FIRES SPARK NEW FEARS
GROWING HOMELESS ENCAMPMENT DRAWS COUNCILMAN’S, NEIGHBORS’ IRE
Leticia Bracamontes was sitting with her elderly wheelchair-bound mother in their backyard a couple of weeks ago when a man appeared, threatening to jump onto her grass.
Then her neighbor, Trami Huynh, saw fire licking at the back edge of her property last Saturday night and scrambled to dial 911.
Both women and their families live in the Sunshadow mobile home park next to Highway 101 near Story Road in San Jose. Directly behind them, a homeless encampment has sprouted against the freeway wall alongside the southbound onramp.
Now, the women and others in the area say, problems are mounting as the camp balloons in size, despite repeated pleas to Caltrans and the city to do something.
“I’ve been patient for months,” said Tam Nguyen, the San Jose City Councilman who represents the area, at a news conference he called Friday morning to beg for help addressing
the encampment.
There have been at least two fires since June 16, Nguyen said. Friday afternoon, more than a dozen tents and makeshift shelters lined the area, which was strewn with garbage bags, loose clothing and other belongings. Several shopping carts perched close to the road, shaking as cars whizzed by onto the freeway.
But Victor Gauthier, a spokesman for Caltrans, which oversees the space, says the problem is broader and harder to solve than simply sweeping the camp. As housing costs soar, more homeless encampments are cropping up. Around 4,000 people in San Jose don’t have housing, but the city has only around 1,000 shelter beds on any given night.
Caltrans cleared encampments in the area in February and contract workers were back earlier this month, Gauthier said. But two or three days after workers clean up the area, homeless people return, pitching tents and building cooking fires like the one that startled Huynh and left burn marks on the freeway wall last week.
“We do understand that occupants are back and so we’ll have to go back out there,” Gauthier said. But he didn’t give a timeline, saying Caltrans was also grappling with other camps throughout the Bay Area. “We’re doing the best we can with the resources that we have.”
And while Caltrans says it tries to work with cities to help people displaced by their sweeps find the services they need, subsidized housing is scarce and wait times can be long.
Rudy, a homeless man who only wanted to give his first name and did not want to be photographed, said he’d lost his house in East San Jose several years ago over domestic violence allegations. He signed up to receive housing assistance, he said, but “they don’t call.”
Kicking people out of their tents, though, Rudy said, “Don’t make sense. It’s not solving the problem.”
By the end of the year, San Jose is expected to have a tiny home pilot project up and running to house around 40 homeless adults as they work toward more permanent housing. One of the two sites currently being considered for the homes is not far from the Story Road encampment.
Nguyen supports the tiny homes project and sees it as distinct from the encampment. Even if it is in the same area, he said, residents will have access to services and there will be security on site.
“People here are compassionate,” Nguyen said. “They have nothing against homelessness, just be safe for yourself and for us.”
But not everyone living in the encampment wants to move indoors even if they have the chance.
Kelly Hemphill runs San Jose’s homelessness response team. Her outreach workers regularly try to reach people at the encampment, she said, offering vouchers and services.
Many of the 20 or so people who live there now used to live in the notorious “Jungle” encampment of some 300-400 people near Kelley Park that was dismantled in 2014, and have bounced around since.
“A lot of them have been moving around the city for quite some time,” Hemphill said. “It’s been a challenging group to get to come inside.”
That frustrates Bracamontes, who vividly remembers the man climbing the freeway wall dividing the encampment from her property and threatening to jump into her yard.
“It’s scary,” she said standing in her backyard Friday afternoon. “What if my kids had been out here?”
Twice, she said, she’s found dirty needles people have tossed over the wall.
Huynh’s 11-year-old daughter, Kelly, was playing in their backyard recently when she heard shouting from behind the wall and fled inside, frightened. The fire — the second in a week — has prompted her to keep her piggybank within eyeshot while she’s home so she can grab it and run if another blaze breaks out.
“We don’t sleep, thinking of the fires,” Bracamontes said. “Enough is enough.”