As San Jose attempts to comply with the Clean Water Act and other regulations, the city has significantly reduced the impacts from one of the largest polluters of its waterways: homeless encampments.
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In the previous fiscal year, the city cleared 16 of its 26 miles of most impacted waterways — removing 3.6 million pounds of trash and creating new no-encampment zones along them, a new report shows. In the past few months, San Jose has picked up the pace even more, clearing 27.2 miles and banning encampments on 22 miles of its 100-plus-mile waterway system.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan lauded the city’s robust efforts but cautioned that the progress the city has made is merely incremental as it continues its push to reduce unsheltered homelessness and meet its environmental mandates.
“This is the 26 miles we’re focused on right now, but in our time together on this council, I believe we’re going to need to get to a place where there is just a no-encampment zone along all the waterways,” Mahan said at Tuesday’s City Council meeting.
As part of its stormwater permit, which runs until 2027, the city is required to submit an annual report detailing its actions and performance in complying with the permit’s requirements.
It also requires that new development and redevelopment projects include design features and controls that reduce pollution in stormwater and prevent additional runoff.
One of the key goals is a 100% reduction in trash entering waterways by the end of the year, which San Jose is on track to meet, as the city currently sits at just under 98%.
But with officials attributing nearly 90% of waterway pollution to encampments, the city also had to reduce the impacts from the unhoused population as part of its permit, which proved a costly endeavor last year.
An accounting of the costs just to comply with the requirements to reduce impacts from encampments, as included in the report, found the city spent nearly $64 million last year.
Olympia Williams, deputy director of the Community Services Division, said some of the activities included clearing 30 public streets with sizable RV or lived-in vehicle encampments. The city also served more than 2,600 RVs as part of its biowaste pollution prevention program.
This year, the city plans to expand its oversized and lived-in enforcement program, known as OLIVE, to 50 sites.
The other large undertaking is the creation of no-encampment zones, which have been implemented near emergency interim housing sites, as well as along stretches of the waterways.
Williams said that unhoused residents have become better at complying with the no-encampment zones, though there have been some hiccups in the initial stages. She added that in the first 60-90 days, some unhoused residents returned because they were unaware of what the zone meant.
“After that, it tends to trail off and usually what happens is maybe a new person that just didn’t realize they’ve encamped in a no-encampment zone,” Williams said. “After a while, then it gets lower and lower and there are fewer places in a no encampment zone that we need to abate.”
While San Jose has focused on the 26 most impacted miles of its waterways, Williams said the city is developing a long-term strategy, noting that encampments have begun to spread from its central core to what it refers to as the “ring around the city.”
Aiding the effort is the significant investment the city has made in its shelter system, which will see San Jose add more interim units this year than any other city in California. The investment over the past few years have seen the unsheltered homeless rate improve from 84% a few years ago to potentially around 50% by the end of this year.
If the city is to prevent encampments along all of its waterways, the key question is how it will prevent the thousands of people without shelter from ending up in neighborhoods.
With the city’s coffers facing budgetary constraints and funding from the state drying up, Mahan said the next phase in reducing unsheltered homeless will have to look different than the approach San Jose has taken with increasing its shelter system, predominately with tiny homes, and instead look at safe sleeping sites, congregate shelter — typically shared living areas with limited privacy — and better integration with the county to provide an alternative to living along the waterways.
“50% or a little under 50% is great, but it still leaves a couple thousand people outside and we don’t have the money to just keep building endlessly,” Mahan said. “The system has to get more efficient and we have to maximize utilization. We have to get more throughput to county (permanent supportive housing) and Homeward Bound and other outcomes that are more stable for people beyond interim housing.”