San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan declared Monday that homelessness in San Jose has become a crisis and issued an ordinance pledging to build safe and decent housing for people experiencing homelessness.
“Homelessness is an emergency and it is time we treat it as such. We are here today to introduce a new ordinance that will commit San Jose to building safe and decent housing faster, and reduce the barriers in the way, helping to end our era of encampments for the good of the entire city,” Mahan said in Spanish during her meeting with the press.
Joined by Deputy Mayor Rosemary Kamei, Council Members David Cohen and Omar Torres, and the Founder and Executive Director of Dignity Moves, Elizabeth Funk, he noted that these actions will ensure that people have a safe and dignified shelter and are on the path to a more permanent solution.
“The important thing here is that we call homelessness a crisis and an emergency. Our actions have been doing that for many years, but our actions have to match those words. We have to treat homelessness as a crisis, as an emergency, and that’s what this statement does,” Mahan said.
The official said that the declaration commits the city to accelerate actions through all possible levers, to build all decent and safe housing, and to relocate people living in camps to them.
He recalled that when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake occurred, leaving more than 5,060 people homeless, the government quickly built very basic earthquake-proof houses so that people would have a decent place to stay and their own room. “They sprang into action, because it was a real emergency.”
“Homelessness is an emergency on our streets,” Mahan said, calling for rhetoric to be matched with action.
“We need to move quickly to build safe and dignified alternatives to the camps. We could end homelessness in a year,” he said.
“If an earthquake were to happen and put 4,000 of our neighbors in San Jose on the streets, we would have FEMA trailers at the county fairgrounds within 72 hours. So we have to act like it. It’s time to stop the blame game,” he stressed.
In this regard, he called for ways to speed up the process for the creation of these homes, such as modifying the terms of land use and zoning requirements, so that there are no obstacles to the existence of these sites and the decision-making process can be expedited.
“To me, that’s what a real crisis requires, that we can get these sites up and running quickly and efficiently with minimal process and then start requiring people to come and support us,” he added.
Mahan said the city is in the process of clearing an entire stretch of encampments along the river, but not before offering everyone living there a place to live.
He said that homeless people are often victims of organised crime and are at risk of dying prematurely.
“Last year, 246 individuals died on our streets, in the camps, the unmanaged ones due to lack of access to basic housing and health. So, this is a crisis, and we have to treat it as a crisis,” he added.
In his remarks, Councilman David Cohen stressed that residents and the City Council are frustrated by the lack of housing and the lack of solutions to it.
He said that while it is the Council's duty to remove barriers from the road to ensure things can be done as quickly as possible, it currently takes months or more than a year to get a site ready and open for business. "That is not acceptable!"
Elizabeth Punk, founder and executive director of Dignity Moves, an organization that works to end homelessness in communities by building temporary supportive housing as a quick fix to the problem, explained that “solving the problem of people experiencing homelessness does not mean ending them.”
Homelessness, he said, “is part of a much larger and more complex problem, but it is the most inhumane, visible and, fortunately, the most solvable.”
“Everyone agrees that permanent housing is the solution to ending homelessness, but it can’t be done on its own. It’s really part of a system and the most important thing to understand is that for every person who gets permanent housing, three are falling into homelessness,” he added.
“My math shows that you can’t catch up with that system if your only exit point is building permanent housing. If we could get people into interim housing where they can get services now, over 80 percent of them have other exits they can find and not be waiting for that permanent housing. That’s what we want to do,” he said.
On September 29, the newly renovated Arena Hotel in San Jose reopened to help the homeless in the area.
The 90-room hotel in The Alameda, about two miles from Santa Clara University, is one of five Project Homekey sites designed to provide temporary housing for homeless people.
Most rooms are for single adults. There are 10 double-occupancy rooms and pets are allowed. The long-term plan calls for tearing down the building to build up to 200 permanent, affordable apartments.
The $46 million transitional housing project was funded through Measure E and California's Project Homekey. The city received $125.5 million from the state.
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