‘It’s everything to me’: Santa Clara County celebrates the purchase of Homeless Veterans Emergency Housing Facility

Just the other day, Irvin Goodwin, the head of the Homeless Veterans Emergency Housing Facility, called up 70-year-old Russell Adams to ask him how he was doing.

“I said, ‘I need to come home,’” Adams recalled. “He said ‘c’mon.’ And so we talked for a minute and I said, ‘I’m on my way.’”

Adams, who served in the United States Air Force that took him to Okinawa, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, was living in London when Goodwin, the CEO of the Santa Clara County no-profit, made the phone call. By Thursday morning, Adams had traveled more than 5,000 miles to move back into the place he has called home on several occasions in the last decade.

“It’s everything to me,” he said of the transitional housing facility, which provides housing, three meals a day and a slew of services, including referrals to Veteran Affairs healthcare services, for homeless and at-risk veterans. Since 2009, the 150-bed facility has helped more than 6,000 veterans.

Adams’ homecoming on Thursday coincided with another celebration: Santa Clara County’s acquisition of the property. In September, the Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to use Measure A funds — a $950 million affordable housing bond approved by voters in 2016 — to purchase the facility on Kirk Avenue in East San Jose. The county expects to finalize the deal with the soon-to-be former owner, developer Swenson, next Wednesday, less than a week after Veterans Day.

For Supervisor Otto Lee, who served 28 years in the U.S Navy and did a year-long tour in Iraq in 2009, this is an issue close to his heart. The county’s purchase of the facility, he said, cements their commitment to the roughly 64,000 veterans in the South Bay.

“The ability to find places for our veterans to have a safe place to sleep is absolutely vital for our safety net, not just for veterans but for our homeless situation as a whole,” Lee told the Mercury News.

In 2022, the Santa Clara County point-in-time count identified 660 veterans experiencing homelessness, with 79 percent of them living unsheltered.

While the county is planning on renovating the property, Lee hopes they can build permanent housing for veterans on the 4.3-acre site, as well.

“There’s a lot of military history and veterans who have served that are living in the Bay Area, especially in the South Bay,” the supervisor said. “We definitely need to make sure they haven’t been forgotten.”

Retired Col. Ray Watts called the county’s acquisition of the facility a “game changer,” as he imagined what more could be done for veterans at the location.

“Those who wear the uniform understand when we say crawl, walk, run,” he said. “In my opinion, this acquisition is somewhere between crawling and walking. I look forward to the day when this facility is in its full stride with its run.”

Watts has already seen first hand how the Homeless Veterans Emergency Housing Facility has changed lives. His former tenant, U.S. Army Ranger Sgt. Jeffrey Wray, came to live with him as part of a Veterans Affairs program after a yearlong stay at the Kirk Ave facility in 2015.

Before that, Wray, who served six years and two tours — one in Grenada and one with Operation Desert Storm in the U.S. Army — had been living out of his car. Living at the facility, he said, gave him a safe space first and foremost.

“Once you got in here it gave you one of those moments that you could just let your hair down,” he said. “It gave me stability to find my bearing on what way I wanted to go in life.”

Wray and his new wife, Alma, just signed the paperwork to move into an apartment of their own.

For Adams, who has called the facility home in times when he couldn’t find a job or after his wife died, coming back is “a fresh start.”

“I know people here,” he said. “I love people here and I want to help. I want to be a part of it again.”