San Jose divided over fencing off 40-acre encampment
FAA orders city to clear area; installing $1.5 million fence isn’t the answer, mayor says
SAN JOSE » With a federal deadline looming to clear one of the Bay Area’s largest homeless encampments, city leaders and staff are at odds over a proposal to install a $1.5 million fence to keep out unhoused campers.
Under a mandate from the Federal Aviation Administration, the city has begun the daunting process of removing 250 to 300 unhoused people camped on vacant land between the Guadalupe River Park and San Jose’s airport. But there’s disagreement over how to handle a particularly challenging question — how to prevent people from coming back and reestablishing their camps.
City staffers want to erect an 8-foot-tall fence around the 40-acre area at a projected cost of $1.5 million — to be paid for by the airport. But Mayor Sam Liccardo and multiple council members oppose that idea, saying fences are a temporary fix and can be easily cut through.
“If you build a fence, I think we know where unhoused people are going to go,” Liccardo said during a City Council meeting Tuesday evening. “They’re going to go immediately adjacent to the fence. They’re not going to leave the vicinity.”
The fence debate underscores the immense challenges of clearing such a large, entrenched encampment, and city staff and council members agreed Tuesday they have no good solution to the problem. As staff has begun clearing the encampment in stages, many of the campers simply relocated their tents, cars or RVs to other nearby areas. As a result, things actually are getting worse along the biking and walking trails in the neighboring Guadalupe River Park, which already had struggled with an influx of encampments and trash buildup during the pandemic.
Yet the city has no option but to proceed, thanks to the FAA mandate. To sum it up: “This sucks,” said Councilwoman Maya Esparza.
“We’re forced into this horrible situation,” she said.
The council voted to postpone a decision, and return Jan. 11 for a vote on the fence. In the meantime, staff will monitor the cleared areas to see if camping and illegal dumping continue.
Councilwoman Dev Davis was the lone “no” vote.
“I don’t want to kick the can down the road for another 60 days,” she said. “I was out there at Spring Street over the weekend and it looks terrible. There are cars overturned and burned out. There’s just a ton of stuff there. And it just looks like a really lawless area.”
The 40-acre site was purchased by the city with federal funds to serve as a buffer between the airport and the community in case of a plane crash, but an encampment there exploded in size during the COVID-19 pandemic. The FAA recently demanded the Mineta San Jose International Airport clear the camp by July 2022 or risk losing millions of dollars in federal funding.
The FAA also requires San Jose to prevent people from reinhabiting the area once it has been cleared, and signed off on the city’s plan to erect a fence. Liccardo, Vice Mayor Chappie Jones and Councilmembers Raul Peralez and David Cohen would rather deploy staff — potentially park rangers, unhoused residents trained in park maintenance, and/or police — to patrol the area. But neither the police department nor the parks service has the resources to do that, the agencies said Tuesday.
Liccardo and the council members also suggested using the space in ways that can discourage camping, such as setting up a working farm and orchard where unhoused residents can help cultivate produce, or installing dog parks, running and biking trails or disc golf courses.
City staffers say that approach is more expensive — without a fence, they estimate it will cost $2.15 million a year to maintain the area, plus the cost of developing the vacant land into a park. San Jose’s housing department eventually plans to spend about $3 million to house people who have been living in the camp, though it’s not yet clear exactly how that money will be used. The process of clearing the camp — not including the fence construction — is estimated to cost the city another $1.5 million.
Earlier this month, the City Council voted to move forward with a modular temporary housing site that would shelter at least 76 unhoused people from the area in small, individual apartments.
But in the meantime, Jason
Su, executive director of the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy, said he and his staff have seen an influx of encampments in the park. There also have been more vehicles driving along the park’s trails, which are intended for pedestrians and cyclists only. That has been “really scary,” Su said. His staff has heard of multiple instances where a bicyclist was almost hit by a car.
Fires also have continued. An Oct. 4 blaze destroyed a park restroom and storage building.
When the city told him it was time to go, Scott Largent, who has been living in an RV in the encampment for nearly a year, packed up and moved less than a block down the road, to an area that will be cleared later. But uprooting everyone and forcing them to move into a smaller space has created tension and conflict between residents, he said. People are packed more tightly together, and forced to relocate next to people they may not know.
“It’s just the most unorganized mess,” Largent said.
Ultimately, he’d like the city to provide a permanent safe RV parking site.
“I think they wouldn’t necessarily need a fence,” Largent said, “if they figure out where they can put the existing people that are there.”