This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:01:05] I know you went to an encampment in San Jose. What did it look like and who did you meet when you were out there?
Guy Marzorati [00:01:13] So this is an encampment off of Cherry Avenue in South San Jose. It’s underneath Highway 85, kind of right on the banks of the Guadalupe River, and it’s behind this big Almaden Ranch shopping center.
Guy Marzorati [00:01:31] What really interested me about this encampment is right next to it, San Jose’s building a new tiny home community. And anyone who’s living in the encampament is getting offered kind of first dibs for moving into the site when it opens later this year. And so it raises the question of like, are people gonna take the offer? Why or why not? Since I first started visiting this camp, probably back in January, it has gotten in smaller and smaller. People have taken up offers of shelter, but some folks are still there.
Guy Marzorati [00:02:05] Have they said anything to you guys about giving you a spot there?
Butch Larson [00:02:09] No, they said it was backed already.
Guy Marzorati [00:02:11] Butch Larson and David Garcia are among them, and they’ve both been living at this camp near Cherry Avenue for years.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:19] Yeah, I mean, do they have any interest in the tiny homes being built, the stone throw away?
Guy Marzorati [00:02:26] They don’t. They like to do repairs. They have a lot of tools with them. They’re concerned that they won’t be able to bring the tools into the tiny homes.
Butch Larson [00:02:45] Yeah, they tried to give me a tiny home. That was bulls–t. Couldn’t have any visitors, most of all, right? Even in jail, you get visitors.
Guy Marzorati [00:02:52] They don’t really feel comfortable moving in. And I think, look, the tiny homes are pretty low barrier. They don’t do drug testing there. You can bring in pets, you can come in and out. But at the end of the day, comfort is a feeling and they don’t feel comfortable making that move.
Butch Larson [00:03:12] I’ve been telling everybody out here about how you’re the first person to go to jail over this s–t, and I’ve been out here the longest.
Guy Marzorati [00:03:17] And others I’ve talked to at the encampment feel differently. They want a spot in the interim housing, but there are some folks like, like Butch Larson and David Garcia who say, no, they’re not going to accept that offer.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:35] And it’s really that slice of folks who have come into focus for Mayor Matt Mahan in recent months, right? How has the city tried to answer this hesitation that we’re seeing from people like Butch and David to accept these sort of interim shelter offers?
Guy Marzorati [00:03:57] Yeah, it’s been a balance of kind of carrots and sticks. Like I said, you know, there’s this outreach and the people who are encamped immediately around these shelter sites are getting first priority. But they’re also setting up the city as a no encampment zone around the shelter sites. So ultimately these are the encampments that are going to be cleared first. And it’s really what’s at the center of this policy that the mayor is rolling out now, this responsibility to shelter policy.
Matt Mahan [00:04:25] I’ve come to believe that it is ineffective, politically infeasible, and frankly, cruel to those suffering from addiction and mental illness to only focus on the people who want help.
Guy Marzorati [00:04:37] He’s saying once we offer people shelter, heated times, multiple times, and they’re still turning it down, that’s when we’re gonna bring in the police to potentially make arrests.
Matt Mahan [00:04:48] I actually think the person who’s saying, no, I don’t want to come indoors, I don’t wanna help, I’d rather move down the block to the next neighborhood than come indoors is a real problem. Those are the folks who most need our help.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:05:01] And this is sort of a way of like forcing people’s hands to accept this interim shelter, right? Why this approach? Why the threat of arrest?
Guy Marzorati [00:05:11] Yeah, I think he sees it as kind of a middle path between letting encampments proliferate in the city, but then also not the approach pursued by other Bay Area cities like Fremont, for example, or elsewhere in California, like in Fresno, cities that have banned camping without offering housing.
Matt Mahan [00:05:29] We don’t want to be cruel. The goal here is not to send anyone to jail, nor will that be the outcome of enforcing responsibility to shelter. The only point is when we’re doing everything we can and asking our community to invest millions, and ultimately, actually, it’s been billions of dollars statewide to end homelessness, people have got to, at a minimum, agree to come indoors.
Guy Marzorati [00:05:49] Mahan has tried to pitch responsibility to shelter. It’s like a middle ground between that. They’re gonna clear encampments, but they’re always gonna proceed that with an offer of shelter.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:05:59] I mean, which kind of raises the question, does San Jose have enough shelter to offer?
Guy Marzorati [00:06:05] It doesn’t. There’s a city report that was out on this earlier this year that I think has a few really pertinent statistics. One is just the raw number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, which this report pegged at 5,477 people in San Jose. When you combine city shelter, interim housing, county shelter, there’s probably a little more than 3,000 units. There is not enough shelter for every person who is experiencing unsheltered homelessness. The second data point that I think is relevant here is how many people are actually resisting shelter and services. And this report says in San Jose, that’s around 10% of people who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Now, it’s a moving number, right? At some encampments, you’ll have a 20% of people say no, or 30, but I think this is really at the heart of the discussion here. And it’s difficult number to pin down because these are humans. There was a guy I talked to at the Cherry Ave encampment who said, you know, he’s been battling depression and an outreach worker came to him, offered a spot in interim housing, and he turned it down. And he said, I’ve regretted that ever since. Like I was just having a really bad day. And I told that person, I’m not interested, go away. And ever since then, I’ve been regretting that. And if they came back, I would say yes. So it’s a really difficult statistic to pin down, but I think it’s at the heart of this question of, how many people are actually refusing shelter and would be impacted by this initiative?
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:42] Right, and I feel like what’s interesting is that this policy that city council is voting on really puts to the center of the photo, I feel, like of what’s happening here. The people who aren’t accepting shelter, when it seems like there’s, I mean, there’s a demand issue, but also a supply issue here. If the stated goal is to try and compel unhoused people to accept help. Say you are arrested. I mean, what would happen to you next under this plan in an ideal world?
Guy Marzorati [00:08:17] Depends on whose ideal world, but I would say like the way the mayor has crafted this is once, you know, someone is arrested. The city’s plan is to take that person to this mission street recovery station. It’s a 24 hour drop off site. It’s run by the county for people who are having like a mental health crisis or honestly just for people to sober up. But there’s no agreement for that right now. So as of now, San Jose police would take this person experiencing homelessness to the county jail. Give them a citation, and then the sheriff’s office says they’ll be released right there. They’re not going to lock people up for this. Then this person would, you know, come back to court for their arraignment or for their first court appearance. You’d have someone from the San Jose City Attorney’s Office asking the judge, hey, can we place this person in a diversion court, court order treatment? You’d the public defender there, maybe they’re pushing back against the terms of a treatment plan or asking for the case to be dismissed. But if the person does make it that far, they’re gonna be in this rigorous behavioral health court. And I actually spent some time in one of those courts this week. And you know, clients there, they’re getting support from a judge, they’re get support from caseworker, but they have to show up to their appointments, to their counseling, and they have these constant check-ins with the judge to make sure that’s happening.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:44] And there’s some people who don’t see that as a very realistic scenario, right?
Guy Marzorati [00:09:50] Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I mean, first of all, I think we should just predicate this with like, not everyone who’s refusing shelter has a behavioral health issue. If people are being routed in that direction, is that even going to capture the needs of everybody who is refusing shelter? I heard some skepticism on that front. There’s a lot of skepticism among people who work in county government. And ultimately, once someone is arrested by San Jose police, they’re then transferred over to the hands of the county government.
Damon Silver [00:10:19] I am quite kind of skeptical of the use of the criminal legal system to address the homelessness problem our community is kind of wrestling with.
Guy Marzorati [00:10:29] When I talked to, for example, the acting public defender in Santa Clara County, Damon Silver, he said, you know, after that person is arrested, taken to the jail, and then immediately released, he basically said, like, it’s wildly optimistic to expect them to then show up to even their first court hearing.
Damon Silver [00:10:46] They’re struggling to survive. For us to expect that they’re likely going to be able to manage both the transportation, the monitoring of when their court date is, and then successfully arriving at court, I think we’re going to anticipate a large failure to appear rate.
Guy Marzorati [00:11:03] And then if they don’t show up, the judge can say, no more citations, this person needs to be brought into custody. So then that does increases the chances that someone will spend time in jail.
Damon Silver [00:11:12] So what you create is this kind of negative cycle of arrest, re-arrest, detention, loss of property, loss of connection, and then all the resources it’s consuming to do that.
Guy Marzorati [00:11:30] Fundamentally, everyone I talked to who’s involved in this behavioral health treatment program said, if you don’t have housing, your treatment is not going to work. And Damon Silver, the public defender, says the county just doesn’t have enough of that housing for treatment right now.
Damon Silver [00:11:47] It will ultimately, in our opinion, result in a lot more harm and be counterproductive to the goals, which is, in essence, get people out of homelessness, than achieve what the stated goal is.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:03] Coming up, why Mayor Matt Mahan thinks this policy will help unlock the rest of his homelessness agenda. Stay with us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:20] How am I supposed to make sense of all of this, Guy? I mean, if this policy that the city council is voting on next week is really about compelling people to accept help, but there’s actually not even enough help to offer, I mean what really is the goal here then?
Guy Marzorati [00:12:41] Yeah, I mean, I would lay out two other big pieces of this that I think is kind of through the lens that the mayor is thinking of it. One is to use these arrests to force action by the county government, to push judges to order people into mental health or substance use treatment, to push the county, the board of supervisors to build more housing for people who are going through treatment. I think Mahan sees like, look, the city is spending a lot of money and doing a lot to stand up these shelters. And for the people who are not accepting those, he wants the county to take on a greater role to provide that kind of housing. So part of this is a forcing function.
Matt Mahan [00:13:19] I don’t control what happens on the county side, and much of that is determined by the state. Counties are essentially subsidiaries of the state, but I’m not going to be silent on what’s needed there either.
Guy Marzorati [00:13:31] The other I would say is political. It’s been hard historically to get neighborhoods to accept homeless housing. It’s a big part of Mahan’s time as mayor to try to do that, to try and expand the shelter system, the interim housing system in San Jose.
Matt Mahan [00:13:47] The deal we’re making with the community is, if you allow us to build these solutions with your tax dollars, you are going to see a meaningful improvement. In fact, in the vicinity of the site, we’re going to end the era of encampments.
Guy Marzorati [00:14:01] And he’s saying if we spend the money and we open this interim housing and there’s still an encampment right outside of the interim housing, there’s no way that people are gonna continue to support these shelter sites being built in their neighborhoods. So that political piece I think is also key.
Issa Ajlouny [00:14:17] When you get that kind of thing that comes in your neighborhood, you say, what’s going on? But okay, they said they’re gonna spread it out through the rest of the city. Here we go, what, five years later, we have 50% of the tiny homes and the safe parking.
Guy Marzorati [00:14:30] One of the people I think has a real stake in this is this guy Issa Ajilouny. He lives in a South San Jose neighborhood that has taken on a lot of the shelter sites, a good proportion of the sites that the city has set up.
Issa Ajlouny [00:14:44] We want to be treated well and we don’t appreciate when they’re moving people in and then they’re taking from the community.
Guy Marzorati [00:14:49] Issa Ajlouny is the head of this local committee that was set up to kind of be a go between from the city to the neighborhoods around these shelter sites. And Issa says since the site has opened, you know, he does hear complaints from neighbors about there’s still encampments around or we’re hearing issues from going on at the
Issa Ajlouny [00:15:10] I’m trying to be the person that says, hey, neighborhood, we need to be good neighbors to them and try to help them. But in turn, we needed to be treated as good neighbors.
Guy Marzorati [00:15:23] He feels like neighbors are not completely satisfied with how things have gone since the site has opened. And in his opinion, it’s really incumbent upon the city to, in his words, like throw them a bone. And so he supports the mayor’s plan to kind of step up enforcement.
Issa Ajlouny [00:15:43] I’m one of those that feel like it’s okay to push someone a little bit to get help. Just like we do with our kids, we push them a little, we discipline them to help them grow up in the right way.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:15:56] The final vote on this policy is coming soon. Obviously, Matt Mahan is for it. What would need to happen next? And who else has come out in support?
Guy Marzorati [00:16:08] Yeah, so the final vote is Tuesday, alongside the San Jose city budget. And in addition to his allies in the council, Mahan also has gotten the support of the police union in San Jose, the fire union in Santa Jose, and their leaders have argued that, you know, clearing encampments, getting people into the care of the county is gonna ease the burden on the work that kind of their officers have to do.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:16:32] And who’s come out against this proposal?
Guy Marzorati [00:16:35] So you have some progressives on the city council who are opposed, and really, all of the county government leadership has been the biggest opponents of this plan. From the board of supervisors, then you have the sheriff, the district attorney, the county executive, they’ve all weighed in with criticism of Mahan’s plan, basically saying it’s not gonna be workable. They don’t feel like this is, A, the best use of law enforcement resources to have, you know, be arresting people, bringing them into the jail. Um, and they pointed back to the fact that the shortage of housing is ultimately going to be a factor that’s going to, you know, hurt any, any kind of effort. And nothing is going to successful until you have more housing.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:17:18] I mean, what am I supposed to make of that Guy? The fact that the city and county officials are really split on whether this is the best and most effective way to address homelessness. I mean it kind of feels like a little bit of hot potato going on here.
Guy Marzorati [00:17:35] Yes, I mean, part of it is political, like on the council, you have a moderate more kind of business aligned majority led by mayhem. On the board of supervisors, it’s more of a progressive labor supportive majority. But I think also you have the fact that the homelessness crisis has blurred the traditional lines of responsibility between city government and county government. Historically it’s city deals with housing, county deals with health and human services. But this crisis clearly is an overlap between those two areas and so it’s jarring when you have, in this case, the city and county government at such loggerheads. Whether or not those two groups can work together and work it out, I think is gonna kind of play a key role in the success of this initiative and also future initiatives that overlap between housing and behavioral health.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:18:31] And I mean, Guy, if this passes, how would we know if it’s working?
Guy Marzorati [00:18:37] I asked Mahan about this, like, what would success look like for responsibility to shelter? And he said, you know, getting everyone indoors is the goal, but specifically for people who are turning down shelter, getting them into treatment.
Matt Mahan [00:18:50] If we intervene earlier and get people connected to appropriate services, we have a much better shot at helping them turn their lives around and better manage an addiction or a mental illness.
Guy Marzorati [00:19:03] As we explored, that’s a complicated path. Will that happen? We’ll have to see. And then on the second piece of the political support for future interim housing, we’ll have see whether this can help the shelter program expand. If clearing encampments and showing to neighborhoods that have accepted shelter, that their neighborhood is gonna look a lot different and better after this plan goes into place, will that help the city expand interim housing into other areas? Does this help Mahan go to the whole West side of the city, which has no shelter and say, look, here’s my pitch for why you should accept it. Because I also think the other side of that coin is the people who live near shelters right now do feel like they’re taking on an outsized burden as far as having interim housing in their neighborhood. And if those projects and those facilities are spread out more throughout the city maybe you won’t have as much of a dynamic of residents feeling like I need something in return. For accepting this interim housing nearby.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:20:03] I mean, it does seem worth pointing out that some of those metrics, like whether a neighborhood is open to shelter or whether someone who’s living on the streets eventually gets into more sort of permanent, stable housing, those are still going to take a lot of time, even if maybe someone is, in the immediate term, swept off of the streets and into jail for a little bit.
