by hand, officials say future phases will require specialized equipment — a cost the volunteer-driven Lakeside effort is absorbing largely without the dedicated state grant funding that supported comparable cleanups closer to the coast.

That contrast matters. Roughly 15 miles downriver, the City of San Diego spent four months in 2024 clearing a massive encampment known as The Island, near Interstate 5 and Friars Road, using a $3.6 million Encampment Resolution Fund grant from the state, part of a $17 million regional ERF award shared across multiple agencies. City crews and contracted outreach workers pulled 78 tons of debris from that single site, and the operation is frequently cited by city officials as a model: as of the most recent count, 59 of the roughly 91 people originally living there had moved into permanent housing or shelter.

“This work is human, this is the warm and fuzzy, this is what gets you emotional,” Ketra Carter of the city’s Homelessness Strategies and Solutions Department said of that effort a year after it wrapped, noting that no new encampments had re-formed at the site since.

But the ERF-funded model that worked at The Island was never designed to address the underlying flow of people into homelessness countywide, and county officials have acknowledged that homelessness in the region has grown every month for roughly two and a half years, even as individual sites get cleared. The San Diego River Park Foundation’s most recent census counted 323 unhoused individuals living along the river between the ocean and Lakeside, up from smaller counts in prior years, and outreach workers along the coastal stretch have said that almost as quickly as one group is connected to housing, new arrivals take their place.

Lakeside sits at the eastern edge of that same river corridor, and it has effectively become the destination for people displaced from the cleared, better-funded sections of the river closer to the coast — without a comparable state grant following them there. The Sheriff’s Department’s Homeless Assistance Resource Team has been active in the area, and county spokespeople describe ongoing outreach, but the current Lakeside effort is being led and largely paid for by a small nonprofit conservancy rather than the multimillion-dollar state program that funded the coastal cleanups.

That gap illustrates a structural weakness in how the Encampment Resolution Fund program has been deployed regionally: it is allocated site by site and grant cycle by grant cycle, rather than as a standing response to a river corridor that both the county and city have long identified as a single, continuous problem. Each new ERF award requires its own multi-year application, environmental review and interagency coordination — the same kind of grant-compliance overhead that consumes months of staff time in the nonprofit and public sectors alike, and that leaves gaps exactly where a smaller community like Lakeside, without its own dedicated homelessness department, is least equipped to fill them.

The Conservancy’s crews plan to keep clearing sites in the coming weeks, and say the community response so far has exceeded their expectations. Whether that momentum translates into the kind of dedicated funding and coordinated outreach that produced results at The Island — rather than simply moving the same unresolved population a few more miles upriver the next time a coastal site gets cleared — will depend on whether the county and state treat the entire San Diego River, not just its most visible encampments, as the single policy problem the data already shows it to be.

This article was produced through Human-Directed AI Journalism: reporting, editorial judgment, sourcing, and final review by Jose Navarro, with AI assistance used for drafting and research synthesis.

Jose Navarro is the founder of The Navarro Report. Contact: jose@navarro-report.com | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/Jose-E-Navarro-MBA