San Jose begins enforcement of no encampment zone around Branham housing site ...0

As San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan walks along the sidewalks near Branham Lane and Monterey Road, he sees a stark difference in one of the neighborhoods he once represented as a city councilmember.

What was once the largest hotspot for constituent complaints in the district — from trash to eucalyptus trees being lit on fire to drug dealing and noise, all from homeless encampments — is now a much more serene setting since the city’s largest interim housing community opened at that very site in late February.

San Jose leaders had promised residents that the city would do its part to protect the neighborhood from encampments if residents agreed to take on homelessness solutions. On Wednesday, they began to fulfill that pact by instituting a no-encampment zone that goes into effect immediately.

“People want a government that works and a government that works says, ‘If I’m going to ask you to invest millions of your dollars in real solutions, we’re going to implement them,” Mahan said. “They come with some sacrifice, but in exchange, we will make your life better: the neighborhood will be safer, cleaner (and) there will be less homelessness and human suffering. That’s what people want.”

The city partnered with LifeMoves to transform the two-acre site into a three-story development with 204 units that could serve up to 216 residents at any given time. The site has equipped each living space with private bathrooms, kitchenettes and modern furnishings and also offers case management and supportive services.

Homekey Branham Lane is part of the city’s grander vision to add more than 1,000 units to its shelter portfolio over the coming year in the form of more safe sleeping and safe parking spaces, motel conversions and tiny homes to help reduce unsheltered homelessness. City estimate the current unsheltered homeless population at around 5,500 residents, so even when the city completes its existing projects, it still would be thousands of units short of providing every person a safe place to sleep.

But despite San Jose’s push to get more people indoors into what Mahan and the city describe as more dignified living conditions, the process has encountered some difficulties. The initial round of outreach resulted in 32% outright refusing shelter, according to Mahan, who noted that the refusal rate is now closer to 10%, with 20% unreachable.

“Our assumption is that in most cases, people have moved out of the area because they don’t want to be bothered anymore and are not interested in coming indoors,” Mahan said. “But you have to take it on a case-by-case basis. There may be some folks who have found housing some other way.”

While the interim housing site is not full, the city is moving forward with its promise to the neighborhood as Mahan helped install the first of 12 no encampment signs in the neighborhood Wednesday morning.

He said the city would follow a similar playbook it executed along the Guadalupe River between the Children’s Discovery Museum and Little Italy — an area that has seen success after the city spent several weeks in the area doing outreach, offering housing and educating residents about the rules.

“We made it very clear with everyone that we would not allow re-encampment and that the enforcement mechanism would be immediate abatement — not a 72-hour window, not multiple weeks of outreach,” Mahan said. “We haven’t had to press any charges and haven’t had to arrest anyone and it has worked incredibly well.”

Mahan said he would judge the housing site’s success on whether quality of life improves, the city receives fewer 911 and 311 calls in the area, and how well formerly unhoused residents transition to permanent housing.

He noted that San Jose’s other interim housing locations have shown promising data that he hopes will translate to the city’s newest site.

“We found that calls for service for both 911 and 311, so crime and blight essentially were down in the 12 months,” Mahan said.

Meanwhile, for residents in the area who were living on the streets less than two months ago, there have been both positive and negatives from the city’s ramped-up enforcement.

“It’s been pretty good, a little different rules than living in an apartment, but they’re easy to accommodate because it’s free,” said one of Homekey Branham Lane’s newest residents, identified as N., who asked this news organization to withhold his name for security reasons.

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He considered himself fortunate because he had spent the past five years living on the streets after losing his job, staying at one encampment for nearly a year and a half before the city conducted sweeps, forcing him to find a new location.

While the resident secured a spot at the new interim site, he sympathized with one of his friends — a pregnant woman in her third trimester — who was not as lucky as her makeshift tents had been torn down multiple times, forcing her to leave and is now nowhere in sight.

“I would have been pretty much (s***-out-of-luck) or arrested,” he said.

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