San Jose officials are sharing more details about the city’s first safe sleeping site for homeless residents as the March opening draws near.
Mayor Matt Mahan and city housing officials spoke with residents on Monday about how they’ll convert the lot at 1157 E. Taylor St. into a place where up to 56 homeless people will be able to sleep in tents without fear of being swept. The site will have 24/7 security and serve as a navigation center, where participants will be given three daily meals, have access to shower and laundry facilities and get connected with supportive services. The goal is to move people within 30 days of placement to another temporary housing site such as a tiny home or congregate shelter — where people share a common space with limited or no privacy — or into permanent supportive housing.
“This site will act as triage placement, and then they’ll be transported to the new sites,” Housing Director Erik Soliván said at last night’s community meeting.
Residents have raised concerns about the site’s proximity to Empire Gardens Elementary School and Watson Park, where homeless people have set up camp along nearby Coyote Creek. They are worried about increased crime and drug dealing in their neighborhood. The city will implement a no encampment zone near the site on both sides of Coyote Creek, from Mabury Road to East Empire Street, as well as around the park and school.
“It’s not like the status quo out there is that things are great in the park,” Mahan said at the meeting. “It’s full of trash. There’s drug dealing. So the idea is we should be able to really move the needle in terms of restoring (Watson Park) to public access and public use because (there’s) a lot more eyes out there.”
The city will track data on the number of 911 and 311 calls, where people are being transitioned to, how active residents are with case management, as well as whether the city is meeting its goal of moving people out within 30 days, Soliván said. The city will also conduct background checks on participants to ensure sex offenders won’t be staying at the site.
“Twelve months after (a temporary site) opens, we tend to see a reduction in calls for service, for crime and blight,” Mahan said. “So 911 and 311 calls tend to go down in an area like this, where you already have an encampment.”
Residents questioned why the safe sleeping site can’t be in an industrial area.
“The problem is not having these encampments for the homeless, it’s where they’re putting it that everybody’s having a fit about,” resident Leslie Muniz, 69, told San José Spotlight. “They don’t want it by the school or in the neighborhood.”
Mahan said it’s difficult to find land in an industrial area for a safe sleeping site, with the city being largely residential.
“There’s not a lot of undeveloped land,” Mahan said. “A lot of the land is private, and just the price tag of buying or leasing one private site can wipe out all the other sites that we’re building on public land where the land is free.”
The navigation center is part of the mayor’s plan to add 1,500 temporary beds for homeless residents in the next 18 months. That includes expanding the city’s tiny home villages, opening more safe parking sites for people living in their vehicles and converting hotels into temporary housing.
Several tiny home villages are expected to open next year, including the Cherry Avenue site in September, which can house up to 136 people, an expansion of the Rue Ferrari site in October, which can accommodate an additional 134 people, and Via Del Oro early next year, which will accommodate 150 people. San Jose has the largest homeless population in the county, with approximately 6,340 homeless residents, 4,411 of whom live on the street, along waterways or in tents.
The city is under scrutiny to comply with the Clean Water Act and to reduce the pollution in the waterways from homeless people or face a fine, Mahan said.
“We’re going to be required to move everybody out of the waterways, and I don’t have anywhere for them to go,” Mahan said. “So part of the answer here is we have got to stand up shelter before we go out there and just start clearing waterways.”
Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.