San José Begins Clearing Columbus Park, the City’s Biggest Homeless Encampment

Under a bright morning sun, garbage trucks, tow trucks and law enforcement poured into San José’s Columbus Park on Monday.

Crews of city workers wearing bright vests began taping off sections of sidewalk, raking up piles of debris and trash, disassembling tents and even ripping microwaves, solar panels and other materials out of RVs.

Monday morning marked the zero hour for what city officials say is a three-month plan to completely clear out the more than 100 RVs, many more tents and other forms of soft shelter from the park, where hundreds of people have lived for years.

Columbus Park is the largest single encampment in San José since The Jungle — a sprawling community that hundreds of people called home along Coyote Creek near Story and Senter roads — was dismantled in 2015.

City officials say the conditions at the park, which lies just south of the San José Mineta International Airport, had become untenable.

“Every day this encampment is allowed to persist, it puts lives at risk, especially the lives of those who call it home. The lives of children, seniors, the most vulnerable,” Mayor Matt Mahan said Monday during a press conference inside City Hall, about a six-minute drive from the park.

The crush of RVs, vehicles and tents has dominated the space for several years, with the streets in and around the camp lined with loose trash and debris, making it unusable for recreation.

The conditions, city officials said, only added to the risks for people living there in close quarters, many of whom were already facing difficult and desperate situations in pricey Silicon Valley.

“Our homeless neighbors are living in increasingly unsafe, unmanaged conditions, including a homicide in the park last year, a pedestrian fatality just last month, and a suicide just last week. That’s why we’re moving with urgency and resolve,” Mahan said.

The process of clearing the park has followed more than two months of in-person outreach to residents, city officials said. City workers offered park residents temporary spaces in motel rooms around the city, only about 42 of which are move-in ready now. Mahan said he expects nearly 400 will be ready within about a month.

The city is also building nearly 400 spaces for people that should be ready by year’s end, officials said, in the form of clusters of tiny homes or sanctioned safe camping sites, in addition to an existing safe parking site for people in RVs in the Berryessa neighborhood.

Some residents of the park are also being offered a roughly $2,000 buyback of their RVs in exchange for an agreement to accept temporary shelter in one of the city’s hotels or managed sites.

“This is a thoughtful, methodical, multi-month process of standing up safe, dignified interim housing,” Mahan said of the plan, which will include meals, case management and security.

“And if people are unwilling to accept that option, they will not be allowed to continue to camp in a public park. It’s as simple as that.”

In the last few years, San José has worked to cordon off sections of the nearby open grasslands where residents camped before, and which the city said must remain vacant due to federal aviation rules near airports.

But without enough shelter beds or homes for the residents, the several sweeps, cleanups and relocations have mostly shuffled around people facing homelessness onto a smaller footprint of the park, such as the former baseball diamonds and soccer fields.

Some Columbus Park residents told KQED on Monday they have accepted shelter offers and are happy to have the chance to move.

“Yeah, of course. I am looking forward to being able to be in a hotel,” Emily V., a 33-year-old who has been living at Columbus Park for about a year, said, while packing up tentpoles and a suitcase on the sidewalk.

“I mean, nobody really wants to camp forever, you know? It’s just one of those things that happens to you. Life happens to everybody.”

Others, like Fernando Alcantara, said he wasn’t given clear information about his options. Alcantara prepared to leave the park with his trailer on Monday, but instead, city crews dismantled it in front of him and hastily hoisted the shell onto a flatbed tow truck.

“At least, can I take my stuff out? Because I have my wallet, I have money, I have everything,” in the trailer, he said. “They didn’t let me take anything. No I.D., no nothing.”

Alcantara’s situation highlighted some of the confusion and disarray on the ground during the large and sprawling operation. Only after his RV was confiscated did city workers determine he wasn’t offered shelter, and said they would try to connect him with an option for housing in one of the motel spaces.

Others who have agreed to accept a motel or tiny home space will be allowed to remain at the site until Sept. 5, or until such shelter is ready for them.

Shaunn Cartwright, an advocate for unhoused people and a frequent critic of Mahan’s policies that prioritize interim housing instead of building permanent affordable housing, said the city’s plan to inform people fell far short of what was needed.

She said many people didn’t receive detailed information, including herself, about what people should do to prepare, and what choices they had, so it could be shared with residents to avoid panic.

“The city intentionally left everybody in the dark here. And then it made it where it was so much easier for rumors to start,” she told KQED.

“There’s people that work nine to five, and if you assume they take the bus, so they’re seven to seven, and they missed everything. So they didn’t get to apply for the buyback program, they didn’t get to go to the hotels or anything.”

The city’s director of housing, Erik Soliván, said the city is facing a “dynamic” situation, and emphasized that the park’s fluctuating population made informing all residents — a count estimated at 370 people last weekend — a challenge.

“We’re going to capture as many people as we can to ensure we can give them offers of shelter and service,” Soliván told KQED.

Mahan said he understands the plans may not be perfect when trying to address the individual needs of people who may be struggling in different ways, but said a change must happen soon.

“We have to end unsheltered homelessness. We cannot, in a modern city, have thousands of people living in unmanaged conditions all over the city with trash and fires and crime. So we’ve got to get people indoors,” Mahan said.

“Can I promise you that as we move people indoors, none of those problems will come? No, of course not,” he said. “But it’s a lot better than the status quo today in terms of human suffering, cost, community impacts and environmental impacts.”

Following the cleanup work, the city plans to renovate the park with new soccer fields, pickleball and basketball courts, as well as spaces for futsal and horseshoes, officials said.