(This is a companion article to our report on San Jose's stormwater and encampment challenges at http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3495.)
Leslee Hamilton, executive director of the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy, says "The biggest challenge to me being successful in my job is the presence of homeless people." Hamilton speaks glowingly of the Conservancy's programs in science and nature education, which reach about 4600 children a year. She says the program has a chance to inspire kids who have few other chances to study natural habitats. "Kids get off the bus here and their eyes get wide." But because of encampments, Hamilton said teachers sometimes feel unsafe and donors become concerned about safety. Though she saw the safety issue as "largely the perception," its effect is major: a report of a survey on the Guadalupe River Park showed 30 of 76 people who answered open-ended questions "mentioned homeless issues, security and/or safety." Among campers she meets, she said, there truly are some who "I don't feel safe interacting with." The Guadalupe River has been a subject of energetic camp evictions for more than 20 years, and was the subject of a flood-control and parks project on the Guadalupe River from 2001 to 2005. The project cost $327 million, including $99 million in Redevelopment funds -- sums that impose perspective on the homelessness response program budgets of a million or two at a time. (See http://www.sjredevelopment.org/ProjectGallery/GuadalupeRiverFloodControlFacts.pdf.) Part of the Conservancy's work is with the the area near the airport where the former large camp was evicted. It's a former subdivision where houses were demolished because of their nearness to the runways. She said volunteers there were growing roses and orchards: "We're slowly converting it to gardens." Detriments from continued encampments on the Guadalupe River are real, she said, ranging from runoff pollution to more inventive damage: shopping carts used as fish traps; makeshift stairs cut into the banks. A friend who does EIRs told her "someone would be in jail by now" if a business did anything similar. She pointed out a YouTube video dramatizing the contrasts: a naturalist who was fortunate to spot king salmon spawning in the urban reach of the river also filmed trash in the water nearby. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNMrODZ_Hgk Like many administrators speaking on the subject, Hamiilton mentioned a need for better regional cooperation among the small and sometimes insular municipalities of the South Bay. She saw the Los Angeles region as an encouraging model. Meanwhile, she noted, San Jose lost some affordable housing funds in the dissolution of Redevelopment, and rents kept going up. She had heard a developer say rents needed to rise even more downtown before it would "pencil out for him" to turn a downtown parking lot into housing. "Rents are so bloody high now, it's just hard to imagine," she said.
