San Jose still looking for developer for homeless housing site six years on

San Jose is still looking for a developer to build permanent housing on the site of an interim community for unhoused families — six years after the city approved homes for the homeless there.

The six-acre Evans Lane site between Curtner Avenue, Highway 87 and the Almaden Expressway has 49 temporary homes made from shipping containers, according to San Jose Spotlight. The units opened last year, two years after the City Council approved converting the containers into residences, and they house 50 families, the news outlet said. The site is one of five interim communities the city has built over the past two years.

The city expects it to eventually become a dense permanent housing development, which San Jose’s Swenson Builders offered to build five years ago, according to emails obtained by Spotlight through a public records request. The developer brought a proposal to the City Council in August 2016 for a mixed-use project with 400 affordable units, a Boys & Girls Club, open areas and a park, CEO Case Swenson wrote in an email to city and Santa Clara County officials last year.

The project would’ve taken two to three years to build using state and federal funds and a $16 million loan from the city, which Swenson would repay over 10 years with 3 percent interest. Council members rejected the plan, saying it would’ve taken too long to build, Swenson wrote in his email. He wasn’t available for comment to Spotlight.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo recently labeled homelessness the city’s “greatest failure” and called for faster, cheaper, and more nimble solutions. Yet the lack of progress on the permanent housing plan for Evans Lane highlights the risk of favoring a temporary solution over a long-term one. The city’s population of unhoused residents jumped 42 percent from 2017 to 2019, according to the city’s 2019 homeless census.

“The council was looking for a quick win,” San Jose Planning Commissioner and former Councilmember Pierluigi Oliverio told Spotlight. “They wanted to showcase that, ‘Hey, we can do something quickly.’ And my insight was, ‘No, you can’t.’ The interim stuff takes a lot of time, a lot of resources, spends a lot of money, and it could’ve gone toward, you know, permanent housing.”

It took the city about six years to come up with an interim plan for Evans Lane but just a couple of months to convert its shipping containers into homes, Jeff Scott of San Jose’s housing department said. Those units are part of a three-phase plan to turn the site into permanent housing, Councilmember Dev Davis, whose district includes Evans Lane, told Spotlight.

The city is working on the second phase, which involves building a dense permanent housing project on the other half of the property. It’s accepting bids for a developer for that project until April, Spotlight said.

“The housing department is excited to review the proposals and is optimistic that there will soon be permanent housing on the Evans Lane site,” Scott said.

[San Jose Spotlight] — Matthew Niksa