A new homeless shelter in Costa Mesa is set to welcome residents by the end of next month. First it needs furniture, but that’s not a problem — there’s a local store ready to deliver the goods, free of charge.
Starting next week, a team of employees from IKEA will visit the 72-bed site near John Wayne Airport to paint designs on the walls and begin assembling furnishings and fixtures provided by the iconic Scandinavian home essentials store across town.
At a cost of more than $125,000, this is the first time that IKEA will furnish an entire homeless shelter anywhere around the country, said Vanessa Flores, a loyalty manager for IKEA responsible for communications, events and community relations on behalf of the Costa Mesa store.
“We’re so excited about this project,” Flores said, adding that the Costa Mesa store — one of five IKEAs in Southern California and 51 nationally — had identified homelessness and hunger as two initiatives it wanted to prioritize in the local community. The store made that decision around 18 months ago, in a pre-pandemic world and after the project manager for Costa Mesa’s shelter contacted IKEA.
“It was really perfect timing for us because we were like, ‘Yes, this is what we were looking for.’”
Partnerships at work
The new shelter in Costa Mesa, which will have 70 beds divided between men’s and women’s dormitories and two more at the intake area for after-hours arrivals, will replace a smaller, temporary site that for about two years has been operated at Lighthouse Church of the Nazarene.
The donations from IKEA — including the interior design work, chairs, tables, towels and bedding, home decor, office equipment, and stands to go beside beds the city ordered from a separate industrial furniture company — will help make the 12,000-square-foot converted industrial warehouse at 3175 Airway Avenue welcoming and comfortable, said Costa Mesa Assistant City Manager Susan Price.
As many as 60 employees from the 18-year-old Costa Mesa store, a big box, blue-and-yellow fixture on Coast Drive near Harbor Boulevard, will spend three weeks readying the shelter for occupation, Flores said. Smaller projects in other areas have included donations of items from IKEA stores, but nothing on the scale of what the Costa Mesa store is doing, which required corporate approval.
“They are just going all-in on this project,” Price said.
The shelter is part of Costa Mesa’s settlement in a landmark 2018 federal lawsuit. In that civil rights action, homeless people and advocates sued Costa Mesa, Anaheim and Orange, along with the county, over anti-camping laws. The lawsuit eventually included other cities in Orange and Los Angeles counties, and led to the opening of nearly a dozen homeless shelters in and near Orange County since a settlement emerged in late 2018.
The Costa Mesa-Newport Beach facility will be the latest new shelter in Orange County. It comes on the heels of the 425-bed Yale Navigation Center in Santa Ana that the county began populating earlier this month, as people transitioned from the now-empty Courtyard shelter that once occupied a defunct bus terminal at the Santa Ana Civic Center.
The regional Yale shelter also will serve homeless people in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach, along with seven other cities in central Orange County. Yale, which Price said began taking referrals from participating cites on Monday, Feb. 22, will be the county’s biggest shelter.
The Airway Avenue site is strictly for the use of people connected to Costa Mesa and Newport Beach, which are sharing expenses under a five-year agreement reached in November. Costa Mesa spent $11.5 million to buy and develop the site. Another $2.5 million annual commitment from the city is divided between shelter operation costs and a citywide homeless response, Price said.
Newport Beach is contributing $1.6 million toward the capital costs and another $1 million for annual operation. Clients from the city will have access to 20 beds, enough to accommodate Newport Beach’s entire homeless population, city officials said in November.
In for the long run
Considered a “bridge” shelter, where people can hopefully transition into better living circumstances, the Airway Avenue site represents a broader collaboration between Costa Mesa and Newport Beach. The shared goal is to help a street homeless population that includes people who migrate between the two cities. Respective outreach teams and law enforcement agencies from both cities have worked together to address street encampments and other homeless-related issues, Price said.
Another shelter partner is Hoag Hospital, which is providing $300,000 annually over 10 years to help pay for support services. Mercy House, a longtime operator of homeless facilities in Orange County, is running the Lighthouse temporary shelter and will continue that role at the Airway facility.
The 18 people currently staying at Lighthouse will move to the new site in late March, Price said. April will be spent fully supplying and stocking the new shelter, then it will open up to other homeless people on a gradual basis, with the pace of the rollout dictated by COVID-19 health and safety protocols. Full occupancy is anticipated by July.
Price estimated there are about 65 homeless people on the streets of Costa Mesa who currently are in touch with outreach workers. In 2019, the Point In Time count estimated the city’s homeless street population at 187 people, sixth highest in the county.
Flores, of IKEA, said her company is eager to do its part to serve those people, and to create a blueprint for sister stores to do similar work in their communities.
IKEA volunteers ready to put together the furniture will be led by an expert team that builds the Costa Mesa store’s display furniture, meaning deciphering assembly instructions won’t be an issue.
Neither will durability, Flores said: “We made sure we picked the best products for this.”
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