Father Joe’s Villages Marks 75 Years of Housing Support

For 75 years, Father Joe’s Villages has been helping San Diegans facing homelessness transition onto the path of long-term stability and success. The nonprofit is the city’s largest provider of homelessness-related services, including shelters and housing (which serve upwards of 3,000 people each night), addiction recovery, medical care, job training, childcare, and food assistance at a rate of about a million meals per year. Father Joe’s Villages also works to overcome the root causes of homelessness, a Herculean task, especially in a high cost of living city like San Diego. 

Building the Foundation

Though Father Joe’s Villages is now a large-scale operation that offers an array of services, it has humble roots. It began in 1950 as the St. Mary of the Wayside Chapel in downtown San Diego, which opened with a mission to serve the poor. 

“There was an increasing number of individuals that were falling onto the streets, and, initially, it started as a soup line, in a sense, so people could catch something nutritious for lunch—PB&J sandwiches, for example—and have a compassionate ear,” says Deacon Jim Vargas, president and CEO of Father Joe’s Villages. 

The program grew over the next several years, and the chapel added a handful of shelter beds, which led to the eventual opening of the St. Vincent de Paul Center in what’s now the Gaslamp Quarter. 

As the Vietnam war wound down, a large number of returning veterans fell into homelessness due to a lack of jobs and affordable housing. As the Gaslamp Quarter was “revitalized,” residents felt the sting, Father Joe’s says, and the nonprofit was hit with massive demand. 

A Hero Comes Along

As legend has it, the bishop tasked with finding someone to take over the St. Vincent de Paul Center in the early 1980s asked for “the biggest hustler in the diocese.” Bronx-born Father Joe Carroll fit the bill. He started small, handing out peanut butter sandwiches on the streets of San Diego, then soon after garnered national attention with a commercial and a feature segment on 60 Minutes. 

“He’s the one who initially came in and sized up the situation, then recognized that, as a community, we were sorely lacking in comprehensive services so that an individual who was on the streets didn’t have to go to multiple places,” Vargas says. “So, he decided to start building a village and a model that was able then to really address all the issues.”

The man now known as Father Joe subsequently moved the St. Vincent de Paul Center to the East Village and expanded. His impact was transformative. Within five years of arrival, Father Joe opened the organization’s Joan Kroc Center, a first-of-its-kind facility that included housing for individuals and families—“neighbors in need,” as he called them—a medical clinic, childcare, and job training all under the same roof. The nonprofit began serving three meals a day and later added a dental clinic and behavioral health care. In 1988, St. Vincent’s opened the first Josue Homes for people who were homeless and also living with HIV/AIDS. 

Father Joe shifted the organization’s focus to identifying and addressing the underlying causes of homelessness by not only meeting people’s basic needs but also investing in healthcare and children’s welfare and offering a supportive path to self-sufficiency. Take the evolution of the health center, for example, Vargas points out.

“[Father Joe] recognized that some of the people [utilizing the nonprofit’s services] had children. These children, because of their circumstances, were academically, emotionally, and socially delayed. So, he came up with a therapeutic childcare center. He hired professionals, psychologists, and teachers who could work with these children and mitigate their circumstances, help them to get to peer level, and help them break that cycle,” Vargas says. “Otherwise, statistics show that one in four would be homeless in adulthood.” 

Another barrier homeless individuals face is employment. So, the organization launched an employment center that offered vocational training in culinary arts, welding, property management, and other fields and worked with area business leaders to ensure the skills taught there could be efficiently put to use long-term, Vargas adds. 

By 1990, the St. Vincent de Paul Center was providing roughly 200,000 bed nights a year. The efforts were recognized nationally and internationally—the center received a United Nations International World Habitat award and earned a spot in then-president George Bush’s Thousand Points of Light. 

The St. Vincent de Paul Center split from the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego in the 1990s and became an independent nonprofit organization. It rebranded as the St. Vincent de Paul Village and continued to grow and add programs. The 350-bed Paul Mirabile Center was opened in 1994, and its primary care facility, the Village Family Health Center, launched in 1998. 

Father Joe continued to lead the organization until his 70th birthday. He retired a household name and a local icon. In 2015, the St. Vincent de Paul Village was renamed Father Joe’s Villages in his honor. He died in 2021 at age 80. 

A New Era 

The number one cause of homelessness in the San Diego region is economic, says Vargas, who has led the organization since Father Joe’s retirement. The solution, he believes, is multi-pronged: more shelter beds to get people off the streets, more affordable housing for them to transition into, wraparound services to support them along the way, and prevention and diversion programs to help those at risk of homelessness. But that’s much easier said than done. 

Today, Father Joe’s Villages operates on a “housing-first” model—providing a stable place to live with low barriers to entry is a top priority. In 2017, the nonprofit launched its “Turning the Key” initiative, a push to add 2,000 affordable housing units earmarked for people transitioning out of homelessness or who are at risk for homelessness. In 2022, Saint Teresa of Calcutta Villa opened with 407 affordable homes. Father Joe’s also works with local landlords to secure existing housing. 

“We recognize that at the end of the day, what breaks the cycle of homelessness is a home,” Vargas says. 

Another important aspect of the mission is what Vargas calls “meeting people where they are.” In 2019, the organization introduced its street health team program, the first of its kind in San Diego. Healthcare and psychiatric care providers deployed into areas with large homeless populations to serve those with complex medical needs who couldn’t seek help on their own. 

“About a third of those who are out there in the community will not access medicine in a traditional way,” Vargas says. “So, we’ve gone out to meet them where they are and work with them to get them into a more stable setting. Why? Because we saw that was a need.”

Most recently, Father Joe’s Villages opened a 44-bed sober-living shelter and detox facility at its Paul Mirabile Center for people who are both homeless and struggling with substance abuse. Prior to its opening, there were only around 80 detox beds available within San Diego County, and just two were inside San Diego city limits, Vargas explains. 

Father Joe’s has also launched a recuperative care program for people recently discharged from a hospital who are still too sick to go back to the streets. It plans to expand the effort in 2026. 

“The face of homelessness has changed. The situation of homelessness has changed,” Vargas says. 

Though homelessness will likely be a problem well into the future, Father Joe’s Villages will continue to grow to meet the evolving needs of the population. And there are no plans of giving up—on anyone—any time soon. 

“Hope lives here in our organization,” he says. “The situation seems dire, and it appears as if it’s not getting any better, and yet there is hope. We point to all these stories, we point to the work that we’re doing … so that people recognize good things are happening here.”