San Jose Celebrates Opening of Newest Quick-Build Community Which Will House Homeless Residents Working to Beautify the City
Guadalupe interim housing community provides 96 new beds, and will help house members of the San Jose Bridge program that employs homeless residents to clean up the city
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 19, 2023
Media Contact:
Tasha Dean, Chief Communications Officer, Office of Mayor Matt Mahan, [email protected]
SAN JOSÉ, CA - Today, San José Mayor Matt Mahan, was joined by former Mayor Sam Liccardo, and community partners at LifeMoves, Goodwill of Silicon Valley, Sand Hill Foundation Co-founders Peter and Susanna Pau, and members of the Lived Experience Advisory Board (LEAB) to celebrate the opening of the City’s newest emergency interim housing (EIH) site or quick-build community.
The Guadalupe Interim Housing Community, located near San José Police Department Headquarters on Guadalupe Parkway, will provide 96 private rooms for those experiencing unsheltered homelessness and bring the city closer towards Mayor Mahan’s goal of ending the era of encampments. Half of the units will be dedicated for members of San José Bridge, a program for homeless San José residents that provides them with employment; job training, the development of long-term career goals and job placement; and assists in finding housing and placement in San José.
“No one should live in encampments,” said San José Mayor Matt Mahan. “Sites like Guadalupe, which cost a fraction of traditional housing, offer a safe and dignified alternative to the streets. I’m especially excited that we are reserving half of these units for residents enrolled in our work program that employs homeless neighbors in jobs cleaning up our city. Offering people work and stable shelter is the path we need to take to end unsheltered homelessness.”
San Jose Bridge has employed 137 unhoused residents since March 2022 and 46 participants have secured permanent jobs at various companies and organizations, including Tesla, Goodwill, the Santa Clara County Reentry Resource Center, and the San José Airport. San Jose Bridge participants have removed 351,450 pounds of trash from city streets and trails.
San José has made a monumental effort to scale up its supply of emergency interim housing in recent years, building 397 beds across the Mabury Road, Felipe Avenue, Monterey/Bernal, Rue Ferrari, and Evans Lane quick-build communities, serving 1,350 residents since 2020, with 72% remaining stably housed.
Including Guadalupe and the new Monterey/Branham quick build community, which broke ground in April, San José now has 697 units operating or under construction, with another 300 in the pipeline. San José is also set to receive 200 small homes from Governor Gavin Newsom, which will get San Jose 20% of the way to Mayor Mahan’s goal to create new capacity to move 1,000 unhoused residents out of unmanaged encampments by the end of this calendar year.
San Jose’s quick-build community model has led to a halt in the increase of unsheltered homeless residents for the first time since 2015. Based on the 2022 countywide point-in-time census (PIT), 75% of homeless residents are unsheltered in San José compared to 84% in 2019.
The Guadalupe site is a $16.95 million undertaking, with funding for construction through federal American Rescue Plan funds, City of San José Housing Department funds, and Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) funds from the state. The City also received generous donations from community partners, including $1 million from Destination: Home, $500k from All Home, and $25k from Housing Trust of Silicon Valley. Peter and Susanna Pau donated the living units through their Sand Hill Foundation saving the city millions in development costs. SHP Foundation previously contributed to the construction of the city’s first quick-build apartment community at Evans Lane and the Pau’s continued support for this housing model is generating ongoing interest in philanthropic support.
“Homelessness is a crisis. The City of San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan, and former Mayor Sam Liccardo act and not just talk,” said Peter and Susanna Pau, Co-founders of Sand Hill Property Foundation. “This project is not the whole answer, but it is an effective solution. We hope more will follow. Our Christian Foundation is helping because this is God’s work”
The Guadalupe quick-build community is being developed by Bay Area-based firm DevCon Construction, Inc and will include onsite laundry, community kitchen, dog runs, computer rooms, community programming space, and case management offices. The site operator, LifeMoves, will provide wraparound services to connect residents with a case manager and transition them to permanent housing. Each prefab unit also comes with a bed, heating, and air conditioning, as well as a personal bathroom complete with a shower.
“The need, in our community, to bring our unhoused neighbors indoors has never been higher,” said LifeMoves CEO Aubrey Merriman. “LifeMoves believes it takes us all coming together to build a thriving community. Close teamwork, partnership, collaboration, a sense of urgency, and a unified vision have brought us together to celebrate this ribbon-cutting milestone. Opening San Jose’s Guadalupe Interim Housing site will provide a supportive transitional step toward stable housing for people, along with the resources and customized, intensive services to help chart their course to permanent housing.”
The Guadalupe quick-build site will be the home of numerous residents who were originally living in the Guadalupe Gardens encampment – the city’s largest before being decommissioned in 2022. Several residents that moved from the encampment into hotels and motels will be able to move into the Guadalupe quick-build community. Going forward, outreach teams will prioritize SJ Bridge participants and unhoused residents living in the nearby neighborhood to live at the site.
"When we began discussing this site back in 2020, we knew there was a real opportunity to both expand our community's shelter capacity and create a new model for how lived experience can influence the design and operations," said Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination: Home. "We are so glad to see this vision come to fruition and are proud to be a partner of a project that has been meaningfully shaped by leaders who've experienced homelessness."
Increasing the city’s supply of emergency interim housing and identifying new sites to support them was a focal point of addressing unsheltered homelessness in Mayor Mahan’s budget proposal. The Mayor’s core budget priorities include homelessness, public safety, blight, and bringing jobs and housing back to San José. Mayor Mahan continues to push the City to narrow its focus and make meaningful progress in these areas using practical, cost-effective solutions.
"The Guadalupe EIH site should be used as a model for interim shelter sites moving forward," said Gabriela Gabrian, of the Santa Clara County Lived Experience Advisory Board (LEAB). "From the conception of the project and throughout the development process, we were given decision-making power and were able to offer our lived experience of homelessness to help set this site up for success."
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About the City of San José
With more than one million residents, San José comprises the 10th largest city in the United States and one of its most diverse cities. San José’s transformation into a global innovation center in the heart of Silicon Valley has resulted in the world's greatest concentration of technology talent and development.