Despite widespread support among unhoused residents and their advocates for city-sanctioned tent sites, San Jose leaders are just not ready to commit to the concept.
Instead, the San Jose City Council this week decided to simply expand the number of homeless encampments that are regularly provided with hygiene and sanitation services, trash pickup and dumpsters and housing outreach. In addition, the council plans to create a policy that ensures unhoused people living in those encampments will not be forced out without extended notice of two to three months.
“We want to improve conditions today, right now, for our unhoused neighbors,” said councilmember Matt Mahan. “… And I think the path that we’re headed down is doing that at a greater scale for more people without needing to officially sanction ‘here’s where you can camp.’”
A small handful of cities on the West Coast, including Seattle, Sacramento and San Francisco, have recently turned to permitted tent encampments as an interim solution to addressing their homelessness crisis while they work to find permanent housing for their unhoused residents. The sites offer services such as toilets, showers, food and social workers. They provide residents with a safer, more stable alternative to illegal encampments on city sidewalks, under overpasses and in park . And, they aim to curb frustrations from residents and business owners who say the crisis creates public safety issues, health concerns and unsightly neighborhoods.
Though San Jose has made attempts to create sanctioned encampments in the past, it has never proved fruitful. Instead, the city has built interim housing developments known as “bridge housing sites” with dozens of tiny homes and modular units to serve unhoused residents as they search for long-term housing.
Thanks to an influx of federal funding associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, San Jose last year established a new program called Services Outreach Assistance and Resources — known as SOAR — to routinely provide services, such as bathrooms, laundry, routine trash pickup and housing outreach, to unhoused residents living in about 14 of the city’s largest encampments.
Since the establishment of the program, San Jose employees have collected or removed more than 125 tons of debris per month, which has tempered an inclination from some people to illegal dump their unwanted materials in the area, and engaged with more than 123 individuals to connect them with services such as rental assistance and addiction counseling, according to a city memo.
In Mayor Sam Liccardo’s March budget message, he directed the city manager to use new federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act to expand the number of encampment sites programs.
San Jose leaders face tremendous pressure to address the growing homeless population, which now includes more than 6,000 residents and has only become more visible amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of them see the new program and the 1,000 emergency shelter beds now available across the city as a major improvement from just one year ago, when the city was spending less than half the amount that it is now on homelessness efforts. But housing advocates and at least three members of the city council believe the city’s SOAR program fails to address one of their most serious concerns: the disruptive and traumatic practice of abatements.
“It’s time to listen and it’s time to stop the cruel practice of destroying people’s shelter, trashing their belongings and tearing apart their communities and start providing basic necessities like toilets and garbage collection at a side in each district,” said Sandy Perry of the organization Affordable Housing Network. “All of us are better off when our neighbors can live with security, health and dignity.”
Amanda, a resident who has been living in her van for the past 11 years, said in a video presented to the council Tuesday night that a sanctioned camp would be a step up for herself and most other people currently living without a roof over their head.
“Stability is a good thing, and I am pro-sanctioned encampments,” she said.
The city council in March adopted new limitations on where encampments could and could not be located, increasing enforcement and abatement around schools and childcare centers.
The city’s SOAR sites are provided with certain services, but they do not protect residents living there from abatements, which force people to continually move from one area to the next. Establishing a sanctioned encampment in San Jose would assure residents who live there that they would be safe from this disruptive process that creates even more instability in the lives of unhoused residents.
“We certainly know that abatements don’t work to help us end homelessness but we spend a lot of time and effort and energy on that because quite frankly we have to without sanctioned encampments,” said councilmember Raul Peralez, a vocal proponent of sanctioned encampments. “So we’re spinning our wheels regardless, unfortunately, and that’s part of my hope to find a way to not do that or at least not do it as much.”
Peralez announced Tuesday he had identified both a public and private site in his district that he believed could either serve as home to a sanctioned encampment. His hopes, however, were dashed — at least for now — by the council’s decision later in the meeting.
In place of an immediate plan to establish a sanctioned encampment program, city staff will be conducting a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the initiative would be worthwhile for the city.
One of the major inhibitors to launching a pilot program, according to city staff, is a lack of funding and staff to conduct the complex and time-consuming work of identifying a site, conducting public outreach, figuring out the legal restrictions of a city-sanctioned site, hiring a service provider to operate it and actually setting up the site, including potential fencing and security needs.
To pursue a sanctioned encampment program, the city’s housing department estimates that they would need $325,000 for additional staff and support to develop the program and up to $1.5 million annually to operate the site.
During a nearly four hour discussion on the matter, city staff and even some council members noticeably grew tired of repeatedly telling some of the other members on council that the city’s homelessness team simply did not have enough resources and staffing to tackle a pilot program at this time.
“For folks that are proposing this, be real for a second,” councilmember Maya Esparza said during the meeting. “Offer a site in your district and say what you’re willing to give up so we can do this. Say what’s less important than this — is it rent relief? Is it sheltering folks for a pandemic that is still out there?”
San Jose Housing Director Jacky Morales Ferrand also cautioned city leaders against asserting that a single sanctioned site would quell the residents’ concerns over the thousands of homeless residents and swelling number of encampments across the city.
“I’m not sure it will provide you with what you’re hoping to provide to all of the residents who have legitimate concerns,” she said. “… I just want to temper expectations that one 100-bed sanctioned encampment is not going to move the needle if 1,000 new beds housing 6,000 people over the last year doesn’t have any impression.”