Dear Neighbor,

Tomorrow, we are starting our biggest clean-up operation since we cleared the Jungle — Operation Clean-Up Columbus. 

It won’t be easy. It won’t happen overnight. And it may get worse in the area before it gets better. But continuing to do nothing, allowing this encampment to grow out of control, is not an option. 

Fortunately, we’ve been preparing both ourselves and the people living in the encampment for weeks. 70 days ago, we posted abatement notices. Since then and for weeks prior, our outreach workers have been in the park daily, often facing unsafe situations, in order to ensure that our homeless residents are ready to make the transition from the streets to safety. 

And of the 309 current encampment residents, 50% have said yes to coming indoors. We want to get to 100%. And we have the shelter capacity to do so thanks to the work we’ve been doing to expand safe, dignified interim housing over the past 2 years. As you may recall, San José is adding over 1,000 interim housing units this year alone — more than any other West Coast city — and 390 of those beds will be opening up over the next four weeks.

But the truth is, not everyone is ready or even able to make the rational decision to turn their lives around. Our outreach workers have found that about 50% of the people living in the park scored an 8+ on the VI-SPDAT (“Vulnerability Index – Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool”) — meaning they are suffering from severe addiction, mental health issues, chronic physical health conditions, have a long history of interactions with the justice system, or have been victimized in the past. We know this population likely has a correlation with the folks who have not yet indicated they will accept offers of shelter. 

They need help. Often, more help than we can give them in our interim housing — even with private units, support for pets, and individual case management and counseling. 

We keep running into the same problem here in San José, and I know other cities are in the same boat. We simply don’t have the mental health and addiction treatment system we need.

We’re going to continue doing our part at the city-level — building out our shelter system, cleaning up our streets, investing in permanent housing, and ensuring that camping isn’t a choice when safe shelter is available. 

But we have to acknowledge the hard truth — our system isn’t set up to help the most vulnerable amongst us. The people who are chronically homeless. The people who have slipped through the cracks. The people who have the biggest impact on our small businesses, our emergency rooms and police and fire departments. 

In just the first seven months of this year, Columbus park has had 272 emergency calls for service. That’s an average of more than one 911 call per day. 

Columbus Park is unsafe for the people living in it, unusable for the wider community, and an untenable situation for our emergency responders. As are many of our encampments. 

That’s why we’re taking action. 

Over the next 8 weeks, we will clear the area, offering housing to every person who is currently there, and prohibit re-encampment of the site so we can restore the park to what it always should have been — a shared public space for everyone to enjoy. 

We’re doing our part. And I will continue to advocate that other levels of government step up and do theirs. Our county needs to build out a proper treatment system and our state needs to focus on the issues here at home. That’s how we prove that California can work.  Stay tuned in the coming weeks — I’ll be sharing regular updates on our progress as we continue pushing toward our goal of ending the era of encampments here in San José. 

Sincerely,

Here in San José, we’re creating housing affordability and ownership opportunities by thinking differently.

A little over a year ago, we were the first city to implement AB 1033 — which allows ADUs, like the one you see in the photo above, to be sold as individual units, similar to how condos are parceled and individually owned. (In case you’re wondering, in this arrangement both homeowners participate in a joint HOA that spells out enforceable rules related to issues like ingress/egress, similar to an HOA in a traditional condominium.)  

Last week, we marked another milestone: San José approved the very first ADU condominium conversion in California history. And there are 86 more ADU projects like it in the pipeline.

ADUs are affordable by design and growing in popularity across the state, and now they can offer the most accessible form of home ownership, too. They are the perfect starter home in a state where many young people have lost hope of becoming homeowners. Here in San José, we are offering a proof of concept for California with the hope that other cities follow our lead.

But it’s going to be hard for them to catch up! Since 2019, San José has built 7,592 new homes — 1,735 of them ADUs, making up 22% of all housing built. That growth includes units supported by our ADU Ally program which helps streamline permitting at the local level to make ADUs easier to build, resulting in the city receiving twice as many ADU applications as Oakland and over four times as many as San Francisco.  In San José, we are making sure the American Dream of homeownership is alive and well by bringing the innovation inherent to our region into our housing policy.