Nearly four years after its launch in late 2020, the City of San Antonio plans to retire its mobile shower trailer that served people experiencing homelessness.

“The mobile shower is really not very mobile. … It breaks a lot,” Melody Woosley, director of the city’s Department of Human Services, told City Council last week. “The hitch breaks a lot, the plumbing breaks while it’s in transit. … It’s just very time-consuming for very little outcome.”

The trailer, which has three shower stalls and cost nearly $60,000, has provided fewer than 100 showers per year and requires complicated logistics to move, fill and refill, Woosley said. The intent was to serve people living in encampments outside of downtown, where most homeless resource hubs are located.

When it was working, it was deployed to congregations on the East and West that host resource events for the community, said Patrick Steck, assistant human services director told the San Antonio Report this week.

But it hasn’t been used since October last year, Steck said. He estimates at least $20,000 had been spent on major repairs in the two years prior.

“It’s an expensive way of delivering showers compared to fixed showers, which are available at [Christian Assistance Ministry] and Corazón [Ministries’ Day Center] six days per week and at the Haven for Hope Courtyard seven days per week,” Woosley said. “Human Services’ street outreach teams have vans and can transport clients to shower locations.”

Christian Assistance Ministry (CAM) downtown shares its eight-shower trailer with Corazón, which also has a shower inside Travis Park Church. Haven for Hope, located in the near-West Side, has communal showers.

Former Councilman Roberto Treviño (D1), who lobbied his council colleagues to invest in the trailer, said he was disappointed that the city didn’t utilize the trailer as he and other advocates envisioned. Beyond a tool to help people experiencing homelessness, it could be used in emergencies and for special events across the city, he noted.

“If you’re trying to get on your feet and you don’t have a place to shower, that makes it very hard anybody,” Treviño, who now serves as executive director of the San Antonio Philharmonic, told the San Antonio Report this week. “This is both a common sense thing and a humanitarian issue.”

In the future the city may be looking for “more partnerships with congregations or nonprofits that have showers already that would be willing to allow people to come in and use them,” Woosley told council.

City budget under a microscope

The city has had to tighten its belt as it approaches its fiscal year 2025 budget, which includes increased costs and decreased revenues.

The city will save about $62,500 by discontinuing the operating and cleaning supplies, as well as fuel and grey water disposal costs required to operate the not-so-mobile shower. That’s a far cry from the cutbacks needed, but when combined with other inefficient or underutilized programs, the city found a total of $36.6 million in spending reductions over the next two years. The belt tightened further this week as the city laid out a budget adjustment plan to accommodate $27.7 million in raises for firefighters over the next three years.

There was little resistance from council members to keep the trailer last week as they reviewed the Department of Human Services’ budget for next year. It includes $44.2 million for direct homeless prevention services, outreach, shelters, housing and encampment cleanups. That’s $6.35 million more than it spent last year. 

The proposed budget also maintains funding (nearly $72,500) for CAM’s shower hub and trailer, which Treviño also initially lobbied for. That trailer has given hundreds if not thousands of people access to showers. The nonprofit also provides sack lunches, toiletries, socks, underwear and portable toilets for people while connecting them to other services such as ID recovery.

Dawn White-Fosdick, president and CEO of CAM, told the San Antonio Report this week that she once thought about getting a mobile shower trailer to take to encampments after seeing the success of the stationary shower hub. Ultimately, she decided against it after talking with some counterparts in other cities.

“They just basically said it was causing them too much trouble,” White-Fosdick said. “It was too hard to manage.”

Councilwoman Teri Castillo (D5) said last week she hoped a nonprofit or someone with the capacity to continue operating the trailer could use it in the future.

“We’ve got a process we have to follow [when getting rid of public property], but that could be the end result,” said City Manager Erik Walsh.

DHS will first ask its partners in the homelessness response system to see if anyone is interested in taking on the trailer, Steck said. It’s possible that it could be auctioned off like any retired city vehicle.

“Maybe a church can take it over and it can be stationed somewhere,” White-Fosdick said.

Treviño, who rejected the suggestion that the mobile shower was too complicated or expensive, said the city could still keep the trailer and rent it out or deploy it as needed across the city.

“There’s plenty of ideas and people willing to help support this,” he said. “Resourcefulness is an art. … There are still opportunities.”

Addressing the ‘bottleneck’

Treviño started pushing in 2018 for the trailer and the purchase was approved in January 2020.

More than half ($32,375) of the trailer’s original $58,583 price was covered by discretionary project funds from seven council members, including Treviño, and Mayor Ron Nirenberg. The rest was set aside in the Human Services Department’s fiscal year 2020 budget.

Services like food, shelter, showers, street medicine and clothing are critical parts of the homelessness response system, Dawn-Fosdick said.

Expanding the inventory of permanent supportive housing, which pairs housing with treatment and social services, will take the system to the next level and alleviate the overflow at local shelters, she said.

“If there’s no place for them to go, you just got a bottleneck,” she said.

The city and county investments in permanent supportive housing projects such as Towne Twin Village and SAMMinistries‘ properties should continue if elected officials and residents want to see a decrease in homelessness, Dawn-Fosdick said.

“Permanent supportive housing is really the bottom line.”