A safe bed, with a door that locks, can be life-changing for thousands of the Bay Area’s homeless residents. Providing basic needs like security and running water, interim housing projects may be getting a boost from lawmakers this year, while politicians and developers wrangle over affordable and permanent solutions.
Spotlighting San Jose as a successful example of the interim housing approach, Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park) and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan spoke Monday in support of Senate Bill 1395, or the Interim Housing Act of 2024.
They stood at the Evans Lane project in San Jose, a fenced area containing 36 interim units with the capacity to house 49 families. It sits between two expressways. The modular units were donated to the city of San Jose by a private foundation with help from Habitat for Humanity. Onsite support services are provided by PATH Santa Clara County, or People Assisting The Homelessness.
“I’m proud that San Jose is leading the way in ending the era of encampments,” said Mayor Mahan. “Evans Lane was built in less than a year at a cost of just $66,000 per unit.”
Mahan said that over the past three years, over 1,500 people have moved through the city’s interim projects, and today 70 percent of them remain housed.
“Over the last 12 months, the rest of the state has increased by 10 percent the number of unsheltered people living on the streets,” said senator Becker. “In San Jose, they have decreased by 11 percent. That’s a 21 percent swing because of this model that is working.”
The legislation would revise existing law to streamline zoning and permitting for housing projects provide individual units.
A ‘Band Aid’ approach
The bill would extend until 2027, the sunset for a 2017 law which lessened building standards for emergency housing that meet minimum health and safety standards. It says interim housing units don’t need to be built with permanent foundations. They can be modular and relocatable. The bill also eliminates the sunsetting of so-called “low barrier” rules, lifting restrictions on access to shelter for things having a pet or partner.
“Hundreds of people long for these units,” Mayhem said.
The city has six of these quick-build communities, with about 500 units total and a waiting list.
Mahan said there are another 784 modular units in the pipeline that the city council has committed to.
Todd Langton, executive director of homelessness nonprofit Agape Silicon Valley and the founder of the Coalition for the Unhoused of Silicon Valley, supports the measure and says there needs to be more interim housing built. But he says the problem is more complex. He suggested lawmakers could require leases to include information about services for people having trouble paying skyrocketing rents, which he attributes to greed.
“There tends to be somewhat of a Band-Aid approach towards interim housing,” Langton said. “They build these small developments which can house 50 to 100 people. County wide, we still have about 8,000 or 9,000 people that are unhoused. So, it tends to create some false sense of security or temporary satisfaction. They need to go big, and they need to go quick, and they need to treat it like the humanitarian crisis it is.”
Langton points to cities like Bakersfield or Austin that he says have successfully integrated their non-profits and social services.
“Here, we have all these different agencies and huge nonprofits that are independent of each other and work separately from each other,” he said. “They need to consolidate and run on a county basis, and we should not issue these huge contracts to these big nonprofits who aren’t open towards change. In many cases, they have their own agendas. I question whether a lot of the executives with these huge nonprofits really want homelessness to end, because they have a huge financial incentive for it to continue.”
Becker said the bill will cut red tape for local governments and expedite approvals, streamline zoning and reduce construction time and cost. He underlined the urgency statewide, saying 67 percent of California’s homeless people are unsheltered and living on the streets, compared to 20 percent nationally and 5 percent in New York City.
“When people say ‘not in my backyard,’ well, they already are in your backyard,” said Langton. “Another myth is that all the unhoused are not employed. Many of them are employed. Many of them could be employed if they had a place where they could lock the door, shower and shave and go to work in the morning.”
