California, with simply over 12% of America’s inhabitants, is house to virtually half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless – and the quantity is rising.
It’s grim information. However San Jose is one of some vivid spots the place the inhabitants of unsheltered homeless has began to shrink as a result of we’re lastly breaking with the failed insurance policies of the previous.
The newest Level-in-Time (PIT) rely exhibits San Jose shrank the quantity of people that name our streets house by 10.7%. With out San Jose, Santa Clara County’s unsheltered homelessness price would have grown by 9.4% %.
Whereas we should do higher, this small enchancment is basically as a result of San Jose is constructing low-cost, quick-build and incessantly modular models to accommodate the homeless in protected and respectable rooms, with the dignity of a door that locks and a personal lavatory and with out the as much as five-year delay of constructing conventional properties.
The established order strategy in Santa Clara County and past is spending as much as $1 million a door on housing sponsored with public funds. Our strategy can greatest be described as “Housing-Now,” and it’s working to transition neighbors off our streets and into protected, dignified housing by constructing it at a fraction of the associated fee and time.
The June 13 vote on subsequent yr’s price range will determine whether or not we do extra to accommodate our homeless neighbors now in protected, respectable particular person properties or return to the failed coverage of prioritizing million-dollar properties for the fortunate few.
In 2020, San Jose leaders requested voters to assist deal with the homelessness disaster with Measure E, a rise of the switch tax on the most costly properties, by promising the funds could be used to handle each our homelessness disaster and our scarcity of reasonably priced properties for working households. We have to preserve that promise by spending these funds on each of these worthy targets — and that’s what I’m proposing.
Some advocates are pushing again, saying the one answer is to construct high-cost housing. Our want for reasonably priced housing is critical and can be with us for many years, but when we are saying that now we have to unravel our reasonably priced housing disaster earlier than we are able to finish road homelessness, we’re committing ourselves to the established order we see on our streets at this time.
Basically, they’re arguing to proceed spending the lion’s share of Measure E funds on high-cost properties — which is the technique that has left us with the encampments you see at this time. Together with many others, I’m combating to maintain our promise to voters by doing each, together with investing in quick-build communities which are working right here in San Jose.
These properties are saving lives. For too many, residing on the streets turns into a demise sentence, with practically 250 homeless individuals dying on the streets of Santa Clara County final yr alone.
But as a substitute of treating this as a real disaster and constructing the protected and respectable placements we’d like proper now to avoid wasting lives, we see the forces of the established order organizing to keep up a failing coverage. Mockingly, their new argument is that it’s too “expensive” to run these quick-build communities, whereas they insist on million-dollar models that price way more to construct and a comparable quantity of ongoing public subsidy to function. And they don’t think about the price of managing an unsheltered inhabitants, from trash pick-up to police calls to emergency well being interventions — which come out to an estimated $65,000 per particular person annually.
We’ve got a disaster of unhoused neighbors. Let’s home them now, not 5 years from now.
Matt Mahan is mayor of San Jose.
