Just weeks ago, nonprofit outreach workers approached Robert Emmons and other unhoused residents living along Autumn Parkway to let them know they would be there every day to help them out of their predicament.
But in the blink of an eye, the hope they offered disappeared. Emmons awoke some days later to the sound of staple guns discharging, signaling that the homeless residents living on that stretch of the Guadalupe River Trail were now on notice — they only had a little more than a week to leave.
“Haven’t seen them since,” said Emmons as he recalled the day outreach workers first visited the area to extend a helping hand, including potential shelter.
Now, Emmons and dozens of homeless residents who set up tents or makeshift structures from the trail to Julian Street are looking for another place to live after city and Santa Clara Valley Water workers cleared their encampments, irking homeless advocates who questioned why they would do so knowing that unhoused residents have no place to go.
“If you are concerned about public safety, the best thing you can do is (offer to) house people because they’re not creating fires,” said Shaunn Cartwright, founder of the Unhoused Response Group in Santa Clara County. “People who are housed have better mental health because when you are outside, you are constantly in fight-or-flight mode, constantly agitated by the environmental factors, and not in a good state.”
This year, San Jose is adding more than 1,400 placements to its shelter inventory through hotel and motel conversions, safe parking and sleeping sites, and tiny homes. But while San Jose is bolstering its shelter options, many of the new units will not be open until at least the fall, leading to tense exchanges between advocates and city officials over what conducting the abatements would solve.
For instance, one month ago, the city cleared a large RV encampment in North San Jose near the Milpitas border, forcing dozens of residents to move from Alviso-Milpitas Road into other nearby neighborhoods.
While city officials aim to get unhoused residents into available housing, they conceded it was not a realistic possibility every time there was an abatement.
“Decommissioning an encampment isn’t the end goal — but when safety is at risk, like with the recent attack on one of our police officers, we have to act to protect the broader community,” said Mayor Matt Mahan.
Two weeks ago, a 41-year-old man with an extensive history of mental issues was charged with attempted murder, accused of stabbing a San Jose police officer in that area.
“The Autumn Parkway encampment generated over 100 calls for police in the last month alone — a clear signal that the situation had become unsafe and unsustainable,” Mahan said. “That’s why we’re urgently expanding shelter and treatment — over 1,000 beds this year — to stop this cycle and offer real pathways off the street. But those living on our streets who are committing crimes, whether violent or quality of life, don’t belong in our shelters; they belong in our justice system or treatment centers until they are ready to rejoin the community.”
Of the dozens of homeless residents living in the Autumn Parkway encampments who spoke to The Mercury News, only one person was known to have been placed into an emergency interim housing site.
But even that case was not a direct result of contact with outreach workers who had recently come out to the encampment.
Mary Delacruz, 57, who had fallen into homelessness three times over the past several years, heard she was going to receive a spot in a tiny home community — but her son, who also lived at the encampment, did not.
“It’s hard out here to keep a phone because people steal everything or they don’t get in contact with us,” Delacruz said. “It’s a big, long process, and people who are out here just don’t know where to go. There’s no money and the government is not really helping us (and) they’re just shoving us to the side or wherever they want.”
Tyric Perkins, a 48-year-old man who has been on the streets for the most part since 2015, said he’s never encountered anything like the current encampment sweeps.
Although Perkins said he requested a reasonable accommodation due to his severe health conditions, the sweeps led to all of his belongings, including his walker and cane, being tossed in the trash. Adding insult to injury, he said, the only belongings workers left behind were a bag of dirty clothes.
“I’m wearing basically everything I’ve got on my back,” Perkins said. “I’m not going anywhere, because where else am I going to go? If I go somewhere else, they’re going to keep following us.”
The area just south of Guadalupe Gardens has a long, troubled history.
During the recent stabbing, the suspect, who was not homeless, had threatened security at a nearby Target with a machete before fleeing into the encampment and using another knife to seriously injure the officer, authorities said.
Emmons has been mostly homeless for about four years, except for one year in a tiny home community he was ultimately kicked out of due to an altercation he described as self-defense. He acknowledges the public safety burden the encampment has imposed on the city.
“It’s a mixture of a few things: fires, the guy that got stabbed, the trash and the people stealing from stores,” Emmons said. “It’s hard to back us up when, going down this alley, there is (expletive) everywhere. That’s hard to fight for.”
San Jose must also grapple with the Clean Water Act and its stormwater permits, which unhoused residents have significantly impacted.
City officials have estimated that 88% of waterway pollution comes from homeless encampments along creeks and streams.
But Emmons added that multiple things could be true simultaneously, including that the sweeps would not solve anything.
Since he returned to the streets, Emmons estimated the homeless population living along the Guadalupe River Trail between Julian Street and the Taylor Bridge had increased 10-fold before many of them left ahead of this week’s clearing.
Homeless advocates also fear what is to come as San Jose plans to clear the massive encampments at Columbus Park, reclaiming the public space so the city can move forward with an ambitious revitalization project that includes installing sports and recreational amenities.
Cartwright estimated that the sweeps this week could increase the homeless population at Columbus Park to nearly 1,000 individuals before that area is eventually swept later this year.
She also feared the continued abatements without the offer of shelter could set the wrong types of records, specifically the number of deaths on the streets.
“It might look like a shack to the outside person, but they know how to protect themselves against the elements,” Cartwright said of the tent encampments. “They understood how to survive, and now that they have been forced to move and had their gear taken, they won’t and will be roaming around with nothing.”