The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has placed its water quality concerns in direct conflict with the state's affordable housing shortage by filing a complaint with the Regional Water Quality Control Board against the City of San Jose over its Coyote Creek encampment, unofficial home to 150 or more people who reportedly live without access to basic utilities.

The Mercury News reported at http://bit.ly/1gGkC4Q that the complaint came from Lt. Byron Jones of Fish and Wildlife, "a retired 22-year veteran of the San Jose Police Department" and it "charges that city administrators and police 'have refused to remove the encampments and protect the water.'" The charges followed two years of pressure for cleanups amid a level of expressed resentment by conventionally housed neighbors that Mercury News reporter Bruce Newman described as "an organized resistance movement." http://bit.ly/1snjvRp

U.S. cities with encampments increasingly face the choice whether to provide (or permit the provision of) infrastructure such as clean water, sewage and garbage removal, sturdy shelters, electricity or responsive policing, or instead remove the encampments themselves because of nuisance conditions that appear at high population densities in the absence of urban systems such as sewerage.

A news analysis based on interviews with experts about the San Jose situation is at www.mintpressnews.com/city-san-jose-cleansing-homeless-encampments/187406/. Prior news reports on grave environmental concerns about Coyote Creek water pollution include two from 2012: the Mercury News at http://bit.ly/1eilrkJ and the San Francisco Chronicle, focusing on the Save the Bay organization's  "trash hot spot" rating, at http://bit.ly/1lIl0rF. Last summer a drama-laden photo essay in Business Insider referred to the encampment as "The Jungle" and called it "the largest homeless encampment in the continental United States." http://www.businessinsider.com/the-jungle-largest-homeless-camp-in-us-2013-8?op=1. It said up to 175 people may live there at a time.

Another perspective is offered by a report prepared on Sacramento's 2011 American River encampment conditions by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation. The rapporteur, Catarina de Albuquerque, called on the United States to meet the needs of all its people for access to sanitation with dignity. At the Sacramento camp, where such provisions were otherwise absent, she praised a man named Tim who at the time of her visit was making weekly journeys by bicycle to carry bags of human waste away from the camp for disposal in a public restroom. See http://www.sacbee.com/2012/02/04/4238427/un-investigator-urges-sacramento.html and the UN report (PDF) at http://bit.ly/1g22rrn.