West Valley Community Services policy manager Cassandra Magana can relate to the plight homeless residents face connecting to housing from her own experience.
When she lived out of her car, Magana said she was offered transitional housing but did not accept it — and not because she just wanted to stay on the streets, suffered from an addiction or mental illness, a common perception about homeless residents. Instead, Magana recalled being in the impossible position of deciding between juggling two jobs and taking a full-time college course load or reserving a bed at 7 p.m. every day.
Her story was one of several told before and during Tuesday’s City Council budget discussion to exhibit how much more nuanced accepting interim or supportive housing is in light of a controversial, yet somewhat popular policy being floated at City Hall that would allow San Jose to cite and arrest homeless residents who refuse available shelter space three times for trespassing.
“If I had been arrested or cited, I may not be here today,” Magana said. “That is the reality for so many of our neighbors. We cannot let our city leaders dictate a false narrative that being poor is a crime.”
In the run-up to his March budget message, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan unveiled a new policy proposal he has portrayed as a middle ground between doing nothing and banning encampments that creates a layer of accountability for unhoused residents as the city continues to make historic investments in attempting to reduce unsheltered homelessness by adding another 1,000 spaces to its shelter system over the coming year.
With the city lowering the barriers to use interim housing, Mahan has argued that it was inhumane to let homeless residents live and die on the streets and there was a level of expectation that they would come indoors as part of the social compact with neighborhoods that took on interim housing solutions.
“We will not be able to maintain the trust of our community and continue to spend tens of millions of dollars a year to invest in interim housing and tell neighbors — over their strong objections — that even though they don’t want these solutions in their neighborhood, we would do it for the good of the city if we cannot prove to them that it allows us to resolve the homeless encampments that have caused so much harm to the broader community,” Mahan said.
Mahan’s policy initiative has elicited a full range of emotions, including praise from many of the hundreds of community members who came to speak on the budget message Tuesday.
“There is no dignity in watching the homeless or the unhoused caked in human waste walking about our streets, suffering miserably in the cold,” longtime resident and businessman Sal Caruso said. “There’s no dignity in that, but there is dignity in providing housing, and I applaud the solutions, and there have been many solutions for many different types of scenarios, including the homeless veterans (and) handicapped individuals.”
Several neighborhood leaders from across the city also recalled the impacts of homelessness and why San Jose could not accept the status quo.
“I’ve seen the heartbreaking reality of homelessness along Coyote Creek near my neighborhood,” McLaughlin Corridor resident Patty McNeil said. “People are dying from extreme weather and ravaged by addiction. These neighbors are living in squalor, fires reach through encampments nearly every week during the summer, endangering our neighborhoods. Coyote Creek is now filled with unimaginable amounts of trash and pollution (and) these folks need emergency shelter now.”
But Mahan’s proposal and the city’s more aggressive homelessness policy push has also received an enormous amount of pushback from religious leaders, advocates and housing nonprofits, who said the policy either misses the mark on why residents reject shelters or have equated it to criminalizing homelessness.
“Policies like this that remove all contexts are dangerous,” said Kylie Clark, a policy and advocacy manager at the Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits. “When I was a case manager for folks who are homeless, every single woman that I was managing had been sexually assaulted in a shelter. Are we going to punish her and arrest her for refusing to go back?”
Resident Jennette Holzworth blasted Mahan and the city’s rhetoric for a recent violent altercation she documented between police and a homeless man accused of trespassing and indecent exposure. She feared those types of incidents could become more commonplace as police increase the number of contacts with the homeless.
“The city has built zero trust with the unhoused from (its) language and attitude to outright defending the brutality in my yard on March 10,” Holzworth said.
Another sticking point for the policy’s detractors was the questionable data point used as a pretext for moving forward with the initiative.
Mahan cited that 32% of homeless residents near the newly opened interim housing site at Branham Lane and Monterey Road had rejected the initial round of outreach to use the site. But nearly a month after its opening, that figure is closer to 10%.
“We shouldn’t be using misinformation and we shouldn’t be exploiting the frustration of the community,” District 5 Councilmember Peter Ortiz said. “There was something that said that if we don’t do anything about this, that there’s going to be a movement to criminalize homelessness. If we don’t have politicians exploiting the community’s frustration with the unhoused, we won’t have policies like this before us, and really, that’s the root of our problem.”
Although the City Council approved the budget message by a 7-4 vote, the homeless policy will still need a final signoff from elected leaders in June when the city officially adopts the budget.
While both sides share the same goal of connecting residents with services and ending unsheltered homelessness, advocates also fear the policy could have the reverse effect if passed.
“We all know as service providers, one of the most important things we can do is build trust with our clients (where), especially in the outreach world, the threat or the suggestion of arrest really serves to hinder that process,” said Sarah Fields, director of public affairs for LifeMoves. “Further, the proposal to arrest by creating or increasing someone’s criminal record and history puts them further away from a job, further away from housing, and further away from the goal.”