With San Jose again heavily investing in addressing homelessness, city leaders believe they are making tangible progress and finally moving the needle on public perception.
But despite the city’s significant push to increase interim housing solutions this year, a recent clearing of an RV encampment of more than 40 vehicles outside a future Microsoft data center on Alviso-Milpitas road has dispersed unhoused residents into other neighborhoods, creating several new mini-encampments and raising questions about the unintended consequences of future abatements when there is not enough shelter space.
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“It’s going to happen again at a lot of these places and I feel like a broken record because I feel every week when we have discussions about homelessness on a different topic, I say the same thing, but the unintended consequences make me feel like we’re just spinning our wheels a lot of the time,” Cohen said.
Elected officials lauded the work of the various city departments involved in addressing the homelessness crisis as they heard a mid-year report on San Jose’s efforts to make progress on the issue that has consistently been at the forefront of residents’ minds.
This year, the city budgeted $220.4 million to address homelessness through interim housing, abatements, outreach and prevention efforts.
From July 2024 through February 2025, the city reported clearing 530 encampments and collecting 6.56 million pounds of trash from them throughout the city. San Jose also launched an RV pollution prevention pilot program, which later expanded to 537 vehicles, resulting in the city collecting nearly 200,000 pounds of biowaste.
Housing Director Erik Solivan said 17 unhoused residents also have engaged the city about participating in the recently launched Homeward Bound program, which provides funding for bus or train tickets to connect unhoused residents with loved ones willing to take them in.
With building and operating shelter space consuming more than half of the funds, the city expects to have opened more than 1,400 additional placements between safe sleeping and safe parking sites, hotel and motel room conversions and tiny home communities.
This week, he city is opening its 135-unit tiny home community at Via del Oro. In September, the city has targeted opening more interim housing at the VTA’s Cerone Yard, Cherry Avenue and its expanded Rue Ferrari site. Between those three communities, the city will add 480 beds.
“It feels that we are finally acting with a speed, urgency and scale that reflects it being an emergency, being a crisis,” San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said. “We’ve talked a lot about it being a crisis, and yet have often had solutions that have been very slow, very expensive, difficult to scale and basically condemn thousands of people to live and far too often, a couple hundred times a year tragically die on our streets. I’m really, really impressed with the progress over the last couple of years and appreciate how hard the team is working and the level of coordination and collaboration.”
But while the city has made progress in some aspects of its homelessness approach, RV encampments continue to be a source of frustration for some residents and public officials.
The abatement of an RV encampment in North San Jose has prompted vehicles to relocate to different neighborhoods, including this stretch on the 1300 block of Grand Boulevard in Alviso, as seen on April 23, 2025. (Devan Patel/Bay Area News Group)The city’s oversized and lived-in vehicle enforcement program (OLIVE) — which aimed to create 30 temporary towaway zones and declutter streets where RVs presented a public safety and health issue — has been compared to whack-a-mole because there is no one place for the RVs to go and they are now popping up in different neighborhoods. The city intends to expand the OLIVE program to 50 sites next fiscal year.
“What we’re doing with the OLIVE program is we’re pushing RVs from one area to another, and I get a huge amount of complaints because even if you look on Tully Road, between Seventh Street to Monterey Road, I counted 22 RVs just in that little section,” District 7 Bien Doan said. “Are we chasing tails, in a sense, because we don’t have a safe RV parking site?”
This week’s abatement on Alviso-Milpitas Road has elicited mixed emotions. Bicyclists, for example, noted that the encampment led to vehicles driving illegally and recklessly on the nearby bike path and a rash of illegal dumping and unleashed dogs roaming the area.
Meanwhile, homeless advocates blasted the city because they believed there was no reason to clear the RV encampment.
“Don’t just show concern for your own districts, show concern for these mostly senior, mostly minority folks who were needlessly swept from a safe, stable and clean spot and scattered to the winds,” advocate Shaunn Cartwright said. “Many will likely lose their vehicles and I cannot understand for the life of me how that improves their lives in any way. This sweep is slated to go for two weeks and I cannot wait to see what new shenanigans No Plan Mahan comes up with.”
While Cohen said the city has made progress and supported its expansion of interim housing solutions, he believed going too fast would not make the situation better and would lead to San Jose spending more time, money and resources on dealing with the effects.
He added that the city might want to reconsider its approach for long-term success, predicting that the state would face an “explosion of homelessness” as it is cut off from resources and services that help prevent the predicament.
“We really have to be thinking through what are the ways we do this in the least impactful way on our community and that’s not going to have the 47 abatements over and over again in the same sites,” Cohen said.
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