While San Francisco hogs headlines on homelessness and crime, its southern neighbor, San Jose, has been quietly making bold moves — and seeing substantial results. Frustrated by years of progressive policies, voters elected Mayor Matt Mahan, who campaigned on a platform of reform. Since taking office, he has streamlined regulatory processes, strengthened law enforcement, and leveraged Silicon Valley’s innovative spirit to tackle the city’s most pressing challenges. The Washington Examiner spent several days on the ground in San Jose to gain deeper insight into the city’s evolving landscape. Part 2 of this series, The San Jose Way, takes a look at homelessness and the efforts to reduce it.
SAN JOSE, California — Picture-perfect palm trees, manicured lawns, and luxury cars are an all too familiar sight in San Jose.
As California’s third-largest city, it boasts natural beauty and extraordinary wealth — with more billionaires per capita than nearly anywhere else in the world.
In 2024, just nine Silicon Valley billionaires held an estimated $150 billion in liquid assets, a sum 15 times greater than the combined wealth of the bottom half of all households in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.
Against this backdrop of immense prosperity, there is also deep human suffering.
Angel
“Angel” is a 30-something-year-old living in squalor in Columbus Park, where the sights and sounds of misery are everywhere.
There’s feces, possibly human, on the sidewalks, open-air drug use, and people walking around blitzed out of their mind. Years ago, there were about 200 homeless residents living in ratty RVs and trailers on the streets, fields, and basketball courts there, turning a community area into a serious public safety hazard. At one point, the Federal Aviation Administration threatened to withhold millions of dollars in funding if the encampment wasn’t cleared because it sits under the flight path of San Jose Mineta International Airport.
The city cleared it in 2022, but since then, many, like Angel, have returned.
When the Washington Examiner spoke with Angel, she claimed she had a baby living with her. She didn’t. It was a broken plastic doll with a leg and an eye missing. Out of the blue, Angel started crying, then screaming, and eventually ran into a packed parking lot littered with torn tents, toys, and trash.
There are many ‘Angels’ not only living in San Jose but across the state.
In 2024, about 187,000 people were homeless in California, the highest figure ever recorded in the state, according to an analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California.
The homelessness crisis is especially visible because so many people are living without shelter. California’s predominantly mild climate makes living outdoors more manageable year-round, attracting homeless individuals from across the country.
In San Jose, about 6,000 people live in shelters, clustered together on the streets, in riverbanks, and parks. Homelessness has consistently ranked among the top concerns for frustrated voters who say something needs to be done.
The city, which has long embraced progressive ideals, including a tolerance for people living outdoors, seems finally ready to turn a corner.
An experiment ‘proven to fail’
“Homelessness can’t be a choice,” Democratic Mayor Matt Mahan told the Washington Examiner in a wide-ranging interview.
He added that while the government has a duty to provide shelter for its homeless population, individuals also have a responsibility to make use of the resources offered.
San Jose has spent most of the year focusing on expanding its shelter options through hotel and motel conversions as well as building new tiny home communities and safe parking and sleeping sites.
In 2025, the city plans to open more than 1,000 new shelter placements, providing what officials describe as “an immediate alternative to encampments.” It’s the largest expansion of its kind on the West Coast and is believed to surpass that of any other city in the nation.
The effort is a major pivot from the “housing first” strategy pushed by progressive Democrats.
Mahan has also been outspoken in his criticism of the state’s handling of the homelessness crisis.
“I think California has been running an experiment that has more or less proven to fail,” he said. “The experiment has been that we will not invest in shelter. We won’t intervene in cycles of addiction. We will pull way back on law enforcement outside of violent crime, and we’ll raise taxes to build permanent, affordable housing. And we’ll say that that is the only solution to the crisis. We will essentially allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.”
Mahan, 42, acknowledges the urgent need to build more housing and does not dispute advocates’ calls for increased support. However, he emphasized that “the status quo approach is failing by the objective measure that matters most — the number of people still living outside in misery.”
“The reality is, we’ve deployed billions of dollars, tens of billions, and we have more people outside today than when we started,” he said.
Arresting the homeless
Mahan believes the city must take a more strategic approach — one that includes safe, managed interim housing options to offer people a dignified alternative to living on the streets. He stressed that these solutions must be implemented quickly, cost-effectively, and at scale.
Mahan has come under fire for a controversial proposal that would punish unsheltered individuals who have rejected shelter three times in an 18-month span and continue to live on the streets.
Under Mahan’s plan, which needs approval from the city council, people who reject offers of shelter would face escalating punishment with each refusal, starting with a written warning and ending with possible arrest. The city would create a special unit within the San Jose Police Department to handle enforcement.
The measure is a rare move for an elected official in a liberal Bay Area city but one that has gained the support of residents and the scorn of homeless advocates and community groups that believe it does more harm than good. A vote on the high-stakes proposal is scheduled for next month.
One person not on board with the idea is Sacred Heart Community Service Executive Director Poncho Guevara.
“I reject this false choice between compassion and enforcement,” he said. “I have no compassion for a system that has failed folks over and over and over again and believes that enforcement can do anything but further traumatize human beings and make it harder for them to get housing and employment in the future. When we do nothing, people suffer (and) handing out tickets is doing nothing.”
Santa Clara County Public Defender Damon Silver also isn’t a fan. He told San Jose Spotlight he’s not familiar with any evidence-based research that shows criminalizing homelessness has been successful.
“Half-baked incarceration-based proposals inevitably exacerbate the problem and will likely result in catastrophic outcomes for this vulnerable population,” Damon said.
Santa Clara Board of Supervisors President Otto Lee, District Attorney Jeff Rosen, County Executive James Williams, and Sheriff Robert Jonsen sent a letter last week to San Jose’s elected leaders, saying Mahan’s plan would result in “unnecessary and ineffective bookings.”
The mayor and his allies on city council have blasted the county, claiming misdemeanor charges have been used in the past to compel treatment.
“It is not enough to criticize the use of misdemeanor arrests for municipal code violations without offering a realistic alternative for those who continue to refuse help and fall through the cracks of our current system,” Mahan said. “If the county has a plan for reaching the hardest-to-help, we would welcome the opportunity to learn more about that plan through a joint meeting between the San Jose City Council and the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.”
Mahan has also clashed with officials from nearby counties for claiming San Jose has shouldered too much of the cost of dealing with homelessness. He supported a state bill that would have forced the largest counties to cover at least 50% of the operating costs their cities spent on running interim housing and shelters. The bill was later gutted.
Encampment sweeps
For now, San Jose has stepped up sweeping encampments.
One major site that has been swept twice in the past month spans a 12-mile stretch along Coyote Creek. Complaints had been pouring in for some time about the homeless clogging up the waterways by putting up tents, doing drugs, and discarding their debris along the banks. In fact, it had gotten so bad that the city estimated roughly 90% of the pollution and congestion in local creeks and rivers were caused by homeless people.
The city was under orders to comply with the Clean Water Act which required them to reduce pollution in the waterways or face a fine per pollutant. City officials said they will continue to do the sweeps, sometimes in the same locations, to underscore the message that people cannot call those places home.
The sweeps are not only happening in San Jose but across the state.
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California’s crackdown on homeless encampments has grown since the June 28 U.S. Supreme Court decision that gave local officials the authority to ban camping on sidewalks, streets, and other public property even if no shelter is provided.
The 6-3 decision found that outdoor sleeping bans don’t violate the Eighth Amendment. Since then, cities including Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley have used the high court decision to cite health hazards and launch punitive measures.