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For Jim Salata, there’s no escaping the all-too-familiar sight — and looming danger — of the mounting piles of trash and debris that he passes each day on his way to his office just south of downtown San Jose.
“It’s disgusting,” the owner of Garden City Construction said in a recent interview. “We’re in Silicon Valley but this place looks like a crap hole.”
Salata says he tried for years to get local officials to address the trash and debris that accumulates on the off-ramps of Interstate 280 at First Street, but his emails and phone calls appeared to go nowhere, resulting in little progress.
Then, after a fire broke out along the off-ramp last month and threatened the businesses of Salata and his neighbors, he took matters into his own hands, spending upward of $10,000 to rent heavy-duty equipment and clean up the area with the help of more than a dozen of his employees and neighbors.
“I finally said, ‘To hell with it,’ ” Salata said. “We had to protect our own properties because no one else is doing anything about it.”
Although San Jose has long dealt with reports of illegal dumping and growing homeless encampments, the situation has grown worse in recent months.
From the creek beds in and around the city’s downtown core to the off-ramps and underpasses of Interstate 280 and Highway 85 to long stretches of Monterey Road in south San Jose — piles of trash, tires, broken tents, abandoned vehicles and furniture continue to mount.
And by the city’s own admission, San Jose is struggling to deal with it.
“The reality is it (the city’s current process to address the blight) has not been anywhere near enough to do an effective job and keep the city clean, regardless of how hard staff works,” Deputy City Manager Jim Ortbal said in a recent city council meeting. “…We’re not giving up on anything, but we’re picking our battles.”
To keep the city truly clean, Ortbal said that it would likely need to conduct weekly trash pickups at more than 200 known encampments and illegal dumpsites across the city. According to data recently compiled by the city, only about 10% of the sites are currently cleaned up weekly, while at least 65% are cleaned up once a month or fewer.
More than 5,000 people sleep on San Jose streets any given night, city officials and homeless advocates estimate, and the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic fallout have only exacerbated the crisis. Since the pandemic struck the region in mid-March, San Jose and other entities, such as Caltrans, Union Pacific and the county, have halted abatements of homeless encampments in accordance with guidance from the public health experts to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
But that’s only one part of the problem.
After diverting personnel and resources to various pandemic response initiatives, the city’s clean-up efforts of those sites have slowed. And as residents drive by the encampments and see trash accumulating, some are feeling liberated to dump their own junk onto the piles.
And with the growing amount of trash comes a growing number of complaints.
“Our community is tired of hearing excuses,” Councilman Johnny Khamis said. “And frankly, I’m with them.”
But further complicating the issue is that many of San Jose’s problem areas — such as off-ramps, underpasses, highway corridors and railway lines — are properties owned by outside entities such as Caltrans, PG&E and Union Pacific. Since those are not within San Jose’s jurisdiction, city officials maintain little to no control over their condition and upkeep.
Steven Pera, a co-owner of Roma Bakery in the city’s Guadalupe-Washington neighborhood, has spent years getting the run-around from officials regarding a rat-infested dump across from his food manufacturing facility under Interstate 280 on Almaden Avenue — property within the city but owned by Caltrans.
His emails and phone calls have been seemingly ignored for years, bouncing around from city officials to the county and state leaders to Caltrans, leaving him to foot a hefty pest control bill each month to keep the infestation out of his facility. It wasn’t until just recently when a grassroots group of local residents got involved that cleanup efforts began in his neighborhood.
“It’s just the state of our government these days — bloated bureaucracies that can’t get along with one another and can’t solve a basic health and safety issue,” Pera said.
In a statement, Caltrans spokesperson Matt Roco said the agency “takes the health and safety of its employees very seriously” and has temporarily suspended encampment cleanups unless there is “an immediate safety concern” to limit the spread of COVID-19. But, he added, the company will “continue to work with local partners to move individuals into safer situations as available.”
San Jose officials are currently working on several initiatives to try and address the growing blight.
The city’s Beautify SJ team is creating a plan to provide more routine trash pick-up services to encampments on city properties by the start of 2021. The team has placed dumpsters in 11 heavily trafficked encampment areas and is re-launching a program that offers homeless residents $4 Visa gift cards in exchange for filling a trash bag.
The city is also exploring potential agreements with Caltrans and other outside agencies that would allow it to clear blight and trash on their properties within city limits.
By the end of December, the Beautify SJ team and the city manager’s office are expected to present the council with more concrete plans — and funding requests — to deal with the blight and mounting trash. At that time, city leaders are likely to discuss the potential of creating sanctioned encampments — an option San Jose and most Bay Area cities have long shied away from, though earlier in the pandemic San Francisco created the first-of-its-kind for the city.
San Jose Councilmember Raul Peralez, an advocate for sanctioned encampments as a safer alternative to homeless camps, is hoping his colleagues come around to the idea.
“What we’re doing right now is we’re trying to fit into this environment that’s migratory,” Peralez said at a council meeting earlier this month. “…If we were able to take the next step and make temporary sanctioned encampments, I think that will be better for all of us.”
