Santa Clara County and San Jose leaders are turning a page in their fraught relationship — vowing to bring more county behavioral health workers into city-run shelters and close gaps in placing the city’s homeless residents into housing.
The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted unanimously to approve a new partnership announced Friday by San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and District 2 Supervisor Betty Duong. The plan calls for directing workers at the county Valley Homeless Healthcare Program to visit San Jose homeless shelters and provide mental health care services starting later this year.
The plan also merges the county and city’s shelter and treatment referral process under one system. At the moment, the city and the county have separate intake and referral systems, and homeless people in city-run shelters aren’t in the county’s coordinated system of steering people into housing programs. The proposal commits to directing people in San Jose shelters into as many as 15 permanent supportive housing apartments per month.
Duong said this wouldn’t just help homeless residents, but also county staff working to get them into housing and treatment.
“This is designed to make your jobs easier and give you the tools you need for success,” Duong told workers during the meeting.
While supervisors hailed the proposal as “long overdue,” some balanced their excitement with concerns the move would leave other Santa Clara County cities behind.
“How will city of San Jose folks compete with the rest of the residents in our pipeline or in our continuum of services?” District 1 Supervisor Sylvia Arenas said at the meeting.
She voiced support for the proposal, but raised concern it would validate an approach to homelessness she disagreed with — one where San Jose, under Mahan, favors temporary solutions over bringing down the cost of housing.
“(San Jose’s) concern is putting folks into shelters and temporary setups without building out their permanent housing pipeline,” Arenas said.
The county operates more than a dozen temporary housing sites in San Jose, including the Boccardo Reception Center, the largest congregate shelter, and the Julian Street Inn. San Jose runs 18 temporary housing sites, including eight tiny home villages, two safe parking sites and multiple converted hotels.
Under the proposed coordinated system, staff would be able to assign homeless people to any shelter bed, as well as refer them to county treatment.
District 5 Supervisor Margaret Abe-Koga said other cities should be able to prioritize their own residents for their own shelters.
“I think the way this was written made it seem like there’s a preference. That’s the issue,” Abe-Koga said at the meeting. “If there’s going to be a preference for San Jose residents to be housed in San Jose facilities — which I think is fine — other cities would like to see that too.”
County Executive James Williams said there’s no intent to play favorites or treat one city differently than another.
“The approach we’re trying to take here is actually to bring these San Jose facilities into alignments we already have with non-San Jose cities,” Williams said at the meeting.
He acknowledged the move would increase the volume of people waiting for help in the county’s coordinated system.
“It certainly is a numbers challenge,” Williams said. “Does it help the coordinated system capture more folks who should be in there? Yes. Does that mean it might be more volume. It does. But I do think it will give us a better, more coordinated assessment ensuring overall prioritization is reaching the right folks.”
Contact Brandon Pho at [email protected] or @brandonphooo on X.
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