From rat-infested Columbus Park encampment to chandelier boutique hotel, San Jose’s homeless plan is tested

After a year of living out of her car in San Jose’s Columbus Park, where rats had so overrun the city’s largest homeless encampment that residents gave them names, Tami Davis wasn’t expecting to be relocated to a boutique hotel with crystal chandeliers, maid service and TVs in every room.

“It’s almost too fancy,” said Davis, 61, said of the Bristol Hotel, where a mobile laundry service comes by once a week, Goodwill Industries knocks on doors offering jobs for $18 an hour and a vet clinic updated shots for her little dog, Trixie.

Davis is among 256 of the 370 Columbus Park residents who took up the city’s offer in August to leave the encampment and move into one of five newly-leased motels, three modular home projects or a short-term, safe sleeping tent village. Where they all landed and how they are acclimating — and how neighbors are reacting — is a test of Mayor Matt Mahan’s ambitious and controversial effort to tackle homelessness in San Jose.

By shifting millions of housing dollars in voter-approved Measure E funds from permanent housing projects to interim housing options, Mahan has riled some “Housing First” homeless advocates who want the focus to remain on long-term solutions. But nearly four months after clearing the city’s vast and most troubled encampment and offering shelter to everyone there, the mayor insists his strategy is paying off. When the newest modular homes are filled early next year, Mahan is confident that 50% of those experiencing homelessness in San Jose will be indoors — a milestone for the city that six years ago sheltered just 16% of its homeless population. The mayor is already touting his efforts as a statewide model and led five gubernatorial candidates on a tour earlier this month of the latest modular project in South San Jose.

“Are we going to leave people to suffer and die on our streets?” Mahan asked. “Or are we going to get them stabilized in their own private room with services and give them the best chance at leading a life of dignity and hopefully getting on to something more permanent and independent?”

One of those temporary solutions is Tami Davis’s new home in the Bristol Hotel that fronts busy Bascom Avenue on the edge of Campbell and is designated to house only women and children. The hotel gained attention in June after a standing-room-only crowd of 100 neighbors who live behind it lobbed shouts and boos at city officials during a public meeting, complaining about drugs, trash, crime and boyfriends they were certain would come.

With few exceptions, the problems they feared have failed to materialize.

“I feel like I’m very liberal and compassionate, but it was sort of not-in-my-backyard, because it was in my backyard, and the people that made the decisions don’t live around here,” said Barbara Schreier , who started the petition to stop the project.

Despite her concerns, she has not a single complaint. Even her WhatsApp group that rallied neighbors to attend the raucous meeting has gone quiet.

San Jose Vice Mayor Pam Foley, whose district includes the Bristol, says her office has responded quickly to several complaints, most from one person, about errant shopping carts and copper wire stripped from street lights. However, she said, residents “are getting blamed for things that aren’t necessarily their fault.”

She fully supports Mahan’s strategy of developing more temporary living options, especially having witnessed how a permanent affordable housing project started in 2019 only two weeks ago demolished the Chuck E. Cheese it will replace.

“If we’re depending on affordable housing to solve the problem,” Foley said, “it can’t solve it quick enough.”

Housing advocates, however, say that without enough permanent housing as a next step for those in interim projects , the bottleneck will leave little space for new residents, and street homelessness will continue to grow.

“If you pull your money out of that permanent housing to build your (temporary) shelter, you kind of wind up back where you started,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, director of​​ UC San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.

She praised Santa Clara County for its emphasis on building permanent housing and its “gold standard” homeless prevention program that has largely stabilized the homeless population since 2019 at about 10,700 people (including 30% living in some kind of government-supported shelter).  In a region with high housing prices and income inequality, Kushel said, the county otherwise could have seen homelessness grow by 30% or 40%.

Still, for every homeless person who receives housing, data shows nearly two more take their place. And during the COVID pandemic, Columbus Park, once filled with kids playing soccer, exploded with more than 400 people in tents, RVs and sleeping bags, living alongside piles of garbage and an infestation of rats. Police were called regularly about assaults and drug overdoses. Firefighters responded to campfires that burned out of control.

Through it all, however, a community grew there, with residents protecting each other and even forming garden-hoe wielding brigades to fight fires themselves.

As grateful as most of the relocated residents now feel for receiving a comfortable bed, daily meals, hot showers and private rooms with locking doors, some are feeling a strange sense of loneliness and loss.

“I do feel happy because I’m not sleeping in the back of my van. I have a shower. I get to watch TV,” said Kat Davis, who was unofficially considered Columbus Park’s “mayor” during her six years of living in her minivan there. But now at the Bristol, “everyone stays to themselves and stays in their rooms.”

Residents of all the interim housing sites, managed by Home First Services and PATH, must also abide by numerous rules, submitting to security checks for weapons, weekly room inspections, and for now, no-visitor rules at the Bristol Hotel.

While some residents say the inspections give them a sense of security, to Teresa Toland, 43, who recently moved into the Rue Ferrari modular units surrounded by a security fence in South San Jose, “it’s like I’m in jail because we have to get patted down.”

The location in a commercial area off Highway 101 and Silicon Valley Boulevard seems remote, she said, with no nearby grocery stores and limited transportation. But she knows she’s better off in her tiny room with an attached bathroom than at Columbus Park, where she built “a fort — a tent within a tent” to keep the rats at bay. Home First Services is helping her obtain a copy of her birth certificate, she said, so she might land a job at Goodwill.

Not everyone swept from Columbus Park landed in shelter.

Laura Eldridge, 61, who goes by “Cinderella” on the streets, moved a mile away to the edge of railroad tracks near a cement plant. It’s unclear why she didn’t move into the Bristol or another temporary shelter. She said she signed up.

On a recent chilly morning, San Jose police officers responding to neighbor complaints about Eldridge’s encampment said that some folks can’t be persuaded to accept help. They explained to her the problems her ramshackle RV with no engine was causing the neighborhood.

And then, as Eldridge swept up the sidewalk, a tow truck hooked up the RV where she had slept the night before and slowly pulled away.