Audit: S.J. homeless sweeps surging

Advocacy groups say people living in encampments lose their belongings and their trust in service providers

San Jose has seen a dramatic surge in homeless encampment sweeps, particularly along the city’s creek embankments.

Over the last five years, the number of sweeps ballooned from just 49 between April and December 2013 to 563 between July 2017 and April 2018. But the city doesn’t have nearly enough short- or longterm housing for those displaced.

Those are among the findings of a new city audit of San Jose’s homeless assistance programs.

Part of the uptick in sweeps — which also caused abatement costs to soar beyond $2 million for the first time from $1.3 million just five years ago — is due to the settlement of a 2015 lawsuit brought by the conservation group Baykeeper. Under the terms of the settlement, San Jose agreed to keep trash — including from homeless encampments — out of the city’s waterways. According to the audit, some 400 of the 563 recent sweeps occurred near creeks. And the city is sweeping many of the sites near waterways repeatedly, meaning that encampments frequently reappear there shortly after they are shuttered.

But at the same time, the city, which has adopted a “housing first” approach to addressing homelessness, is left grappling with how to house people where there’s a very limited supply of homes available and long wait lists. As of January 2017, San Jose had 4,350 homeless residents, and 74 percent were considered “unsheltered,” sleeping outside or in cars.

Complicating that task is a recent court decision that said prohibiting people from sleeping in public places when there’s no alternative shelter available amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

When sweeps happen, homeless advocacy groups say, people living in encampments not only lose their belongings but their trust in the service providers trying to help them.

In a written response to the audit, the city’s housing director, Jacky Morales-Ferand, and the city manager’s chief of staff, Lee Wilcox, pointed out that the county tracks shelter utilization rates. From July of last year to this April, there were 731 beds with a 92 percent utilization rate.

“Understanding why the system is not being fully utilized is an important piece of the puzzle before decisions are made about expanding it,” the pair said, adding that there may be too many barriers to using them.

The city has paid for beds at the Boccardo Reception Center specifically for people displaced by sweeps, but the majority of encampment residents did not want to go there, city officials said.

The city, Morales-Ferrand and Wilcox said, also recently added temporary housing at the Plaza Hotel. More long-term housing for homeless residents, such as the Second Street Studios, should be ready in the next few years as projects funded by a 2016 countywide bond measure aimed at housing homeless people are completed.

The audit acknowledged the city’s strategies to deal with the lack of affordable housing: short-term fixes like offering motel vouchers and allowing people who sleep in their cars to use a city parking lot, as well as long-term solutions like building more affordable housing. And the 2018-19 budget for core “homeless interventions and solutions” services is $22 million, up from just $13 million the previous year.

The city has also received more state funding to address homelessness, and the housing department is in the process of updating its abatement policies for the first time since it took over sweeping encampments in 2013. And while the city has a higher rate of homelessness than Santa Clara County, California and the U.S., San Jose also housed 1,357 homeless people during the 2016-17 fiscal year. In a phone interview, Morales-Ferrand said she expected that number to rise for 2017-18.

However, San Jose also needs to better coordinate and monitor the organizations it works with to serve homeless people, the audit said. For instance, according to the audit, the housing department doesn’t track where and when shelter is offered to residents of abated encampments and whether people accept it, making it difficult to tell whether residents moved into housing or another encampment. The department also doesn’t require service providers to report what they offer to residents of encampments that are swept, so it is difficult to get a sense of the outreach they perform.

The city awards grants to a number of community organizations, who assist the homeless. But according to the audit, just two that received grants met all of the targets outlined in their agreements.

Morales-Ferrand, whose department accepts the audit recommendations and plans to implement them, said her team has also been talking to homeless advocates about how to best address the issue.

The city will be adding a fourth visit to some encampments scheduled for sweeps, up from three, she said, and give clear information about when and where they will happen so encampment residents aren’t caught off guard. The city will ask the organizations it works with to provide more information about the number of people who accept shelter.

“We did learn where we could definitely improve,” Morales-Ferrand said. “Our goal is to always try to improve our programs.”