San Jose nonprofit buys property to help homeless people

A San Jose home that was part of a national Catholic movement to provide a “house of hospitality” to the marginalized is transferring hands, though its mission to help homeless people will remain.

Catholic Worker San Jose is selling its seven-bedroom home on North Sixth Street, known as Casa de Clara, to nonprofit Amigos de Guadalupe Center for Justice and Empowerment for $700,000 — nearly half its market value. Amigos plans to rehabilitate the house, including repairing the roof, abating lead paint, replacing sewage pipes and upgrading the kitchen and interior.

The home will continue to be used as transitional housing for low-income people. Destination: Home, a homeless services nonprofit, provided a $1 million grant for the acquisition and rehabilitation. San Jose is giving Amigos de Guadalupe a $500,000 loan as part of the pilot Small Sites Rehabilitation Program to preserve small sized, multifamily homes.

“We’re excited to be part of this new chapter, living out the Catholic Worker house mission,” Maritza Maldonado, executive director of Amigos de Guadalupe, told San José Spotlight. “That so aligns with Amigos’ mission. Because we have partnered with them over the years, they were looking for someone that has shared values around the work and decided that we were the agency.”

The Catholic Worker movement started in 1933 by activists Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin aiming to create a better world through promoting nonviolence, voluntary poverty and serving those in need, including providing a home where poor people could find refuge.

The San Jose house provided a safe, temporary place to live for women and children. Catholic workers lived in the house with the families and provided meals and mentorship to help them find permanent homes.

“(The house) provided belonging and community and support to the women and children who were in need,” Fumi Tosu, a Catholic worker who formerly lived and worked at Casa de Clara, told San José Spotlight. “But I think also it provided a vision or a model for an alternative way of being, that Catholic workers would choose often to leave their careers and their salaries and live simply in community, in prayer, and just live this alternative vision for societies.”

Maldonado said Amigos de Guadalupe is still deciding what groups the home will serve, but there will be no time limit to a person’s stay. The nonprofit will help re-home the family of five living at Casa de Clara before bringing new people in, she said. Rehabilitation is expected to be done later this year.

This is the first home Amigos de Guadalupe has purchased, but Maldonado said it won’t be the last. She wants to help families in East San Jose own their own homes, whether that is through housing co-ops, backyard homes and other creative solutions. Silicon Valley boasts one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation, where the median price of a home is nearly $2 million — about five times the national price.

“For us in Santa Clara County, when housing is so expensive, our job is to try to find different models, different ways of building homes and welcoming people into the community,” Maldonado said. “So, (Casa de Clara) is a seven-bedroom home, and it’s not huge, but it’s one more way of filling this new model of housing for one more population of our community here.”

Homeownership is another way to build inherited wealth, an area that Latinos in Santa Clara County struggle with more than other groups, where they make up half the homeless population.

Latino residents live in poverty at double the rate of other families in the county, according to a recent health assessment report. From 2017 to 2021, Latinos’ per capita income was $31,662, less than half of what it was for all county residents. In addition, Latino renters were more cost-burdened, at 57% compared to 45% of all households renting. Fewer Latinos said they lived in a stable environment.

“Extremely low-income families are hit hardest by our housing affordability crisis and too many of these households are pushed into homelessness as a result,” Chad Bojorquez, chief program officer for Destination: Home, told San José Spotlight. “We’re proud to partner in this project, preserving the safe, dignified housing resources families deserve.”

Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X.