At the direction of state regulators who’re pushing San Jose to scrub up its streams and rivers, local authorities are developing an ambitious plan to relocate about 500 homeless people living along town's waterways to approved encampments on public lands throughout town.
The City Council approved the outline of the plan last week as a part of its recent $5.3 billion budget. On Tuesday, the council will discuss tips on how to put the plan into motion.
That includes whether to further evaluate nine properties as possible sites for the managed camps, often known as “safe sleeping sites” or “basic care sites.” The sites, which might house about 100 to 150 people each, could provide individual tents, food, toilets, showers, laundry and case management services, with at the least limited security or monitoring of the location.
During a tour of homeless encampments along the Guadalupe River on Monday, Mayor Matt Mahan said the proposed sites are critical to keeping town's commitment to state water officials to dramatically reduce the quantity of trash and pollutants discharged into waterways over the following few years.
“Until we get people to safe and controlled places, it is nearly impossible to safely protect our waterways,” Mahan said.
The mayor's office said there isn’t a timetable for the opening of the locations yet. However, in accordance with a city report, the authorities need to approve at the least one location by next month.
The sites town is considering include a parking zone in Kelley Park near Story Road and a vacant lot at 14020 Almaden Road, in addition to 1157 East Taylor St., where squatters occupied a city-owned home on the property last 12 months. The sites are a combination of properties owned by San Jose, Santa Clara County and the Santa Clara Valley Water District.
After the mayor's tour ended Monday morning and the tv crews packed up their cameras, Joe Barnett sat cross-legged under a blue-green tarp, wrapped in a blanket and surrounded by half-empty cottage cheese containers and crumpled pieces of charred aluminum foil.
The 34-year-old Iraq War veteran said he has been living along San Jose's waterways for about six years, since returning to California from the East Coast. Barnett said he would consider moving to an approved encampment and hopes to eventually find housing, but added that he doesn't mind his spot near the river.
“I like living near the water, but I don’t want to go in it,” he said.
The state agency forcing town to act is the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, which has recently increased pressure on cities across the region to maneuver their storage facilities out of sensitive areas.
After three rejections, the water board recently approved town's plan to scrub up its a whole lot of miles of waterways. Mahan said the board could nice town tens of 1000’s of dollars a day if local officials fail to maneuver enough people off the streams and rivers by June 2025.
The city estimates that about 1,000 homeless people could live within the areas designated for cleanup by the water authority. In addition to establishing approved encampments, town is working to construct a whole lot more small homes so that individuals displaced from the waterways have a spot to go.
In total, there are an estimated 6,340 homeless people in San Jose, of whom about 4,400 live in encampments, vehicles or other places not designed for housing. The rest live in shelters.
San Jose wouldn’t be the primary city to try sanctioned camps. Local officials have cited a managed camp in San Diego that provides individual tents and basic security and sanitation as a successful model.
“The status quo is chaos, a disaster. We have to change that,” said Todd Langton, co-founder of the homeless organization Agape Silicon Valley. “We need approved encampments.”
In Sacramento, nevertheless, a supervised camp that provides few services is in jeopardy after the local district attorney deemed the location a public health hazard and sued town to shut it down.
Meanwhile, some San Jose residents have already expressed opposition to the plan, raising health and safety concerns and expressing doubts concerning the city's ability to administer the sites.
“San Jose has shown a particular inability to deal with the homeless population in its current form,” resident David Ralston wrote in an email to the City Council opposing the Kelley Park site.
There can also be legal uncertainty about whether permitted encampments provide the “adequate protection” that cities must provide before clearing unmanaged encampments, however the U.S. Supreme Court has indicated it might strike down that requirement in a choice scheduled for this month.
So far, town has agreed to allocate $10 million to the sites in the following fiscal 12 months.
While some advocates would favor to see the cash go toward constructing everlasting reasonably priced housing, Mahan argues the investment is essential not only to fulfill environmental regulations but additionally to alleviate human suffering along urban waterways.
“We still need places where people can go,” he said. “It doesn't do us any good to simply deport people.”
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