San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan addressed the city’s houselessness issue, announcing the groundbreaking construction of the Monterey/Branham emergency interim housing site on Thursday in south San Jose.
The project, a three-story prefabricated building located at the corner of Branham Lane and Monterey Road, is the largest interim housing site with 204 rooms, providing shelter for 612 people annually.
Mahan said the project, costing about $70 million, will be finished and scheduled to open in April 2024.
“This is not a one-off site,” he said. “This is part of a strategy that Mayor Liccardo really brought forward in partnership with the council and the housing department in great operators,”
Former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, who planned the Branham/Monterey site for District 2 in 2021, said this is the first time the city works on a multi-level project to address the houselessness issue.
“It is gonna enable us to use our land more efficiently to help more people, to bring more people off the street and provide more of our unsheltered residents, a pathway of permanent housing, which we know is the ultimate goal,” he said.
Liccardo also said when he started planning on the site, the then-councilmember Mahan supported the project from its very beginning.
“It's really important that these sites be integrated into the fabric of the neighborhood,” Mahan said. “We don't want these to just be closed off walled gardens. We want these interim housing sites to be part of the neighborhood, part of the community.”
The Monterey/Branham emergency interim housing site is the sixth project the city developed to address the unhoused resident crisis.
Mahan said during the first two years of the pandemic, the city built five sites: Mabury Road, Felipe Avenue, Monterey/Bernal and Rue Ferrari, providing over 400 individual units, some of which serve entire families.
He also said 72% of the people who entered one of those five sites remained in stable housing after one year.
Jacky Morales-Ferrand, the director of the housing department for San Jose, said 15,124 people have been placed in temporary interim shelters since 2020.
“We've created a system here in the county where we are all working together to leverage our resources to expand and improve the overall system that is responding to our homeless crisis,” she said.
However, the San Jose houselessness issue is far from being addressed.
Morales-Ferrand said it is important to keep working on housing because, for every person the city houses, 1.7 people become houseless.
This means that for every unhoused person receiving a shelter, almost two people enter in houselessness.
“We need to continue to support people who are already living in housing and apartments, strong tenant protections, prevention and eviction programs to keep people housed,” she said. “So that we can continue to reduce the number of people who are falling into homelessness.”
Sergio Jimenez, San Jose councilmember for District 2, said he is proud of how his district and his team have taken a leadership role in helping solve the housing crisis for the unhoused.
“Today there are no protests. Today you don’t see people here complaining with signs saying they don’t want this to happen. I think largely because they’ve discovered what we’ve discovered at the city,” he said. “We’re at a crisis level here. We need to do something and doing nothing just isn’t an option anymore.”
The new site will be the third one opening in District 2.
Jimenez said the other two emergency interim housing sites opened in 2020, Rue Ferrari and Bernal/Monterey, have a total of 196 units to provide shelter to unhoused residents.
Once the site will open in April 2024, LifeMoves, an organization offering support to interim housing programs, will provide support services and case management.
LifeMoves CEO Aubrey Merriman said the Monterey/Branham housing community will provide resources and services to move unhoused neighbors to permanent housing.
“We know that we have the ultimate privilege and responsibility to ensure that the streets no longer continue to be the waiting room for our unhoused neighbors,” he said. “And this is something that we take seriously.”
