By Ben Irwin. San José Spotlight.
San Jose is considering adding safe sleeping places 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 unhoused 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, San Antonio’s nationally recognized 22-acre mega shelter that offers a variety of homeless solutions to about 1,700 residents, has caught Mahan’s attention. She told San Jose Spotlight that what interests her specifically is the scale and 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’s a gentle, incremental step toward the ultimate goal (of permanent housing),” Mahan told San Jose Spotlight. “It’s safe, it starts connecting people to services and it creates the first springboard for the next step, which could be something like interim housing.”
The idea of a sanctioned homeless encampment is not new. In 2015, then-Councilman Don Rocha spearheaded the initiative to create safe places to sleep after authorities cleared “La Selva,” a massive encampment housing 200 people.
In 2019, the city allowed a homeless encampment to operate for about six months at Hope Village along Ruff Drive near San Jose Mineta International Airport, a fenced-in area with tents and bunk beds. Hope Village was dismantled and cleaned up after the Federal Aviation Administration deemed the site unsafe. An alternative location could not be found.
San Jose considered authorizing encampments again in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but council members shelved the idea over concerns about the use of city resources to police the encampments and whether they would be effective in reducing homelessness.
Mahan can't imagine a local safe place to sleep as large as Haven for Hope; he said 250 beds is generally the range San Jose has had with transitional housing communities.
Mahan has long said that his goal is to require homeless people to “live indoors” once the city has enough beds to offer. The Martin v. Boise case, which began in 2009 and was decided in 2019, established that governments cannot criminalize homeless people when they do not have enough shelter space to offer, or without first providing some shelter space.