The 56-tent site is part of the city’s effort to move hundreds of unhoused residents away from its waterways.
San Jose has begun construction near Watson Park on the city’s first safe sleeping site, bolstering its efforts to move hundreds of unhoused residents away from its waterways through faster, lower-barrier, and more cost-effective solutions.
Taking inspiration from similar sites in San Diego, Mayor Matt Mahan has asserted San Jose needs to implement a broader range of interim housing solutions, beginning with the 56-tent site at 1157 E. Taylor St., as an alternative to the inhumane conditions seen at the many unmanaged encampments throughout the city.
“I’ll be the first to say that this is not a perfect solution,” Mahan said. “I certainly did not come to the council a few years ago thinking that safe sleeping was what we should be focused on, but what I have seen is that we need scalable solutions … what we can’t do and what we’ve done for far too long is embrace a status quo approach that has left thousands of people with no options.”
The site was one of eight properties the city approved in June for further evaluation as it attempted to find places to relocate the hundreds of people living along its creeks and streams.
City officials announced in September that the Taylor Street site would be the first sanctioned encampment location.
Cleaning up San Jose’s waterways has become paramount, with the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board pressuring the city to clean up pollution and comply with the Clean Water Act.
The city has placed some culpability on homeless encampments, estimating they contribute 88% of pollution, and unless San Jose complies with the mandates for its stormwater permit, it could face heavy fines.
Along with clearing out more than 10 miles of its waterways this fiscal year, San Jose has made some progress in cleaning up the areas around Watson Park by sweeping encampments on public property. When the city announced its intention to build a sanctioned encampment site near Watson Park, Mahan recalled the squalid conditions he encountered when organizing one of his first city cleanups.
While city workers have posted no encampment signs around the park and attached abatement notices on trees along the trail, pockets of trash remain strewn along the waterways, as well as rusty shopping carts in the middle of Coyote Creek. Across from Watson Park near the Highway 101 overpass, a line of occupied makeshift structures remains on private property overlooking the creek.
“One of the things that we cannot ignore is the environmental damage to our major creeks and rivers in the city,” District 3 resident Jeff Hare said. “There is a wide swath of downtown residents that are really excited to see this step being taken, to try and make sure that we can restore the parks for public use, the trails, the bikeways, the bike paths and letting the creeks do their job of serving as flood control and habitat for endangered species.”
The 56-tent site will include case management offices, storage, mobile showers, restrooms and parking for 29 cars and trailers. The ultimate goal is for unhoused residents to move out of the site within 30 days, though the city has reiterated it will not kick them out if their stay extends past one month.
Homeless advocates believe the sanctioned encampment provides a step in the right direction and an option unhoused residents would likely accept but said its success would come down to how well a nonprofit provider manages the site.
“I would hope that they would have positive input because they are going to get connected to services and they won’t have the fear of getting abated hanging over their head,” advocate Gail Osmer said.
Public Works Director Matt Loesch anticipated the project would finish construction in June, with the prospect of bringing in unhoused residents later that month and into July.
Mahan said the tents would likely be offered to unhoused residents living along the city’s waterways first, though the site could be an option for those caught up in future encampment sweeps.
“My hope is that eventually our outreach workers and first responders are out in the field with data of which placements are open, where they’re located, who they’re appropriate for, and that we can actually offer someone shelter in real time out on the streets, whether they’re in the creek or St. James Park,” Mahan said.
The Taylor Street project also represents a scaled-down version of the sanctioned encampment sites San Diego has set up, including one at Balboa Park that Mahan toured in August, which can serve up to 400 people simultaneously.
Although San Jose initially envisioned its safe sleeping sites serving between 100 and 150 homeless residents, it had always intended to have its first site serve as somewhat of a pilot program.
“I think one of the challenges of having a site of hundreds of people is that you create a bottleneck,” Mahan said. “We want to start by learning how to run the site, how to manage it, what unique challenges or opportunities there may be with a site like this and focus on achieving that throughput goal that we’ve set of trying to graduate people out of the site, on average, every 30 days.”
As San Jose progresses with its newest interim housing solution, the city has made a decisive pivot in how it intends to move most of the remaining hundreds of unhoused residents away from the waterways.
Instead of building out a few more safe sleeping sites, Mahan said the city has focused more on hotel and motel conversions, noting how much easier it has been for San Jose to get them online as the city adds 250 new placements by this summer.
“There’s an advantage to the motel conversions in addition to being able to secure them and move faster,” Mahan said. “One is that many of them have parking lots that could double for safe parking, and some of them may actually be candidates for conversion to permanent housing in the long run.”