San Jose is searching for a developer to build permanent affordable housing at Evans Lane—six years after city leaders first approved homeless housing on the site.
Records obtained by San José Spotlight show the city rejected an offer by a prominent South Bay developer to build the homes in 2016. It could have happened faster and potentially cheaper.
It’s exactly what former Councilmember Pierluigi Oliverio predicted would happen.
“I think time has proven that my initial proposal was correct,” Oliverio told San José Spotlight.
The six-acre site currently has 49 temporary homes—converted shipping containers—that house about 50 families. They came online in 2021—three years after city leaders approved the plan in 2019.
The interim housing site is a temporary quick-build solution, but the grand plan is to build permanent homes there in two phases, and eventually remove the shipping containers.
Back in 2016, developer Swenson Builders offered to build a high-density, mixed-use affordable housing site with 400 units that would’ve taken two to three years to construct using state and federal funding, and a request for a $16 million loan from San Jose. It was rejected by city leaders who worried it would take too long to develop.
Case Swenson, the company’s president and CEO, emailed some city and Santa Clara County officials last February saying he “wish(ed) we could be more proud of our city.” It was part of a long email thread titled “Disgrace in D-3” where city officials, housing stakeholders and residents complained about growing homeless camps in the city.
The messages, obtained through a public records request by San José Spotlight, begin with Garden City Construction owner Jim Salata emailing Mayor Sam Liccardo and other elected officials to denounce a homeless encampment at Guadalupe Gardens. He says in the email that citizens should raise hell and “city leaders should be absolutely crucified for this.”
Many others chime in to call the homeless camps disgraceful before Swenson shared that he had a solution for Evans Lane in 2016. The development he proposed would’ve had a Boys and Girls Club, open space and a park, he added.
“The ask was for a 16M loan from the city that we would pay back in 10 years with 3% interest. The rest would have been funded using federal and state money,” Swenson wrote. “This was shot down as it was going to take too long to build (we could have finished in less than 3 years).”
Swenson was not available for comment.
The council instead voted to build temporary housing with the shipping containers.
“The council was looking for a quick win. And they wanted to showcase that, ‘Hey, we can do something quickly.’ And my insight was, no, you can’t,” Oliverio said. “The interim stuff takes a lot of time, a lot of resources, spends a lot of money and it could have gone toward, you know, permanent housing.”
Oliverio suggested building high density, low-income housing with a private developer such as Swenson—50% low income housing and 50% at market rate—would be the quickest way to increase the affordable housing stock back then.
He was at odds with the city’s housing department who recommended the interim housing instead.
Jeff Scott, spokesperson for the city’s housing department, said he did not have details about the Evans Lane proposals prior to 2019 and maintains the goal never wavered from building out the interim housing.
The temporary housing project was delayed when lenders balked at financing modular construction through the repurposing of shipping containers. They argued it was too risky.
“The city recognizing the urgent need for more housing, opted to use a portion of the Evans Lane site to develop emergency interim housing,” Scott told San José Spotlight.
Scott said Evans Lane is one of five interim housing communities the city built in the past two years, with a sixth interim housing site under construction.
Though it took roughly six years for the city to come up with a plan, it took a couple of months to convert the use of shipping containers into temporary housing, Scott said. The total cost to the city was $5.2 million, he said, which doesn’t include staffing or the $2 million donated by the Sand Hill Foundation for the modular units.
At the Evans Lane site, families receive food and services provided by nonprofit PATH to help move them into permanent homes. Some families have already moved into long-term housing.
“It’s definitely serving a need for the families here,” said PATH’s Regional Director Laura Sandoval, who also writes a column for San José Spotlight. “Our ultimate goal is to get people connected to permanent affordable housing solutions for families that are here.”
The temporary homes are part of a three-phased plan, according to Councilmember Dev Davis. Phase 2 will build high-density permanent housing on the other half of this site, and phase 3 will develop a second permanent housing site to replace the containers.
“It’s really important for us to build as many interim housing sites as we can because we can do so quickly,” Davis, whose district includes Evans Lane, told San José Spotlight. “We can’t put all our eggs in any one basket and that was really the point of how we approach Evans Lane with having different phases.”
The District 6 councilmember said the site is also perfectly located to house children because of its proximity to local schools.
The city is currently in phase 2 and is accepting bids for a permanent housing developer until April.
“The Housing Department is excited to review the proposals and is optimistic there will soon be permanent housing on the Evans Lane site,” Scott said.
Contact Jana Kadah at [email protected] or @Jana_Kadah on Twitter.
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So, we could have purchased commercially available manufactured housing or likely have been gifted FEMA trailers for free, yet we instead put in 49 extremely expensive one-off converted shipping containers on six acres of land? Figures… No one seems to know how better to waste cash and expensive real estate for than City of San Jose. This is a reminder why we can’t flush any more tax dollars down the toilet on homelessness. The county has been sitting on $1 billion dollars for going on 10 years now and that only resulted in a handful of housing units. Drug intervention, treatment of mental illness and job training are the only real solutions. Everything else is just an attempt to use tax dollars to get on TV to be seen as doing something like storing homeless in shipping containers.
San Jose’s Housing Department has turned into a $150M+/year disaster and our City Council allowed it to become such.
People need to be fired for this.
Moving at glacial speed has been The hallmark of San Jose’s democrat mayors and councils for decades; dithering around, then making the wrong decision. And when someone is termed out, the voters elect yet another person from the same mold. When will they ever learn?
So about $147, 000 per unit plus on-going costs. If we conservatively say 20,000 unhoused; that’s almost 3 billion to house just the homeless (not including any for the extensive affordable housing plan). Do we have that kind of money? Do they have a budget and plan? Show it…..
If you have six acres use them please. You can place trailers there for the homeless like someone is always suggesting for the fairgrounds or you could use the site for any of the SB housing like in my neighborhood Spartan Keyes. SB housing doesn’t have to follow many of the rules other housing has to follow so let us do something. Complaining gets you nowhere and the fact is this is land that needs to be utilize now.
and you want these people to be your landlord, welcome the new dorm age!
If you can’t afford to live here then MOVE. If not for you then do it for your kids.
And stop having so many kids y’all cannot support, then come whining to the taxpayers to help y’all, using those kids as props.
If you are raising a family then you probably shouldn’t be in the Bay Area. It’s too expensive for that.
Thank you Spotlight for reporting this. We need more reporting of how our City is being destroyed from within.
For some reason rhe Department of Housing needs to have exoensive programs. The until #modular# sheds were over 80,000 each.
Other cities have navigation shelters. San Jode won’t consude then Yet if you look.at the Navigstion shelters in SF which were all built in modular fashion they are extremely popular secure and effective. Moreover the neighbors in the area of those shelters come around to see then as useful
Unfortunately in San Jose Destination Home has always been about creating long term housing. The issue is that leaves our what to do with the people on the streets in the meantime
Creating solutions for this massive problem is going to take far more than the Liccardo regimen was capable of. .Along wurb that whoever takes the reins at city hall needs to take a radical look st the current progranx that are not making the formerly unhoused self sufficient and prod6ctive. There needs to be new neasures involved in the Housing First program which us currently fatally flawed
I just don’t understand why city of SJ doesn’t buy a whole square mile in Detroit at 50K per home and gift these to the homeless.
About 10 years ago a homeless person in Stockton, whom I stopped to be charitable toward, told me that he had moved there from the bay area. Apparently, he had received $500 (I believe from Santa Clara County) with the stipulation that he would simply relocate outside the bay area! Wooooow!
That loan to Swenson would’ve resulted in a lot more affordable housing, built faster than the containers ended up being built – and with the 3% interest, would’ve made some revenue for more affordable housing.
I voted against the housing epartment’s recomendation because Case Swneson’s project would have been faster cheaper and would have helpped more people.
How much longer is Sam Liccardo going to spend money on useless projects? If we read of all the idiotic plans Liccardo has invested in for the Homeless, they all could be housed by now. The problem is Liccardo is paying his supporters tons of money for ill conceived un-liveable housing units.
Follow the money trail. How much more of our taxes have to go into these gigantic housing developers?
Fortunately, not much longer. He has done much damage the last 16 years of being on the council.
Let’s vote for a new mayor with new ideas and a new attitude about solving the homeless issue. And hopefully one with a spine to stand up to the almighty, powerful Housing Department, which spends like a drunken sailor, but cannot produce results.
“It’s exactly what former Councilmember Pierluigi Oliverio predicted would happen. “I think time has proven that my initial proposal was correct,” Oliverio told San José Spotlight.”
We feel Pierluigi Oliverio should be added to the list of those who write opinion pieces for San Jose Spotlight. He has the knowledge of what has been/is being done (or not being done) in Santa Clara County and San Jose and always look forward to hearing from him. We feel he would be a great asset to San Jose Spotlight and it’s readers.
I wanted to break the stereotypes about unhoused people who don’t have money. I spent 4 years in the Phd program at Emory University in Behavioral neuroscience and evolutionary psychology where I also taught evolutionary psychology and data interpretation. I came out as transgender in 2016, was immediately (but amicably) divorced from a 20+ year marriage, and I moved here from Chicago to start my life over after cashing in a retirement account. I am extremely intelligent and creative. Those are not necessarily good things to actually be in this world—despite what people say. I have written 2 books and numerous articles. But right after I moved, the Coronavirus hit and things closed down. This stopped my plans and backup plans. (I had 2 sources for income planned-both public and outdoor…) Now I am struggling to put finishing touches on my second book in area libraries on how there are actually information laws in the universe which allow brains to exist. Answering questions no one thinks to even ask has been my lifelong struggle because when you are not understood, when you are different in inscrutable ways, you are automatically isolated. It’s difficult to get a job if people cannot relate you to any existing things. So I burned through my retirement savings and I have been living in my car for 3 years now. But I am determined to be myself and I have unique gifts which are extremely valuable even if they may not be currently economically viable: I can solve problems in ways other people cannot think about. Whatever the reason I was made this way, I want to help humanity and I actually am quite capable of doing so. I applied for grants from the government and the Templeton Foundation multiple times but I can’t get a grant because I am not part of an organization or institutions (I.e. understandable, have the same assumptions as others) and this is a bad sign for the future of a country built on innovation. I moved here because the Bay Area has the highest average IQ as well as because California is very transgender friendly legally as well as to follow the psychological principle of changing your surroundings and friends to start over successfully. Don’t think you know what other people are going through and it is not lost on me that I could raise the property values if people were intelligent enough to understand what I say. I am very self-aware, I have taken several personality tests as well as my IQ tests, and I am part of the 1-2% of the population with genuine self-objectivity, and objectivity in general—which is why I loved teaching experimental methodology and why the philosophy of science and epistemology are my passionate interests as well. So I am pretty much the opposite of crazy. 😂 and I actually researched the basis of drug abuse rather than engaging in it: “dopamine in the Ventrolateral Striatum Modulates the reward value of intracranial self-stimulation” presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Anaheim CA a few years back. So there are homeless people who are the opposite of the stereotypes. Never assume you know what people are going through.
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