☆ Here's how SJ and SF approach homelessness—and what needs to change (1/4)
Image by Housing Innovation
Given ongoing concern about the Bay Area’s failure to reduce homelessness, we sat down with two experts—SJ D3 Council candidate Irene Smith and Recovery Education Coalition's Tom Wolf—for a 4-part interview series. In part 1, they focus on the importance of interim housing and the prospects for large-scale shelters. An Opp Now exclusive.
Opportunity Now: Homeless strategies in SF and SJ get a lot of heat—including from us. But let's start with what's working.
Irene Smith: I'm a big fan of Major Freeman from the Salvation Army in Silicon Valley. They have rows of bunk beds in their shelter, and everyone there is working together. The sobriety is very strong. I'm excited to see their women's shelter opening up hopefully soon with new funding. This compassionate approach to shelter is dignified and cost-effective.
Tom Wolf: All of that is music to my ears, Irene. I, too, know Major Freeman and am a fan of his work. Sixty percent of everyone who engages with our local Salvation Army finds a permanent housing solution within six months (while 80% of folks who go into a shelter in SF return to the street within 30 days).
People might not know this, but the fastest growing demographic right now of people experiencing homelessness are women (making up almost one-third of the homeless population in San Jose, Santa Clara County). So it's incumbent upon us to provide them services as quickly as possible, and prioritize women as quickly as possible, because every day that they are on the street they are at risk of sexual assault, abuse, etc.
IS: Yes. To me, this underscores the importance of greatly increasing our shelter capacity in SJ. I am very worried that as we sweep people off the creeks to make sure we don't get fined, the homeless are simply moving to other areas of D3—parks, parking lots, front yards, and front porches. We will continue to play whack-a-mole with a problem of great moral magnitude—until we greatly increase shelter capacity. By orders of magnitude. We just need the political will to do it.
TW: I agree about pursuing interim solutions to homelessness. I think Michael Shellenberger referred to it as Shelter First, Housing Earned.
We're seeing 181,000 homeless people in California right now. And it's increasing—by 31% over a five-year period. In San Francisco, for every one person that exits homelessness, four people enter into homelessness. We need to act quickly.
Also, I notice that we don't have parity with other counties in the state. If we could get all 58 counties on board with some aligned similar plan, I think you could see homelessness be managed much better.
ON: What are some examples of these quick interim shelters, done well?
IS: San Jose's mayor, Matt Mahan, has just designated Watson Park in the Northside neighborhood in District 3 as a safe sleeping space. If we can get this pilot done correctly, we have so much hope for the future. We need to show neighborhoods and our unhoused neighbors that we can create and manage sanctioned sites in a way that works for everyone.
But, quite frankly, we need a whole lot more shelter capacity—and we need it now. I would like to see us explore large-scale shelters, like have been successful in SF, Reno, and Portland, that use sprung structures [Editor's note: Also called Navigation Centers or Living Centers, these are tensioned fabric buildings that are built relatively quickly and cheaply] to shelter up to 1,000 people/site. Then we layer on services such as job training, addiction rehabilitation, mental health, group therapy, safety, and security, and the like.
TW: Yes, I was in Oregon last year in Clackamas County. Their government approved the building of a recovery center, and they were going to start with a sprung structure. Turns out, they could actually get it built after permitting within six weeks. Six weeks, and they can get up and operating!
ON: So you both mentioned interim shelter solutions—such as sprung structures—as key to our homelessness approach. Yet our city governments more commonly commission new subsidized housing, which can cost $1M/door.
TW: Right. That's just not scalable.
IS: Downtown SJ has new homeless housing on the corner that's going to go for $1.1 million, and that's only the hardware costs. It doesn't include any of the services or management, which will add up to a sizable ongoing cost.
TW: And this begs the larger question: how do we make these changes? I've found in my advocacy work that most of it is policy and ideologically driven. You can't necessarily change someone's ideology. But you can certainly change policy if you advocate hard enough for it, be consistent, and understand that the homeless and drug crises are a marathon.
Whenever I hear a politician say, “We're going to end homelessness in five years, we're going to end homelessness in 10 years,” I just laugh because it's not possible. What we can do, though, is manage homelessness and reduce homelessness.
IS: I like to say we can't solve homelessness; but within months, we could start to get everybody sheltered via sprung structures with their tents inside. And during that time, we could help folks get the services they need, whether that's rehabilitation, mental health support, job training, etc., and keep them on that ladder of housing success. So that when they're ready—and we have capacity at the next rung—they can move up to a place like the Salvation Army, a tiny home, or a group home. They'll constantly graduate to the next level of housing and independence.
Tom Wolf, formerly homeless and in recovery from heroin and fentanyl addiction, is an outspoken advocate—and sometimes critic—about California's policies that have impacted homelessness. He also co-founded the California Peace Coalition and founded the Recovery Education Coalition.
Irene Smith—D3 Council candidate and head of Independent Leadership Group—has lived in downtown San Jose for 35 years and observed the worsening homelessness crisis since 2016. She is also a pro tem judge for Santa Clara County and has been a housing provider for 35 years.
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