Facing a barrage of complaints about homeless residents cluttering the downtown walkways, San Jose’s ban on sitting or lying down on public sidewalks just got tougher.
City leaders added two more hours to the current ban — prohibiting those activities from 8 a.m. to midnight, with potential violators continuing to face misdemeanor charges — in a move aimed at bolstering safety and accessibility. The ban previously started at 10 a.m.
“The reality is students are walking to class, people are opening their small businesses (and) everybody’s coming to work, typically a couple hours before them and so that’s why it’s really the time to say you can’t be laid out across the sidewalk,” Mayor Matt Mahan said. “I do believe that our sidewalk should be pretty clear for everybody, everywhere in the city, but we need to put extra emphasis in downtown, where it is dense.”
City officials attributed the ordinance’s change to concerns raised by residents and business owners as well as an increase in quality of life crimes. The city is also seeing an uptick in foot traffic in the downtown core as San Jose State has opened new housing. And, with the city poised to see a sharp rise in activity when major sporting events like the Super Bowl and FIFA World Cup come to Silicon Valley next year, there’s a bigger push to create a safe environment.
San Jose passed the existing pedestrian facilitation ordinance in 1996 in an effort to keep sidewalks free from obstructions and make downtown more walkable. The ordinance carves out exemptions for vendors, sidewalk cafes, people experiencing medical emergencies, and wheelchair users.
Sections included in the ban are bounded by Highway 87, Julian Street, Fourth Street, and Interstate 280, and a stretch of Santa Clara Street between Fourth and Tenth Streets.
Though the ordinance’s has been on the books for nearly three decades, the city has not always made enforcing it a priority. San Jose Police Deputy Chief Gina Tibaldi said the city began to struggle with complaints from businesses and residents about open-air drug markets in 2023, but more recent consistent enforcement has helped make inroads in the perception of downtown.
The city also came to realize that the existing ordinance did not correspond to the levels of foot traffic the downtown areas saw in the early parts of the day.
“The fact that most businesses open and school starts around 8 a.m. makes the current 10 a.m. enforcement start time less impactful as sidewalks are already in heavy use by that time,” Tibaldi said.
Homeless advocates, however, criticized the change in law, saying its the latest salvo against the unhoused and another attempt to push them from the city without a real long-term solution.
“Nobody has really stepped up to help people downtown,” advocate Gail Osmer said. “There’s just no resources and no place for people to go. Banning people who have no place but the street is an atrocity.”
Osmer pointed to the city’s RV abatement program, which had residents likening the situation to “whack-a-mole” because it led to the RVs continually moving to new spots every few days.
While he expressed support for the ordinance — noting it reflected ongoing concerns from the community – San Jose Downtown Association CEO Alex Stettinski said the city also needs to strike a balance between maintaining vibrant public spaces and ensuring compassionate solutions for homeless residents.
“Enforcement alone is not the solution,” Stettinski said. “Any changes to the ordinance must be paired with increased outreach services and shelter options for those in need. We must ensure that downtown remains a place where businesses can thrive, visitors feel comfortable and our most vulnerable residents receive the support they deserve.”
Although the City Council supported the ordinance change, Councilmembers Bien Doan and Rosemary Kamei questioned how it could be expanded to other areas of the cities facing similar challenges.
“We know that enforcement works,” Kamei said. “It’s just a matter of having the capacity to be able to really spread it across the entire city. I’m hopeful that we can take that model and perhaps think about what is the best bang for our limited dollars to work in the hotspot areas because I think for a long time we didn’t enforce things that were happening.”
District 4 Councilmember David Cohen said if the city expands the ordinance to other parts of the city, it needs to do so more holistically and responsibly, acknowledging that the city does not have a place for every unsheltered resident. He cautioned that moving too quickly would create more problems than it solves and would move San Jose closer to criminalizing homelessness.
“If we say that all business districts are going to be clear of the unhoused and we don’t yet have a place for everyone to go, we’re driving them more into our neighborhoods, along our creeks and into our parks, which is exactly what we are trying to deal with at this point,” Cohen said. “While we’d like to move quickly, we’d like to move faster, we have to move smarter.”