When the interim housing site opened at Monterey Road and Branham Lane last month, it was supposed to be a celebratory moment.
It represented a beacon of hope — San Jose’s largest tiny home community to date, offering two hundred-plus residents at any one time a safer place to rest their heads and a more dignified pathway off the streets — and a sign that the city is making a more constructive effort to curbing the homelessness epidemic.
RELATED: Fremont council walks back controversial ‘aiding and abetting’ clause in recent camping ban
Now, some homeless residents who rebuffed initial approaches for entering that site could face trespassing charges should a new policy coming out of City Hall pass.
In the initial round of outreach, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said about 32% of homeless residents offered placement outright refused to go indoors, so he is urging the City Council to take a firmer stance by enacting a new policy that would allow trespassing charges for homeless residents who consistently refuse available shelter.
“The goal here is to chart a pragmatic but humane middle ground between what you see in some cities doing a blanket ban on camping — which does not really address the underlying problem — and the other extreme where the only answer is permanent affordable housing and everything should be voluntary,” Mahan told The Mercury News. “I think the right answer here is 360° accountability: the government needs to be accountable for building basic shelter, the county side (needs to build) inpatient treatment and when it is available, individuals need to be accountable for coming indoors.”
Since Mahan came into office more than four years ago, he has called for San Jose to expand no-encampment zones in areas where the city is adding shelter space and made it clear that he wants homeless residents to take responsibility for using interim housing options when available.
San Jose has made a historic investment in growing its interim and supportive housing portfolio, including motel sheltering, tiny homes, large, open shelters, safe sleeping, and safe parking sites. In the course of a year, San Jose will triple its shelter capacity, but once the city and county complete the construction of those units, it will still leave an estimated 3,064 unsheltered residents without a place to go.
While the city’s shelter system has a low vacancy rate — meaning that a large portion of the unhoused population would jump at the opportunity to enter into an interim housing site — Mahan said the city made a promise to neighborhoods that it would clear encampments in the surrounding areas if they took on homelessness solutions.
“If a third of people camped in the area simply refused to move into a new apartment, we are unable to meet our obligation to the neighbors,” Mahan said.
Mahan said the proposed policy would look to impose consequences for homeless residents who refuse shelter three times in a 12-month period. He said the ultimate goal would be to get service-resistant residents into behavioral health court, where a judge can determine the right course of action in hopes of trying to break the underlying causes that led them to their predicament.
He also drew a distinction between the Responsibility to Shelter policy he is proposing and the surge of encampment bans cities nationwide have enacted since the Supreme Court’s decision in the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. The June 2024 decision from the Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s ruling that prohibitions on outdoor sleeping amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, resulting in more than 150 local entities across the U.S. codifying new or more stringent camping bans.
Locally, the Santa Clara Valley Water District passed rules late last year banning camping along the 295 miles of creeks and streams in San Jose and parts of Santa Clara County.
More recently, Fremont gained national attention for its encampment ban that made it a crime for “aiding or abetting” homeless encampments. However, its City Council walked back that controversial provision Tuesday.
Some homeless advocates have criticized Mahan’s policy proposal, saying it is out of touch with reality.
“I just think this whole idea is absolutely ridiculous,” said homeless advocate Gail Osmer. “We’re always going to have the unhoused, and maybe it will be less, but this out-of-sight, out-of-mind philosophy won’t work, and they’re never going to get every single person indoors.”
While Osmer said the vast majority of the homeless residents she has encountered would prefer interim housing over their current predicament, she is skeptical of the city’s approach because it does not take into account why residents have become resistant to coming indoors or clarify how residents are being approached with these offers.
Mahan, however, pushed back, saying that the city has lowered the barriers for entry into interim and supporting housing by being more responsive to their concerns and questioned why homeless advocates view wanting everyone to come indoors as controversial.
Mahan noted that homeless residents who are service-resistant cause the greatest stress on public safety and health systems.
He also rejected the notion that a new policy amounted to criminalizing homelessness.
“Criminalizing homelessness is saying it is a crime to be homeless and that it is a crime to camp,” Mahan said. “What I’m saying is we are going to create accountability for accepting housing when we do everything in our power to end your homelessness. Otherwise, why are we okay spending taxpayer dollars to build beautiful new interim housing that looks like market-rate apartments and okay with people saying no and continuing to be trapped in a cycle of addiction or suffering mental illness in a tent right down the street?”