Officials say they didn’t demolish bamboo village
Gilroy – In Uvas Creek, there once lay a bamboo city, where homeless people lived alongside the mansions of Eagle Ridge.
And now, Ann LaCroix is proud to say, it is gone. Since last November, the 74-year-old Eagle Ridge resident has been on a crusade to rid the creek of the bamboo shacks, tunnels and caves where she says 150 people lived. LaCroix calls them “the lowest of the low.”
“It took a year,” she said, “but it was something that needed to be done.”
LaCroix credited city police and code enforcement officers with clearing the shacks this August, after she complained to the city. But city officials and police say they didn’t clear the camp, and couldn’t, even if they wanted to. Most of the creek land is privately owned, by homeowners on the opposite side of the creek.
“The city didn’t take any aggressive action of any sort,” said Bill Faus, planning division manager. Though code enforcement officers Carlos Torres and Scott Barron investigated the site, they didn’t find the bamboo metropolis that LaCroix feared.
“It wasn’t significant,” said Barron. “There really wasn’t any activity there.”
That doesn’t square with LaCroix’s account of a crime-ridden creek. In an e-mail to Officer Justin Matsuhara, dated Nov. 27, 2005, she cited”the dragging of a woman into the creek” and “the blowing up on drug-related material.”
“Sexual deviates, alcoholics, drug addicts and who knows what else” populated the creek, she claimed. “It’s dangerous for our children.”
Faus said it’s likely that summer rains washed out the camps. As for the crews LaCroix saw, they may have been Santa Clara Water District workers, clearing non-native Arundo donax – what neighbors call bamboo — to prevent its thick, mat-like roots from causing flooding. Stream maintenance season runs from mid-June to October, said spokesperson Mike Demarco, and that’s the only time the crews are allowed access to the creek.
It’s an anticlimactic end to LaCroix’s campaign, which drew a mixed response from her Eagle Ridge neighbors. Three women wrote her critical letters; others were pleased.
Clearing the camp was “a great idea,” said neighbor Jan Peat, who worried about mentally-ill homeless people near her home, “but we need more shelters.” Peat feared fires set by transients: the creekbed caught fire 13 times in 2004, and firefighters have often cited homeless people as the source of nearby grass fires.
“There’s all kinds of shelters for people to go to,” said LaCroix, a member of the community’s Safety Committee. “They don’t need to live in the creek.”
But shelter space evaporates in the summer, according to Jeff Fishback, employment services coordinator at St. Joseph’s Family Center. The National Guard Armory closes in the spring, as does the Ochoa Winter Center, which is open only to families with children. The planned Sobrato Transitional Housing Center, originally scheduled to open early 2007, has been indefinitely delayed. At this time of year, Fishback said, there are no shelter beds in the city of Gilroy.
One hundred fifty-two homeless people live in Gilroy, according to a recent study cited by Dina Campeau, chairwoman of the South County Collaborative, a consortium of human service providers. If homeless people aren’t harassing residents, she said, they ought to be left alone.
“Not a sweep, but a visit,” she advised. “Go in and see what the deal is. Link them to services that they need.”
Homeless people’s property is sometimes destroyed in sweeps, she added, eliminating whatever slight stability they’ve achieved. In Gilroy, police notify homeless people before their camps are destroyed, said Sgt. Kurt Svardal, giving them time to move what they own.
“We’re on a first-name basis with them,” said Svardal – and it’s not just because they’re friendly. Transients frequently appear on the police blotter, Svardal said, most often for public intoxication: one of LaCroix’s concerns. But LaCroix’s assertion that many homeless people are sex offenders is groundless, he said, and clearing camps is a temporary solution.
“Uvas Creek has been cleaned up before,” Svardal said. “It’ll move from one location to the next.”
