San Jose’s Homeless Encampment Clearings Raise a Dangerous Question: Where Are People Supposed to Go?
In San Jose, a homeless man named Robert Emmons woke up not to outreach workers or shelter referrals—but to the sound of staple guns. The signs being posted made it clear: He and dozens of others living along the Guadalupe River Trail had just over a week to disappear.
“Haven’t seen them since,” Emmons told The Mercury News, referring to nonprofit workers who had promised help days earlier but never returned.
This is not an anomaly but a window into how California’s homelessness crisis is being managed—or mismanaged—with a broom and a bulldozer. The clearing of San Jose’s Autumn Parkway encampment is the latest in a series of sweeps that expose the cruel gap between rhetoric and reality.
Officials speak of safety and order. Advocates see cruelty and chaos. And the unhoused? They lose what little they have, often without any place to go.
“If you are concerned about public safety, the best thing you can do is house people,” said Shaunn Cartwright, founder of the Unhoused Response Group in Santa Clara County. “People who are housed have better mental health… when you are outside, you are constantly in fight-or-flight mode, constantly agitated by the environmental factors, and not in a good state.”
Emmons has experienced this firsthand. He lived briefly in a tiny home community before being expelled for an altercation he says was self-defense. “It’s a mixture of a few things: fires, the guy that got stabbed, the trash and the people stealing from stores,” he told The Mercury News. “It’s hard to back us up when, going down this alley, there is [expletive] everywhere. That’s hard to fight for.”
But the question isn’t whether there are challenges in encampments—it’s whether sweeps solve them. And on that front, the evidence is bleak.
Of the dozens of people displaced from Autumn Parkway, only one was confirmed to have been placed into emergency housing, and even that was not a direct result of recent outreach.
The sweep comes amid San Jose’s rapid expansion of interim housing options like tiny homes, motel conversions, and safe parking sites—part of Mayor Matt Mahan’s pledge to offer 1,000 new beds this year.
“Decommissioning an encampment isn’t the end goal — but when safety is at risk, like with the recent attack on one of our police officers, we have to act to protect the broader community,” Mahan said, pointing to over 100 police calls from the area in a single month.
He added that people “committing crimes, whether violent or quality of life, don’t belong in our shelters; they belong in our justice system or treatment centers until they are ready to rejoin the community.” But that framing conflates the presence of a few individuals with the guilt of all, punishing entire communities of unhoused people for the actions of a few.
It also obscures the core issue: there simply isn’t enough shelter. As Cartwright warned, “It might look like a shack to the outside person, but they know how to protect themselves against the elements… now that they have been forced to move and had their gear taken, they won’t and will be roaming around with nothing.”
The sweep also hit individuals like 48-year-old Tyric Perkins, who suffers from severe health conditions. Despite requesting accommodations, his walker and cane were thrown away during the sweep.
“I’m wearing basically everything I’ve got on my back,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere, because where else am I going to go? If I go somewhere else, they’re going to keep following us.”
In short: the sweeps don’t fix the problem; they just relocate it. As one advocate put it bluntly, they are “just shoving us to the side or wherever they want.”
This policy shift has been empowered by last year’s Grants Pass v. Johnson Supreme Court decision, which allows cities to enforce anti-camping ordinances even when no shelter beds are available.
San Jose has leaned into this ruling, ramping up encampment clearings and redirecting funds from permanent affordable housing to interim shelter. Proponents hail this as pragmatic.
Critics warn it creates a two-tiered system, where the unhoused are corralled into temporary structures indefinitely, with few paths to permanent stability.
The contrast between Silicon Valley’s wealth and the suffering on its streets could not be more jarring. In the words of Dan Walters, California is now “a highly stratified society.”
As Walters noted in CalMatters, California’s true poverty rate—adjusted for cost of living—was 18.9% in 2023. Over 7 million Californians live in or near poverty, and the disparities cut along racial and economic lines: 31.1% of Latinos and 13.6% of Black residents were among those in or near poverty.
The housing affordability crisis fuels this instability. The Public Policy Institute of California found that high costs have blocked many from building any wealth, especially Black and Latino families. In some counties, even households earning $100,000 per year qualify for housing assistance under the state’s criteria. Meanwhile, the same cities that can’t house people are punishing them for sleeping outside.
San Jose’s policy, praised by the conservative Washington Examiner as bold and effective, may be gaining traction among conservatives eager to see visible homelessness disappear. But at what cost? Visibility is not the problem—homelessness is. And the deeper causes—inequality, unaffordable housing, untreated mental illness—are not addressed with fences and forced removals.
We must stop confusing motion with progress. Tearing down tents may offer the illusion of control, but if the city’s only response is to move people from one underpass to another, then we are not solving a crisis—we are institutionalizing displacement.
What’s happening in San Jose is not just a local story. It’s a warning. Sweeps without shelter, enforcement without empathy, and promises without delivery—these are not the tools of justice. They are symptoms of a society failing its most vulnerable.
Until we invest in real, permanent housing solutions, in trauma-informed care, in case management, and in policies rooted in dignity and equity, we will continue to fail. And no number of tiny homes or abatements will change that.
Because when you take away the only shelter someone has, and offer them nothing in return, you’re not cleaning the city. You’re destroying lives.
“Where Are People Supposed to Go?”
You seriously used that line again?
A primary cause of this consists of trying to house people with no money in expensive areas. No doubt, they can be housed a lot more inexpensively in other areas.
Then, there’s this (from the article above): “He lived briefly in a tiny home community before being expelled for an altercation he says was self-defense. “It’s a mixture of a few things: fires, the guy that got stabbed, the trash and the people stealing from stores,” he told The Mercury News.”
So, he was ALREADY IN the type of community that homeless advocates prefer, and yet “somehow” got into an altercation that got him expelled.
Strangely-enough, I “don’t remember” the last time that I stabbed my next-door neighbor, or he stabbed me. (Seems like I’d recall that, unless I was getting into altercations like that on a daily basis, for example.)
“It’s a mixture of a few things: fires, the guy that got stabbed, the trash and the people stealing from stores,”
Priceless.
“Priceless”
Actually there is a price: we shoveled $25 billion down a sewer hole, and this is the conditions people get to live in.
But where will they go?
“But where will they go?”
I’d suggest Houston. As I recall, David said they handle homelessness a lot better there (though he didn’t say “how”).
I suspect it has something to do with being an uncontrolled hell-hole in regard to development (and periodic hurricanes which then flood said developments.)
And also dirt-cheap as a place to live, compared to places that care about the environment in any way, shape or form.
But still better than a homeless encampment under a freeway overpass in California.
The truth is that homeless people have always existed (except for some reason in some third or second-world countries, where family connections might be stronger).
Charlie Chaplin shipped a bunch of homeless people from Sacramento up to Donner Pass, to act as “extras” in his 1925 film “The Gold Rush”.
In the “old days”, the caricature of these people consisted of a polka-dot sack on the end of a stick.