Santa Clara County is putting homeless housing anywhere it wants

Did you know that Santa Clara County can purchase or lease a building in your neighborhood for homeless housing and not tell you? Not only can the county force a project into your neighborhood with little to no public outreach, but it also can do so without complying with your city’s land-use laws.

Sound far-fetched? Exactly that happened in my Glenside neighborhood of San Jose where the county opened a 91-unit homeless housing project at 1185 Pedro St. on Monday.

Every neighborhood and municipality in the county should shake in their boots over the Pedro project where the county claimed “sovereign immunity” to avoid city zoning laws and local public processes.

On March 10, 2020, without any outreach to the neighborhood, the County Board of Supervisors

approved a 20-year lease of the former senior living facility on Pedro Street for homeless housing. The project was not presented publicly until a community meeting Nov. 4.

The neighborhood largely supported the project but felt betrayed by the process. We expected the county would obtain a required conditional use permit from San Jose — a public engagement process that would codify an operations plan and other accountability measures for the project.

Despite repeated attempts for status updates from the county, the neighborhood did not receive a response until four months later when a second community meeting was held April 19. At that time, the county refused to answer whether it would get a conditional use permit. Instead, one week later, on April 26, the county sent a memo invoking “intergovernmental immunity” and the Shelter

Act (AB 932) to bypass local planning requirements.

The ability of the county to purchase or lease a building anywhere it wants for homeless housing with no prior neighborhood communication, conduct just two cursory community meetings that failed to address neighbors’ questions and concerns, reject municipal land use regulations claiming intergovernmental “immunity,” and trample public process by disregarding basic outreach and transparency practices only serves to damage trust in garnering community support to address the unhoused crisis.

This deplorable precedent eliminates any role for San Jose and other cities in how homeless housing is sited and approved because the county doesn’t need community or municipal support anymore — declaring itself “immune” to local laws and neighborhood concerns. Measure A bonds would not pass today if voters had known the county would act this way.

Had the county simply followed the existing rules seven months ago, Pedro Street would be opening this week with an operations plan co-created through a supportive community in an established public process.

For future homeless housing projects the county must:

• Follow local land use zoning and outreach processes, which take into consideration neighborhood conditions and land use the county has no jurisdiction over, such as traffic, parking and noise abatement;

• Notify neighbors before entering a lease or service contract for a new homeless housing project.

• Provide documents related to the operation of the facilities, lease agreements and eviction policies to neighborhoods in advance of opening the project.

• Be responsible for communication, reporting and enforcement of the operations plan that does not unfairly burden the neighborhood or city public safety services.

• Encourage private funders of homeless projects (for Pedro Street, funders included Destination Home and Sobrato Philanthropies) to make advance community and city outreach a prerequisite of giving funds.

• Use its intergovernmental immunity super power only against recalcitrant cities and neighborhoods — never to cover up its own mistakes.

Hopefully, the county will not use the Pedro project as its new model of locating homeless housing and instead return to an approach that includes cities and neighborhoods.