ogc163
Superstar
It’s the epicenter of the tech industry and the wealthiest, most progressive state in the union, but homelessness is surging — and no one can agree on how to fix it
When the shimmering, state-of-the-art, $1.3 billion Levi’s Stadium opened its doors in Santa Clara, it was hailed as the pinnacle of technological innovation. Concessions delivered to your seat at the touch of a button! Bluetooth beacons to navigate you with pinpoint precision! High-speed internet throughout! And to top it all off, not a single public cent was spent. The whole thing was privately financed, partly through seat licenses sold to fans at prices ranging from $2,000 to $250,000 — a testament to the exorbitant, almost incomprehensible wealth generated in the greater Bay Area in recent decades, and a gambit that happened to price out a huge swath of 49ers faithful.
Adelle Amador has been a Niners fan since she was a kid living on the east side of San Jose. Her husband, Maurice, is a supervisor at one of the stadium’s club-level restaurants. “He’s been working there since they cut the ribbon,” she says. The stadium opened five years ago. The couple and their children, ages three to 14, have been homeless for about the same amount of time. Adelle works too, as a cashier, but the couple’s combined income is not enough to afford a market-rate apartment in the city where they’ve spent their entire lives.
They’ve stayed with friends and family, cycled through shelters, motels, and garages, slept at drive-in movie theaters, and parked their Ford Explorer near Coyote Creek, a homeless encampment San Jose has been trying to eradicate for years, where Adelle and her husband would trade shifts sleeping. “We’ve been where there’s people trying to open the handles to your car door,” Amador says. Most nights, “My main thing was just, ‘Oh, God, just please get us to the morning, please, God.’”
Last December, the family began spending nights in the parking lot of a community center in a residential neighborhood just off the Capitol Expressway, about 30 minutes, give or take, from the headquarters of some of the country’s richest companies — Apple’s Infinite Loop, in Cupertino; the Googleplex, in Mountain View; and Facebook, in Menlo Park. On those manicured campuses, employees are generating billions of dollars shaping every aspect of our futures, but just outside, the lower-wage workers who make this community run are struggling to meet a basic human need: shelter. Google recently pledged $1 billion to help ease the Bay Area’s housing crunch — but that sum is only eye-popping until you hear experts explain it would cost $14 billion to execute the company’s vision of building 20,000 homes. Google’s is a well-intentioned gesture, but one that illustrates how the problem facing the Bay Area, and California at large, is much worse than even its brightest minds can comprehend.
The city of San Jose opened the parking lot to homeless families after fielding hundreds of complaints from locals confounded by the increasing number of people they saw living out of their cars on city streets in the past two years. The lot’s first night of operation was last November, a couple of weeks after San Jose voters rejected a small property-tax increase that would have funded the construction of affordable housing.
It’s just a patch of concrete adjacent to a community center where the kids can shower and do their homework, with a caseworker on site for a few hours every night, and a rent-a-cop security guard who occasionally cruises by to keep an eye on things. But Amador says her family feels safer here than on the street by themselves.
Every night at 7 p.m., she and her husband pull their two cars into the lot — the Explorer and an Econoline van sold to them by another homeless family. They pack their belongings under a tarp on the roof, lay the seats down, and go to sleep, waking up at the crack of dawn to repack the car so they can be off the lot by 7 a.m., when the community center’s daytime crowd starts to show up. “I tell these [little] ones: ‘We’re living a learning experience,’ ” Amador says. “ ‘I don’t want you guys to go through this with your kids.’ ”
Housing has been one of San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo’s top priorities since he took office in 2015. When talking about it, he uses the local dialect, referring to solutions the city can “scale in a really disruptive way.” The parking lot, though, is about as low-tech as it gets, which is how you can tell it wasn’t originally part of the plan.
Four years ago, Liccardo set a goal to create housing for all of San Jose’s 7,400 homeless. The city has just about hit that goal, sheltering 6,937 people this year. The problem, Liccardo explains, is “as quickly as we’re housing residents, we’re seeing three more getting pushed out into the street by the economy.”
It isn’t a failing economy that’s putting residents out on the streets, though. It’s a booming one. By almost every economic measure, the Bay Area is outperforming the rest of the nation. Together, the region’s nine counties boast a GDP of $748 billion — larger than Switzerland’s or Saudi Arabia’s — and an economy that’s growing at double the rate of the United States’ at large. Santa Clara County, home to San Jose, has a job-growth rate that’s twice the national one. But in the past five years, San Jose has built only one unit of housing for every six jobs it’s created — a recipe for rising rents, rabid competition for available units, and, ultimately, economic evictions like the ones many of the families in the parking lot described when Rolling Stone visited in March.
It’s a dynamic happening across California, which, despite generating so much wealth, has the highest proportion of residents in poverty when you factor in the cost of living. San Diego, East Palo Alto, and L.A. have all opened safe parking lots in 2019; Mountain View and San Francisco are poised to follow suit, as demand for housing is far outstripping supply, and the resulting astronomical rents are pushing people out of homes and onto the streets.
“More and more people at higher and higher incomes are finding themselves with this cost burden, so as quickly as you fill up [new] units, you have more people falling into homelessness — oftentimes through economic evictions, where they can no longer afford the rent increases,” says Michael Lane, deputy director of the nonprofit Silicon Valley @ Home.
Almost all of the families sleeping in the parking lot in San Jose have stories that mirror Amador’s: They grew up in the Bay Area, and despite holding down jobs — in warehouses, as customer-service reps, as call-center workers, in retail — they are struggling to find homes they can afford.
Twelve percent of the U.S. population lives in California, but it’s home to nearly a quarter of the nation’s homeless. In the spring, the results of a federal survey found rates of homelessness had increased by double digits across the state this year. In Los Angeles County, the rate went up 12 percent — 6,198 more people on the streets — and that was among the lowest percentage increases. Orange County saw a spike of 42 percent. In Alameda County, home to Oakland, homelessness was up 43 percent this year, and in the Central Valley’s Kern County, it was up 50 percent.
When the shimmering, state-of-the-art, $1.3 billion Levi’s Stadium opened its doors in Santa Clara, it was hailed as the pinnacle of technological innovation. Concessions delivered to your seat at the touch of a button! Bluetooth beacons to navigate you with pinpoint precision! High-speed internet throughout! And to top it all off, not a single public cent was spent. The whole thing was privately financed, partly through seat licenses sold to fans at prices ranging from $2,000 to $250,000 — a testament to the exorbitant, almost incomprehensible wealth generated in the greater Bay Area in recent decades, and a gambit that happened to price out a huge swath of 49ers faithful.
Adelle Amador has been a Niners fan since she was a kid living on the east side of San Jose. Her husband, Maurice, is a supervisor at one of the stadium’s club-level restaurants. “He’s been working there since they cut the ribbon,” she says. The stadium opened five years ago. The couple and their children, ages three to 14, have been homeless for about the same amount of time. Adelle works too, as a cashier, but the couple’s combined income is not enough to afford a market-rate apartment in the city where they’ve spent their entire lives.
They’ve stayed with friends and family, cycled through shelters, motels, and garages, slept at drive-in movie theaters, and parked their Ford Explorer near Coyote Creek, a homeless encampment San Jose has been trying to eradicate for years, where Adelle and her husband would trade shifts sleeping. “We’ve been where there’s people trying to open the handles to your car door,” Amador says. Most nights, “My main thing was just, ‘Oh, God, just please get us to the morning, please, God.’”
Last December, the family began spending nights in the parking lot of a community center in a residential neighborhood just off the Capitol Expressway, about 30 minutes, give or take, from the headquarters of some of the country’s richest companies — Apple’s Infinite Loop, in Cupertino; the Googleplex, in Mountain View; and Facebook, in Menlo Park. On those manicured campuses, employees are generating billions of dollars shaping every aspect of our futures, but just outside, the lower-wage workers who make this community run are struggling to meet a basic human need: shelter. Google recently pledged $1 billion to help ease the Bay Area’s housing crunch — but that sum is only eye-popping until you hear experts explain it would cost $14 billion to execute the company’s vision of building 20,000 homes. Google’s is a well-intentioned gesture, but one that illustrates how the problem facing the Bay Area, and California at large, is much worse than even its brightest minds can comprehend.
The city of San Jose opened the parking lot to homeless families after fielding hundreds of complaints from locals confounded by the increasing number of people they saw living out of their cars on city streets in the past two years. The lot’s first night of operation was last November, a couple of weeks after San Jose voters rejected a small property-tax increase that would have funded the construction of affordable housing.
It’s just a patch of concrete adjacent to a community center where the kids can shower and do their homework, with a caseworker on site for a few hours every night, and a rent-a-cop security guard who occasionally cruises by to keep an eye on things. But Amador says her family feels safer here than on the street by themselves.
Every night at 7 p.m., she and her husband pull their two cars into the lot — the Explorer and an Econoline van sold to them by another homeless family. They pack their belongings under a tarp on the roof, lay the seats down, and go to sleep, waking up at the crack of dawn to repack the car so they can be off the lot by 7 a.m., when the community center’s daytime crowd starts to show up. “I tell these [little] ones: ‘We’re living a learning experience,’ ” Amador says. “ ‘I don’t want you guys to go through this with your kids.’ ”
Housing has been one of San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo’s top priorities since he took office in 2015. When talking about it, he uses the local dialect, referring to solutions the city can “scale in a really disruptive way.” The parking lot, though, is about as low-tech as it gets, which is how you can tell it wasn’t originally part of the plan.
Four years ago, Liccardo set a goal to create housing for all of San Jose’s 7,400 homeless. The city has just about hit that goal, sheltering 6,937 people this year. The problem, Liccardo explains, is “as quickly as we’re housing residents, we’re seeing three more getting pushed out into the street by the economy.”
It isn’t a failing economy that’s putting residents out on the streets, though. It’s a booming one. By almost every economic measure, the Bay Area is outperforming the rest of the nation. Together, the region’s nine counties boast a GDP of $748 billion — larger than Switzerland’s or Saudi Arabia’s — and an economy that’s growing at double the rate of the United States’ at large. Santa Clara County, home to San Jose, has a job-growth rate that’s twice the national one. But in the past five years, San Jose has built only one unit of housing for every six jobs it’s created — a recipe for rising rents, rabid competition for available units, and, ultimately, economic evictions like the ones many of the families in the parking lot described when Rolling Stone visited in March.
It’s a dynamic happening across California, which, despite generating so much wealth, has the highest proportion of residents in poverty when you factor in the cost of living. San Diego, East Palo Alto, and L.A. have all opened safe parking lots in 2019; Mountain View and San Francisco are poised to follow suit, as demand for housing is far outstripping supply, and the resulting astronomical rents are pushing people out of homes and onto the streets.
“More and more people at higher and higher incomes are finding themselves with this cost burden, so as quickly as you fill up [new] units, you have more people falling into homelessness — oftentimes through economic evictions, where they can no longer afford the rent increases,” says Michael Lane, deputy director of the nonprofit Silicon Valley @ Home.
Almost all of the families sleeping in the parking lot in San Jose have stories that mirror Amador’s: They grew up in the Bay Area, and despite holding down jobs — in warehouses, as customer-service reps, as call-center workers, in retail — they are struggling to find homes they can afford.
Twelve percent of the U.S. population lives in California, but it’s home to nearly a quarter of the nation’s homeless. In the spring, the results of a federal survey found rates of homelessness had increased by double digits across the state this year. In Los Angeles County, the rate went up 12 percent — 6,198 more people on the streets — and that was among the lowest percentage increases. Orange County saw a spike of 42 percent. In Alameda County, home to Oakland, homelessness was up 43 percent this year, and in the Central Valley’s Kern County, it was up 50 percent.
