Turning tragedy into a bill How watching his family’s home burn inspired Sen. Jim Beall to fight for affordable housing
SAN JOSE » Fourteen-year-old Jim Beall saw the black smoke from blocks away, wafting over the roofs of his San Jose neighborhood. But it wasn’t until the bus taking him home from summer school turned onto his street that he realized the smoke was coming from his own house.
Beall’s family of 12 was left homeless and lost almost everything in that fire in the summer of 1966 — an experience that eventually drove Beall, now a Democratic state senator representing Silicon Valley, to fight for housing security over the course of his four-decade political career.
It’s a story that few of Beall’s political colleagues have heard over the years. But when the Legislature last month passed Senate Bill 3 — Beall’s measure to create a $4 billion bond to battle homelessness and fund a variety of affordable-housing programs — his past burst into the public arena with a flood of emotion.
“There’s a lot of us who have had those personal experiences of homelessness,” the 64-yearold Beall said, choking up during a Sacramento news conference as the memories from the fire a half-century ago ran
through his mind.
Late last month, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Beall’s bill at a public ceremony in San Francisco. The bond, which would have to be approved by California voters next year, would fund a variety of construction and homeownership programs, including $1 billion in home loans for veterans. It would likely be the largest state housing bond in U.S. history, observers say, totaling $15 billion in new funds when federal tax credits are taken into account.
In an interview, Beall said his parents met as students at San Jose State after his father returned from World War II. They bought a newly built house and felt like they were getting their piece of the American Dream, he said.
But they lost the home several years later when an improperly wired oven sparked, shooting flames that quickly consumed the back of the house. Beall remembers jumping out of his bus and sprinting to his front yard, unsure whether his parents or nine siblings were alive.
No one was injured in the blaze, but the family lost many possessions — and much of the damage wasn’t covered by insurance.
“It really set the family back,” Beall said. “The first few weeks, we had all 12 of us in a motel room.”
For months after that, he said, they spread out around the city, sleeping on the couches of friends and relatives.
The Bealls were only able to rebuild because of a loan that his father, Jim Beall Sr., received — similar to loans that would be available to low-income Californians and veterans under his son’s new measure.
After the fire, Jim Jr., the second-oldest child and eldest son, took late-shift jobs as a janitor and at department stores to help pay his way through Bellarmine College Preparatory, a private Jesuit school in San Jose. During the summers, he worked the fields in the Central Valley, where he witnessed crushing poverty. At San Jose State, he studied urban planning and helped lead a survey exposing housing discrimination in the neighborhoods around campus.
Friends remember him as serious and wonky, but said they never thought he would run for office.
“I think his interest in politics followed his interest in housing and transportation issues, more than the other way around,” said conservative author James V. Lacy, who acted in plays with Beall when the two attended Bellarmine.
Beall, who was appointed to the city Planning Commission at age 24, surprised friends when he ran for a City Council seat four years later. He won, becoming the youngest person elected to the council in San Jose history.
In his six years in the state Assembly and four years in the state Senate, Beall has earned the nickname “the lone wolf” for his willingness to speak his mind — and his trademark white beard. In addition to housing, he’s focused on reforms to the state’s foster care system and helping the developmentally disabled.
“He fights for the most vulnerable with a ferocity unmatched,” said Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De León, D-Los Angeles. “He’s a loner. But he runs in my pack.”
Dennis King, a friend from college and the director of the Silicon Valley Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said he wasn’t surprised Beall has focused on housing issues. “He’s not the polished speaker you would normally associate with someone in public office for so long, but what does come across is a sincerity,” he said.
This has been a big year for Beall, who also sponsored a major new gas tax to fund road and transit improvements, and another bill that could increase tolls on Bay Area bridges to fund traffic congestion programs.
Carl Guardino, the CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, said he saw the senator as “a biblical, Old Testament prophet” in his warnings about the woes of housing and traffic in the Bay Area and his work to bring people together to fix them.
Housing advocates say a $4 billion bond would be a big step forward in addressing California’s housing crunch. It would mean “the opportunity to finally have some really meaningful tools for the state to address affordability,” said Jennifer Loving, the executive director of San Jose homelessness nonprofit Destination: Home. “Without this, we’re perpetuating a crisis of suffering for people who can’t afford to live and work in many parts of the state.”
Opponents, however, argue that adding billions to the state’s debt won’t be worth it. And some Republicans in the Assembly have also accused Beall of using money for veterans as a sweetener to pass increased spending — “wrapping this issue in the flag,” as Assemblyman Rocky Chávez, R Oceanside, put it.
“I find that offensive,” said Chavez, a retired Marine colonel. “If you want to run an affordable (housing) program, fine, do it. But do not wrap it with veterans.”
Beall responds to that criticism by pointing out that his father, who died in 2011, served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division in Europe during World War II.
“My dad didn’t talk about being a veteran,” Beall said, “but the veterans part of this bill is my honor to my father.”
Beall plans to be one of the leaders of the statewide campaign urging voters to approve the bond at the ballot box in November 2018.
“The campaign,” he said, “starts now.”