SAN JOSE — Construction crews, tractor-trailers and dump trucks have begun sweeping away the last remaining tents, caravans and housing structures scattered across a sprawling homeless encampment near Mineta San Jose International Airport, a place at least 300 people have called home since the pandemic began .
Thursday’s tour of the Spring Street camp focused on the last unabated parcel of the 40-acre vacant property — bounded by Spring, West Hedding and Asbury streets — the city purchased as a buffer zone for incoming aircraft.
San Jose city officials have a tight deadline for the third and final phase of the camp’s cleanup: The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced that people are not allowed to live on the ground.
The estimated 100 people still in the camp must now be fully cleared within the next 30 days. If the schedule is not met — extended from the original June 30 deadline — millions of dollars in FAA funding could be at risk. But camp residents say they are being forced to leave their homes without adequate alternatives.
Staff at HomeFirst, a local nonprofit, said people at the camp are being offered housing at the four tiny homes in San Jose, but could not confirm how many people on Spring Street have chosen that option.
The scene on Spring Street Thursday looked similar to conditions in the summer of 2021, when the city first paid construction crews to clear hundreds of people from the other two-thirds of the property. In the past year, 143 people from the camp have been moved into permanent housing or transitional shelters, Omar Passons, San Jose’s new deputy mayor, said last month.
But complicating an already difficult task, the latest planned cleanup arrived just as an extreme heat wave began moving into the Bay Area, expected to bring temperatures into the triple digits over the Labor Day weekend.
City officials at the camp wouldn’t confirm a specific timeline, but housing advocates were told cleanup would end at 2 p.m. Thursday and Friday — weather permitting — but work would be halted until Monday for the holiday weekend.
Attorney Shawn Cartwright, who helped convince the city to stop mopping up when temperatures hit 88 degrees, said she was told crews wouldn’t return until Wednesday, when the worst of the heat wave is expected to begin to dissipate .
But even then, she said, that doesn’t provide any relief for homeless people, as work crews may continue to “clear” the land through the heat.
“This level of trauma will not allow them to relax now,” Cartwright said. “When they swept the jungle (in 2014), it was in torrential rain and the city refused to back down. There was just no mercy.”
Even with the options available, housing advocates say they know a few people who were pushed out have set up other camps along the Guadalupe River Trail a few blocks north or on city streets near the FAA property.
Attorney Gail Osmer has been trying to help people on Spring Street for years, most recently trying to help organize people with RVs on the nearby baseball diamond. Even if it’s not a permanent solution, she thinks the city should be glad people are trying to move out of the buffer zone at all.
She’s angry that what she sees as a lack of coordination and follow-through hasn’t produced more creative solutions.