GILROY—The hundreds of homeless residents who sheltered in Gilroy’s National Guard Armory are out in the cold, as the building was closed for the season this week.
And hopes for another, innovative, option proposed by the Gilroy Compassion Center were dashed when Santa Clara County rejected the idea to shelter homeless families in county park campgrounds.
“We don’t think that encampments, even sanctioned ones, are a good solution for addressing homelessness,” said Ky Le, director of the county’s office of supportive housing.
Santa Clara County Supervisor Mike Wasserman, whose District 1 includes South County, said Monday that the Compassion Center’s proposal to transform campgrounds into a temporary safe haven for the chronically homeless would have established a unacceptable residential use for the facilities.
“County parks—the campgrounds—are intended for recreational purposes and not residential purposes. That’s my No. 1 issue,” Wasserman, a Los Gatos resident, said.
The county’s approach to homelessness is to find permanent not temporary solutions, he said, pointing to the recently adopted “Five-Year Plan to End Homelessness.”
At the Compassion Center, the county’s stand is seen as a lost opportunity to explore new options.
“We are not going to solve this problem by continuing to do things the same way,” said board chair Jan Bernstein Chargin, reacting to the county’s denial.
“We have to be willing to try new approaches and recognize that although temporary shelter is not the whole solution, it plays an important role in helping people stabilize so they can access long-term housing.”
The Gilroy armory is funded by Santa Clara County and homeless service organization. It houses as many as 130 people nightly, but only during the colder months. It will be closed for the next eight months. Local community organizations are scrambling to find a temporary solution.
Most groups agree the answer to homelessness is more affordable housing. But the question, Bernstein Chargin said, is “what do we do in the meantime?”
Rather than continuing to play “cat-and-mouse” with law enforcement as homeless individuals bounce from place to place, Bernstein Chargin said the county could have made an immediate difference if they had approved the permit.
Between October and March of last year, 32 homeless people were temporarily sheltered in county campgrounds through a pilot project, she said, but unless parks officials extend how long a camper use a campground, the center cannot offer the option to more individuals.
Having a safe place to sleep at night is an amazing stabilizing influence, she said; children who hadn’t been to school in months enrolled and began to attend and several campers applied for jobs. Others who already had jobs maintained them, while one person signed up for school and others voluntarily attended Narcotics-Anonymous meetings, according to Bernstein Chargin.
“All gained self-esteem and self-sufficiency by being able to prepare their own meals, make campfires, set up tents and have access to bathrooms, showers and clean water,” she said.
It was December 2014 when the Compassion Center requested a permit from Santa Clara County parks officials to allow campgrounds to be used as a temporary shelter for some homeless as part of a program it would manage.
A voicemail on the organization’s message machine from the county late last week informed them the permit was denied, Bernstein Chargin said.
The proposal to allow people to stay at county campgrounds was never intended to be a permanent solution, noted Compassion Center volunteer Joseph Davis, but a practical one.
Seeing 46,000 acres of land in the holdings of the county’s parks department, Davis saw a “vastly underutilized resource” and paired that with a need to find temporary shelter for local homeless.
On a given night, there are 7,600 homeless in Santa Clara County and a majority is on the streets, the county’s Le noted, based on the most recent census.
A majority, 5,600, lack permanent shelter and live under bridges or in encampments and sleep in vehicles or wooded areas, the census revealed.
At the national-level, Le said the focus has shifted from “treating homelessness like a natural disaster” with emergency shelters to providing permanent supportive housing where individuals can access a wide range of services.
Outside the Gilroy Armory on Monday, before it opened for the second-to-last night of the season, many people waiting for shelter wondered where they’d go next. Before he discovered the Armory nearly three months ago, William Fox said he lived under a Morgan Hill bridge and had to be hospitalized with pneumonia.
Deborah Valentini had no money, transportation or prospects of finding shelter anytime soon. “Tomorrow, I don’t know where I am going to be,” she said.
