More than 100 people packed the Camden Community Center Wednesday to speak against a West Valley hotel converting to temporary homes for homeless women and children. They stood against the walls when seats ran out, booed, shouted over each other and yelled at San Jose officials, “You’re our elected officials! You need to listen to us!”
The conversion of the Bristol Hotel, located on the San Jose-Campbell border at 3341 S. Bascom Ave., is already in the works. It will be transitional housing for about 60 mothers and their children and women aged 60 and older. It’s the only hotel out of five San Jose plans to lease as temporary housing straddling the border. The other hotels include the Casa Linda Motel, a Motel 6 and the Fontaine and Alura inns.
The project has generated a firestorm of opposition from San Jose and Campbell residents.
@sanjosespotlight More than 100 people packed the Camden Community Center Wednesday to speak against a West Valley hotel converting to temporary homes for homeless women and children. The conversion of the Bristol Hotel, located on the San Jose-Campbell border at 3341 S. Bascom Ave., is already in the works. It will be transitional housing for about 60 mothers and their children and women aged 60 and older. It’s the only hotel out of five San Jose plans to lease as temporary housing straddling the border. The project has generated a firestorm of opposition from San Jose and Campbell residents. Read more at SanJoseSpotlight.com #sanjose #campbell #westvalley #siliconvalley #localnews #homelessness #housing
Campbell resident Mars Tang led the charge against the hotel conversion through an online petition that has gained more than 1,200 signatures. His qualms with the site include its proximity to schools and the safety of their students, traffic hazards and the effects it could have on Campbell. But Campbell has no jurisdiction and can’t do anything about San Jose’s plans for the site.
“We’re (not) against or opposed to provide the home to homeless people. We feel bad about that,” Tang told San José Spotlight. “What we oppose is this site, this location. It just makes no sense.”
San Jose has already entered an agreement with the Bristol Hotel’s property owners to lease its 47 rooms for two years, at roughly $30,000 a room or about $1.4 million annually. It will be funded by the roughly $14 million the San Jose City Council allocated in its fiscal year 2025-26 budget toward its hotel conversion strategy, which includes future plans to acquire the sites for permanent housing.
The council doesn’t have to approve the site, which could open as early as August, because it already approved the hotel strategy last year. That approval frustrated residents, including one woman who asked how the city would know the residents don’t use substances and are legal citizens, saying she knows “drugged-out moms” who need a “full-time adult nanny.”
Future residents will receive wraparound services, including meals, case management and 24/7 security. The hotel could help some of the 32.2% of San Jose’s female homeless residents, along with the growing older adult unhoused population. San Jose has more than 6,200 homeless residents as of 2023 data.
A University of California San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative study shows one in five women who fall into homelessness in California are fleeing domestic violence.
San Jose Vice Mayor Pam Foley, who represents District 9 where the hotel is located, hosted the community meeting. She said many residents support the conversion, but were too afraid to speak up at the hostile meeting. She’s heard these concerns before and said when these sites are managed properly, they’re safe and have little effect on the community.
“I believe it’s possible to address valid concerns of the community while standing firmly in our responsibility to provide stability to people who have faced challenges that have left them without options,” Foley told San José Spotlight.
Foley will continue working with Campbell officials, including Mayor Sergio Lopez, who said he’ll continue conveying neighborhood concerns to San Jose officials because he wants it to succeed. Campbell has a much smaller homeless population than San Jose, at 92 residents as of the 2023 point-in-time count.
“We need regional solutions,” he told San José Spotlight. “And I really think if this is done right, there can be a major benefit to Campbell residents and to addressing homelessness here.”
The Bristol Hotel’s property owner did not respond to requests for comment, including questions about what will happen to the 10 to 12 employees, such as Liliana Fierro.
Fierro has worked the night shift at the hotel for four years and said her team was only told about the conversion last week. She said the hotel’s been a hidden gem for the past 25 years.
“It’s extremely stressful, frustrating because I don’t want to have to go out and search for another job again,” Fierro told San José Spotlight. “It’s hard enough already to try to make ends meet.”
San Jose already owns four hotels it’s converted into housing for homeless residents, including the Pacific Motor Inn that opened last year.
But those hotels aren’t limited to housing for mothers with children and women 60 and older — a resource Alison Cingolani, director of policy at nonprofit SV@Home, said is desperately needed. She’s disappointed in the community’s response to the Bristol Hotel conversion because the belief that homeless women and children create an unsafe neighborhood is unfounded.
“Most of us are much closer to the potential to be unhoused than we would imagine ourselves to be, or that we would like to think,” Cingolani told San José Spotlight. “These are just human beings just like all the rest of us who are trying to get by, even more so to provide for their children.”
Contact Annalise Freimarck at [email protected] or follow @annalise_ellen on X.
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