Tiny homes delayed amid site negotiations

Complications with a Caltrans site mean homeless hoping to move into housing will have to wait

“I’ve made my dissatisfaction with the pace of construction clear both here at City Hall and with other agencies. We’re going to get this done. I’m committed to it.” — San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo

This summer, around 80 formerly homeless people were expected to move into new tiny homes in San Jose. But amid challenges with leasing land and legal questions, those plans have stalled, leaving dozens of residents who had been hoping for a place to live still out on the streets.

As part of an attempt to put a small dent in a ballooning homeless crisis — San Jose has more than 6,000 homeless residents, up 42 percent in just two years — the city decided to put 40 tiny homes at a Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) site on Mabury Road near Coyote Creek and another 40 tiny homes at a Caltrans site near Felipe Avenue where Highways 680 and 101 intersect.

With a building cost of around $6,500 each, advocates view the cabins, officially known as bridge housing, as a relatively low-cost way to offer stability to people while they land more permanent housing. The VTA location had been anticipated to open in June, with the Caltrans location following in August.

But sticking points in the negotiations and other challenges now mean that the earliest the VTA site will open is sometime this fall. And the city and Caltrans have yet to finalize a lease for that site, although both parties say an agreement is coming, with tiny homes possibly opening by the end of the year.

The delay has frustrated Mayor Sam Liccardo and housing advocates.

“I’ve made my dissatisfaction with the pace of construction clear both here at City Hall and with other agencies,” Liccardo said. “We’re going to get this done. I’m committed to it.”

New state legislation from Sen. Jim Beall, who represents Silicon Valley, allows San Jose to lease unused Caltrans parcels to house homeless people for $1 a month. According to Ragan Hen

ninger, deputy director of the city’s housing department, debates have swirled about who is liable if something happens on the site. The Caltrans site is also a federal highway right of way, which means the Federal Highway Administration has become involved. Concerns over conflicts between state and federal law — like the use of marijuana on these sites — need to to be resolved.

“Certainly negotiating from one public entity with another is always complicated,” Henninger said, but these negotiations have “really been a new reality.”

Henninger said she hopes a lease agreement can be executed by August.

“We want to make this happen as quickly as possible,” said Tony Tavares, Caltrans’ Bay Area director. “With San Jose we are very, very close.”

While Caltrans has worked with San Francisco and Oakland on projects geared toward serving homeless people, each city is different and “we learn from these lease agreements,” Tavares said.

Both sites will have homes and amenities like showers, as well as supportive services like career counseling. In other cities, Tavares said, he has pledged vacant Caltrans jobs and will do the same in San Jose — offering 10 positions to residents.

“We are all committed — at the city and at the state — to making this happen,” he said.

At the VTA site, predevelopment work — laying sewage infrastructure, water and electrical power — is well underway and Habitat for Humanity is building the actual homes offsite. Henninger said some of the same issues that arose with Caltrans — over liability and insurance — surfaced, but didn’t cause any major delays.

Neither Caltrans or VTA, she added, have regularly focused on housing as part of their business model. But as the need for affordable housing has skyrocketed, cities have sought innovative ways to address shortage, looking at transportation agencies with vacant land in densely packed areas as part of the solution.

“Once we work this out, hopefully it’ll be a breeze for other cities to follow,” Henninger said. “We’re really looking forward to opening up the first site and it’ll fall just in time for the weather to turn, so we can start bringing people inside.”

Councilman Johnny Khamis would like to see the state become more nimble at addressing issues like homelessness.

“We’ve become overly bureaucratic, I have to say,” Khamis said. “I think we have to concentrate on making things less bureaucratic.”

Housing advocate Shaunn Cartwright thinks the city could do more to move quickly, even if it means giving up some of the amenities that will be included in the homes. Oakland, she pointed out, built villages out of Tuff Sheds to get people off the streets quickly and other cities allow sanctioned encampments.

“Delays equal death,” Cartwright said, pointing out that hundreds of homeless people who have died on the streets of Santa Clara County since San Jose began debating tiny homes.

The homeless people she works with, Cartwright said, “don’t care about amenities, it’s what can they have now.”

But Janice Jensen, the president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity East Bay/Silicon Valley, which is building the homes, praised San Jose for striving to give residents a dignified, respectful form of transitional housing.

“What they are doing is quite avant-garde,” Jensen said.

Her team, she said, is already building and storing the homes off-site, and as far as developments go, the tiny homes are “relatively straightforward,” meaning once the organization gets access to the site, progress should be fast.

Every housing development — whether a tiny home or a single-family home — requires infrastructure, land and legal processes, Liccardo said, which means the real possibility of delays.

“The obstacles that every pioneering effort faces have to be overcome so we can clear the way for more rapid development of these communities in the months ahead,” the mayor said. “The nature of innovation is at times that we have to go slow so we can go fast.”

Tavares agreed, saying he hopes that as more lease agreements are worked out in the future with other cities, there is some consistency.

“Homelessness is a societal issue,” Tavares said, “and it really requires the state, the cities, legislation — it requires everybody to get involved and do their part.”