Despite California Gov. Gavin Newsom urging cities and counties to take a more aggressive stance on encampments, some advocates continue to rail against San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan’s homelessness policy platform, including a proposal to arrest unhoused residents who repeatedly refuse offers of available shelter.
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Community groups have petitioned the City Council to scrap the proposal — scheduled for a vote next month — arguing it would do more harm than good.
“I reject this false choice between compassion and enforcement,” Sacred Heart Community Service Executive Director Poncho Guevara said. “I have no compassion for a system that has failed folks over and over and over again and believes that enforcement can do anything but further traumatize human beings and make it harder for them to get housing and employment in the future. When we do nothing, people suffer (and) handing out tickets is doing nothing.”
This year, San Jose has focused on expanding its shelter options through hotel and motel conversions and building new tiny home communities and safe parking and safe sleeping sites. In total, Mahan said the city is on track to open more than 1,400 new placements this year, more than any other city on the West Coast.
Mahan has preached of the need for accountability to make progress on the homelessness crisis, calling on all levels of government to do their fair share and proposing his Responsibility to Shelter proposal, which seeks to amend the municipal code to allow the city to charge homeless residents with trespassing if they refuse shelter three times over 18 months.
While acknowledging that the majority of unhoused residents accept shelter, as evidenced by the low vacancy rate of its shelters, Mahan said the proposal would allow the city to petition behavioral health courts to act when residents suffering from mental health or addiction issues turn down services.
To enforce the proposal, the city intends to invest $2.1 million to create a Neighborhood Quality of Life unit — staffed with one sergeant and six police officers — to reduce the negative impacts of unsheltered homelessness on the city by enforcing criminal violations.
Mahan framed the proposal as a “middle ground” between the housing first strategy and banning encampments altogether, like other local cities have done without offering shelter after the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson decision.
“I think it’s a pretty balanced approach, particularly in light of cities we’re seeing outright ban camping without offers of shelter … or the governor’s announcement this morning, which I think is largely aligned with where we’re going and is pretty aggressive on effectively banning encampments,” Mahan said. “I think in San Jose, we’re trying to take a very pragmatic, practical, holistic, compassionate middle ground of dramatically scaling up safe places where people can be with sanitation, security, three meals a day, case management, shelter, and services.”
Despite Mahan’s goal of getting residents indoors, homeless advocates said the policy amounts to criminalizing homelessness.
Erin Stanton, director of homelessness prevention at Sacred Heart, said research shows that approach does not work, and that if the city was intent on compassionate and effective solutions, it would focus on housing and services.
“When people are ticketed or arrested, they move to a new spot down the road,” Stanton said. “They return to the streets after the time in jail, they lose critical property like IDs and medication, and they lose trust in the services and the system. Criminalizing homelessness makes it harder to end homelessness.”
Mahan emphatically denied that his proposal amounted to criminalizing homelessness, noting how nonviolent misdemeanors do not tend to end up in incarceration but rather diversion programs. He stressed that the policy would only apply when the city has available shelter.
Mahan also pointed to two incidents last week — one in which a person with a history of mental health issues stabbed a police officer, and another in which a homeless man who recently assaulted a 15-year-old boy was released into the community — as being avoidable if the city held them accountable for getting treatment.
“If we intervene earlier and get people into shelter or treatment, and hold people accountable for engaging with treatment when they’re unwilling to accept shelter, I think we can break this cycle that we see play out over and over and over again,” Mahan said.
While a large contingent of residents supports Mahan’s policy direction, some members of the City Council are pushing back.
“When we are talking about the issues that people who are program resistant are facing — whether it’s mental health, substance abuse or alcohol abuse — the place to break the cycle isn’t well into adulthood,” District 2 City Councilmember Pamela Campos said. “It’s early prevention in the form of stable housing, good jobs and strong social safety nets, so if we as a city are truly driven to investments that improve the quality of life in our community, it’s our duty to scrutinize policies like the Responsibility to Shelter ordinance that are not rooted in the policies that are proven to end homelessness.”
District 4 City Councilmember David Cohen noted that the city has not yet satisfied the needs of people in the community who want them, and expressed skepticism that the new policy would have any impact in his district, where “many people are frustrated that we have ordinances on the books that we still don’t even enforce.”
While Mahan acknowledged that San Jose needs to build more shelter options, he said two things could be true simultaneously, including that the city should not be turning a blind eye to those refusing shelter who may need intervention.
“I don’t think we should wait sequentially before we have all the affordable housing, build shelter, do some intervention and get more treatment beds,” Mahan said. “We’re going to have to map all of it at once, but be measured in how we do it.”
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