San Jose to clear around 200 people from Coyote Creek homeless camps. ‘We’re gonna go to the streets’

Angelica Lopez has been here before. A notice from the city. Visits from outreach workers. Thirty days to pack up her belongings and move along.

But this time, Lopez and hundreds of other homeless people living along Coyote Creek in central San Jose are being warned that they no longer can set up camp on much of the waterway — a grassy floodplain where many have lived for years.

Starting Monday, the city will begin clearing a roughly four-mile section of the creek to make way for a long-planned flood-protection project. Anyone still there after that date will be considered trespassing.

But with limited shelter options and a severe lack of affordable housing, San Jose faces the prospect of a surge of unhoused residents unmoored from encampments emptying into nearby neighborhoods.

“We’re gonna go to the streets,” Lopez, 39, said. “Maybe that’s what they don’t want, but we don’t have nowhere else to go.”

The sweeps come as the Bay Area’s largest city grapples with a growing homeless population of more than 6,700 people and mounting frustrations from residents, business owners, advocates and unhoused people over officials’ response to the crisis.

The effort to clear the creek represents one of the first major tests on homelessness for San Jose under new Mayor Matt Mahan, who’s made cracking down on encampments — while adding shelter beds and services — a centerpiece of his first term.

In an interview, Mahan said he’s “extremely concerned” about what could happen when Coyote Creek is cleared, part of the reason he’s fervently pushing the city to build shelters “faster and more cost-effectively, so we can bring more people indoors.”

In April, the Santa Clara Valley Water District finalized an agreement with the City Council giving San Jose $4.8 million to remove people from the creek and connect them with shelter and services so the district can start construction on flood walls and other improvements as early as June. The district began planning the project after a devastating flood in 2017 forced 14,000 people to flee homes in the area and caused an estimated $100 million in damage.

In January, flood waters washed out many of the Coyote Creek encampments — a warren of tents, vehicles and makeshift structures tucked along city parks and trails near the shaded waterway. Officials said they safely evacuated hundreds of people from the creek during the emergency but could not provide shelter for everyone.

Now the city again is making no promises to house or shelter everyone told to leave.

Officials estimate 120 to 200 people live in the construction area, though they concede that the actual number could be higher. This project’s first phase is expected to finish by the fall of next year. A second phase at two other nearby stretches of the creek could start in 2025.

The city is set to clear sections of the creek, starting at Corie Court and Oakland Road near the San Jose Municipal Golf Course and ending at Margaret Street and South 16th Street near the 280 freeway.

Rachelle Dicker, general manager of Gold Rush Express Delivery near an encampment at Corie Court, where Lopez lives, said a series of recent fires in the area has many of her employees wary.

Still, Dicker feels for the people living at the camp and isn’t convinced clearing them out will solve anyone’s problems. “Hopefully, they find somewhere else for them to stay because I don’t know where they’re going to go,” she said.

Outreach teams from nonprofits HomeFirst and PATH have made daily visits to the encampments since last month, according to the city. Valley Water gave $3.6 million to HomeFirst to provide wrap-around services and temporary shelter. But city officials say they are “not able to guarantee housing or shelter opportunities to every person living in the construction area.”

Advocates are raising alarms that removing homeless people from encampment communities without offering shelter or housing that accommodates their physical and mental needs could leave many in harm’s way, particularly vulnerable groups such as seniors, disabled people and LGBTQ residents.

“This seems like a slapdash program that is put together without any real honest concern for the unhoused people that are just being thrown everywhere but into places that they need,” said Shaunn Cartwright, an advocate for homeless people in San Jose.

In recent years, San Jose, like other cities across the Bay Area, has turned to prefabricated cabins and tiny homes as an alternative to dorm-style group shelters. The aim is to offer homeless people more privacy and stability so they’re more likely to accept shelter and take advantage of services, including mental health care, addiction counseling and help finding permanent housing.

While the small shelters succeeded in moving many homeless people to lasting homes, many unhoused residents also resist accepting them. Some worry they won’t be able to bring pets or will be separated from friends at encampments. Others simply prefer to be outdoors or don’t like the idea of living in a small space.

“They got a big old fence. It looks like a tiny prison,” Corie Court encampment resident Fernando King said of the cabin shelters.

For his part, Mayor Mahan is doubling down on such “interim” sites, asking the City Council to shift money in its budget to approve adding 1,000 “quick-build apartments” by the end of the year while expanding no-encampment zones throughout the city.

According to the latest count, about 5,000 homeless people lived outside or in vehicles in the city last year, with another 1,700 in various types of emergency shelters.

Jennifer Loving, chief executive of Destination: Home, a South Bay homelessness solutions advocacy group, is critical of the mayor’s plan, arguing that the city should instead focus that investment on low-income and permanent supportive housing. While acknowledging interim shelters are part of the solution, she said given the region’s severe affordable housing shortage, many shelter residents have little hope of finding long-term homes.

“Taking a shortsighted approach like this might be a political strategy, but it’s not one based in data or any evidence-based practices, Loving said.

According to a recent city report, almost half of the 912 people who stayed in interim shelters last year moved into permanent housing, though the results varied widely across the city’s seven sites. Some shelters had a maximum stay of six months, while others allowed residents to stay a year or more. Currently, the city has about 500 interim units, officials said.

Ahead of Monday’s deadline to leave Corie Court, Lopez, a San Jose native, and her partner, Roberto Ortiz, picked through household appliances and metal scraps strewn across the embankment to recycle for cash before the camp is cleared out. Having survived multiple sexual assaults at another encampment, Lopez said, she’s worried for her safety when she has to move.

Lopez recently filled out paperwork for a housing voucher but said outreach workers told her none was available. She heard payments could be available to help move the couple’s broken-down RV to the street. But after years of struggling for assistance pulling herself out of homelessness, she’s learned not to get her hopes up.

“Promises and promises,” she said. “Like always.”