San Jose has been doubling down on clearing homeless encampments and constructing temporary shelter, though the breakneck speed of the sweeps has left many people displaced.
The San Jose City Council received a midyear report on the city’s efforts to address homelessness Tuesday. Officials have been aggressive with plans to clear homeless camps along the waterways, reduce the number of lived in vehicles on city streets and establish no-encampment and tow away zones to prevent people from returning. The city aims to add more than 1,400 shelter beds and spaces this year in a region where for every one person housed, nearly two become homeless. San Jose has also been piloting programs to pay for transportation to reconnect homeless people to their families outside the area and temporarily ban longterm RV parking across the city.
“It feels that we are finally acting with the speed, urgency and scale that reflects it being an emergency, being a crisis,” Mayor Matt Mahan said at the meeting.
Four temporary housing sites with a combined 524 beds or spaces have come online in the past eight months, including Pacific Motor Inn last August, the Branham Lane modular site in February, the Berryessa safe parking site last month and Via del Oro this week. More sites are scheduled to open, such as the safe sleeping site on Taylor Street in June, the Cherry Avenue tiny home site in September and five hotel conversions into shelters later this year.
San Jose has cleared 12 miles of encampments along Coyote Creek, and there are 13 no-encampment zones throughout the city. The city has conducted 530 encampment sweeps and removed more than 6.5 million pounds of trash this fiscal year. Under the Oversized and Lived-In Vehicle Enforcement (OLIVE) program, the city has been instituting temporary RV bans across 30 highly impacted zones. Fifty more sites are planned for the next fiscal year.
The city’s increased sweeps have displaced people, pushing them into neighborhoods and forcing them to start over again. This week, the city swept dozens of people living in an RV encampment near where Microsoft’s data centers will be built. District 4 Councilmember David Cohen, who represents the area, said some RVs have moved to a nearby school and park. He said his office has become a “full-time encampment complaint line” and he’s concerned about conducting sweeps without places for people to go.
“The unintended consequences make me feel like we are just spinning our wheels,” Cohen said at the meeting.
According to a 2023 point-in-time count, there are an estimated 6,340 homeless people in San Jose, with roughly 5,500 being unsheltered. Officials conducted a more recent count earlier this year, but results have yet to be released.
John Ristow, director of the city transportation department, said most people living in RVs have moved on their own and few have returned to swept sites.
“However, as we move through this program and get more sites abated … we anticipate we will have some more returning to sites,” Ristow said at the meeting.
District 7 Councilmember Bien Doan said RVs in his district have simply moved from one street to another under the OLIVE program.
“Are we chasing tails, in a sense, because we don’t have a safe RV parking site?” he asked Ristow.
The city’s two safe parking sites, one on Berryessa Road in North San Jose and the other at the Santa Teresa VTA light rail station in South San Jose, are full. The Berryessa site can hold 86 RVs and the Santa Teresa site can hold 42 RVs, but there are an estimated 1,000 lived-in vehicles throughout the city.
Doan also brought up how waterway sweeps have pushed homeless people into neighborhoods in his district, with tents popping up where they weren’t before. Other areas like Story Road have been swept nearly 50 times in the past 18 months, he said.
A new strategy
San Jose has rolled out a five-step strategy to synchronize efforts to tackle homelessness: engage homeless residents, build shelter, clear homeless encampments, preserve cleared areas and restore public spaces.
Traditionally, the housing department has taken the lead on outreach efforts; the parks and recreation department leads encampment sweeps and sanitation services; the transportation department oversees the RV sweeps; the public works department oversees the building of new emergency housing; and the environmental services department works to protect natural habitat. Each strategy will now be led by two agencies instead of one, in order to better coordinate across departments.
To engage homeless residents, the housing department has brought on its own outreach team of 10 members to coordinate placements into tiny homes and shelters. It’s also in charge of executing Homeward Bound, a pilot program that began late February that provides bus tickets for homeless people to reconnect them with family members. Over the past month, 17 individuals have expressed interest in the program, Housing Director Erik Soliván said.
With federal funding cuts and San Jose’s budget getting squeezed, Cohen said the city needs to start thinking about longterm solutions to effectively address homelessness.
As the city focuses on clearing encampments and building temporary housing, new affordable housing developments will lag behind. Funds from Measure E, the city’s single largest revenue source for affordable housing, have been shifted multiple times to pay for operational costs of the city’s shelters.
“We’re about to see an explosion of homelessness in California over the next year,” Cohen said. “We might have to rethink what our…best goal is for the long term success of this rather than the short term.”
Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X.
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