Mahan: Why S.J. council should approve “Housing Now’ approach

The June 13 vote on next year's budget will decide whether we do more to house our homeless neighbors.

California, with just over 12% of America’s population, is home to almost half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless – and the number is growing.

It’s grim news. But San Jose is one of a few bright spots where the population of unsheltered homeless has started to shrink because we are finally breaking with the failed policies of the past.

The most recent Point-in-Time (PIT) count shows San Jose shrank the number of people who call our streets home by 10.7%. Without San Jose, Santa Clara County’s unsheltered homelessness rate would have grown by 9.4% percent.

While we must do better, this small improvement is largely because San Jose is building low-cost, quick-build and frequently modular units to house the homeless in safe and decent rooms, with the dignity of a door that locks and a private bathroom and without the up to five-year delay of building traditional homes.

The status quo approach in Santa Clara County and beyond is spending up to $1 million a door on housing subsidized with public funds. Our approach can best be described as “Housing-Now,” and it is working to transition neighbors off our streets and into safe, dignified housing by building it at a fraction of the cost and time.

The June 13 vote on next year’s budget will decide whether we do more to house our homeless neighbors now in safe, decent individual homes or go back to the failed policy of prioritizing million-dollar homes for the lucky few.

In 2020, San Jose leaders asked voters to help address the homelessness crisis with Measure E, an increase of the transfer tax on the most expensive properties, by promising the funds would be used to address both our homelessness crisis and our shortage of affordable homes for working families. We need to keep that promise by spending those funds on both of those worthy goals — and that is what I am proposing.

Some advocates are pushing back, saying the only solution is to build high-cost housing. Our need for affordable housing is significant and will be with us for decades, but if we say that we have to solve our affordable housing crisis before we can end street homelessness, we are committing ourselves to the status quo we see on our streets today.

Fundamentally, they are arguing to continue spending the lion’s share of Measure E funds on high-cost homes — which is the strategy that has left us with the encampments you see today. Along with many others, I am fighting to keep our promise to voters by doing both, including investing in quick-build communities that are working here in San Jose.

These homes are saving lives. For too many, living on the streets becomes a death sentence, with nearly 250 homeless people dying on the streets of Santa Clara County last year alone.

Yet instead of treating this as a true crisis and building the safe and decent placements we need right now to save lives, we see the forces of the status quo organizing to maintain a failing policy. Ironically, their new argument is that it is too “costly” to run these quick-build communities, while they insist on million-dollar units that cost far more to build and a comparable amount of ongoing public subsidy to operate. And they do not consider the cost of managing an unsheltered population, from trash pick-up to police calls to emergency health interventions — which come out to an estimated $65,000 per person each year.

We have a crisis of unhoused neighbors. Let’s house them now, not five years from now.

Matt Mahan is mayor of San Jose.