"Now, eight years later, the neighborhood is so pleased with an alternative project that just opened last month, on Cherry Avenue across the Guadalupe River, residents here raised money for welcome baskets and wrote kindly notes with each one. Many of them even gave up their weekend to set up bedrooms with sheets, laundry supplies and shower caddies. The modular building has 130 beds with individual rooms, 24-hour security, and job and health services for the residents."
"We've been part of the complaining group for a long time about getting these people out of here they're polluting the creek, they're building fires, said Kahn, whose home in the Thousand Oaks neighborhood backs up to the river where homeless encampments flourished. So I don't want to always be the complainer. I want to be part of the solution."
"How the residents here and in the adjacent Erikson neighborhood in South San Jose turned from NIMBYs to YIMBYs offers a civics lesson in how good government, goodwill and trust can overcome the kinds of objections that have doomed attempts to manage the homeless crisis. The Yes-In-My-Backyard mentality didn't come, however, without years of drama and frustration and a tragedy."
San Jose proposed tiny homes in 2017 for homeless people in a park in South San Jose, and neighbors fought and defeated that plan. Eight years later, a modular interim supportive housing project opened on Cherry Avenue across the Guadalupe River. Neighbors raised money, assembled welcome baskets, and prepared bedrooms with sheets, laundry supplies and shower caddies. The facility offers 130 individual rooms, 24-hour security, and job and health services. Longstanding complaints about encampments, pollution and fires drove residents' activism, but trust, goodwill and effective government engagement turned opposition into support after years of drama and a nearby 2019 homicide stoked fear.
Read at www.mercurynews.com
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