San Diego County has broken ground on what officials describe as the first facility of its kind statewide: a Children's Crisis Residential Care center in Kearny Mesa designed to give kids in psychiatric crisis a place to stay for multiple days instead of cycling through an emergency room or a psychiatric hospital bed. The 10,000-square-foot renovation will serve youth recovering from crisis on the campus of the county's Polinsky Children's Center, with construction targeted for completion in 2027.
As reported by CBS 8, the groundbreaking marks the culmination of planning that stretches back to May 2025, when San Diego County was awarded $29.1 million in state behavioral health grant funds. Of that total, $7.9 million was specifically set aside to create the region's first Children's Crisis Residential Care facility at the Polinsky Children's Center, according to the County News Center. That money traces back to Proposition 1, the state ballot measure voters approved in March 2024 that authorized general obligation bonds to expand mental health treatment capacity across California.
Filling the Gap Between the ER and Long-Term Care
The new wing will provide 16 crisis residential care beds, four of which are reserved for youth participating in California's Children's Crisis Continuum Pilot Program, per documents from the county's Behavioral Health Services department. That distinguishes it from the county's existing Children and Youth Crisis Stabilization Unit on Third Avenue, which offers 24/7 emergency psychiatric evaluations and short-term stabilization but lacks the capacity for multi-day residential stays, according to the county. The Kearny Mesa facility is meant to close exactly that gap, giving kids with complex behavioral health needs an alternative to emergency room hospitalization.
Once open, the center will operate around the clock, dually licensed by the California Department of Social Services and certified for Medi-Cal reimbursement by the California Department of Health Care Services, the county's Behavioral Health Advisory Board reported in 2024. The project itself involves an interior renovation of an existing wing at 9400 Ruffin Court, including a full roof replacement and upgraded plumbing, electrical, and mechanical systems, according to filings with CEQAnet. The renovation was declared statutorily exempt from environmental review under state welfare and institutions code.
A Long-Running Campus for San Diego's Most Vulnerable Kids
The host site, the A.B. and Jessie Polinsky Children's Center, has a long history in San Diego's child welfare system. It originally broke ground in October 1992 and opened in July 1993 as the county's primary 24-hour emergency shelter for abused, abandoned, and neglected youth, according to city records. The main campus today includes six residential cottages, an infant nursery, a medical clinic, and an on-site K-12 nonpublic school, placing the new crisis unit directly alongside the county's existing safety net for children in crisis.
The children's project isn't happening in isolation. The same May 2025 grant package that funded the Kearny Mesa center also provided $21.1 million to establish a Substance Use Residential & Treatment Services facility in National City, featuring 73 treatment beds and 16 recuperative care beds and slated for completion in late 2026, per the Times of San Diego. The county also broke ground in March on a separate state-funded conversion at the Edgemoor facility in Santee, turning a 13,500-square-foot wing into a 12-bed adult acute psychiatric unit expected to open in May 2027 — a project Hoodline covered in Edgemoor's $28M psych ward makeover. That project carries a $28.1 million budget aimed at keeping patients close to home during crisis recovery.
Part of a Broader Countywide Push
Taken together, the Kearny Mesa, National City, and Santee projects reflect a broader regional effort to build local behavioral health infrastructure rather than send patients out of county or into hospital beds for care that could be handled closer to home. San Diego County's Behavioral Health Services department admits approximately 44,000 people of all ages to mental health programs and serves over 12,400 individuals for substance use treatment annually, according to the county's own reporting, underscoring the scale of demand these new facilities are meant to help absorb.
County leaders have framed the expansion as a way to reduce reliance on hospital emergency departments for behavioral health crises, a theme that has run through the county's recent string of groundbreakings, including the $99.5 million Midway behavioral health campus and the 24/7 crisis hub that opened in El Cajon earlier this year. With construction now underway in Kearny Mesa and a 2027 completion target on the books, the county is betting that a dedicated residential option for kids will mean fewer families forced to choose between an ER waiting room and a bed far from home.
