By Ben Irwin. San Jose Spotlight.
San Jose is considering adding safe places to sleep to its long list of responses to homeless residents, an idea officials have rejected before.
Amid the city declaring homelessness an emergency last week, local leaders want supervised outdoor living spaces with supportive services for the city's homeless residents. Safe places to sleep already exist in San Diego and San Antonio, Texas, and Mayor Matt Mahan said similar solutions could help get homeless people off the streets.
Haven For Hope, the nationally recognized 22-acre San Antonio mega shelter that offers a variety of homeless solutions to about 1,700 residents, has caught Mahan's attention. He told San José Spotlight that what interests him specifically is the scale and the 1.5-acre yard that houses hundreds of people on cots with access to three meals a day, showers, and medical and mental health care. No weapons, alcohol or drugs are allowed, but sobriety is not required at this shelter.
“Part of what appeals to me is that it is a small, incremental step toward the ultimate goal (of permanent housing),” Mahan told San José Spotlight. “It's safe, it starts to connect people to services and creates the first springboard for the next step, which could be something like temporary housing.”
The idea of a licensed homeless encampment is not new. In 2015, then-Councilman Don Rocha led the initiative to create safe places to sleep a year after authorities cleared “La Selva,” a huge camp that housed 200 people.
In 2019, the city allowed a homeless encampment to operate for about six months in Hope Village along Ruff Drive near San José Mineta International Airport, a fenced area with tents and bathrooms. Hope Village was dismantled and cleaned up after the site was deemed unsafe by the Federal Aviation Administration. An alternative location could not be obtained.
San Jose considered authorizing encampments again in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but council members shelved the idea due to concerns about the use of city resources to oversee encampments and whether they would be effective in reducing homelessness.
Mahan doesn't imagine a local safe place to sleep as big as Haven for Hope; He said 250 beds is generally the range San Jose has had success with interim housing communities.
Mahan has long said his goal is to require homeless people to “live inside” once the city has enough beds to offer. The Martin v. Boise, which began in 2009 and was resolved in 2019, established that governments cannot criminalize homeless people when they do not have enough shelter space to offer, or without first providing some type of temporary shelter.
City Attorney Nora Frimann said that as long as San Jose is “improving” a site consistent with government code — declaring a shelter crisis loosens these requirements — the city can use that site to offer someone shelter pursuant to the law. But Mahan has said that's not why he's interested in safe places to sleep: what he's most interested in is a safe, dignified life.
Homeless advocate Richard Scott told San José Spotlight that 20 people lived at Hope Village in large tents, and it could still be replicated today and potentially serve more unhoused residents depending on the amount of land available.
“It was an ideal licensed camp,” Scott told San José Spotlight. “It's what we need to have now... The county and the city have vacant land everywhere. The problem is trying to get them to use them for all this.”
Councilwoman Pam Foley told San José Spotlight that there is not a lot of land available for use, which is an obstacle to housing construction. Foley, along with the rest of the VTA board, voted last week to lease 7.2 acres of the transit agency's Cerone site to San Jose for five years to build 200 temporary housing units for homeless residents. In District 9, he is working on a housing project with Valley Water near Coyote Creek that is at least six months away.
Foley said he would like to see more research done on empty commercial buildings closed by COVID-19, such as gyms and shopping malls, as a shelter-in-place solution. When it comes to approving safe places for homeless residents to sleep, he said times are changing.
“Concern about community changes and the need to address homelessness is increasingly becoming a key issue within the city, particularly with this mayor,” he told San José Spotlight.
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