4 Months After Its Closure, Homeless Advocates Return To San Jose's Jungle
SAN JOSE (KCBS)— It was known as one of the largest homeless encampments in America, but The Jungle in San Jose is no more. Four months after its closure, protesters and homeless advocates returned to the site to demand more permanent housing.
The encampment sat near Coyote Creek south of the city's downtown. Former resident, Robert Aguirre, was part of the demonstration on Tuesday. He said the city is now issuing tickets for trespassing.
"They're also writing tickets for shopping carts. What they do is make you dump out your shopping cart and tell you 'Now you gotta go', but you can't carry your things because you have too much to carry," he said.
Pastor Scott Wagers from CHAM Deliverance Ministry, who led the rally, said more permanent housing is the only real solution. He claimed the city's housing department had said years ago that it took one billion dollars to house 7,000 to 10,000 people.
"That sounds about right to me. I'm not a mathematician or an economist, but a billion dollars is nothing in Silicon Valley, when you have hundreds of billions of dollars. So you've got the corporations up the street, you've got a lot of right-thinking people in this valley. Silicon Valley prides itself on being progressive, but the facts remain that 7,600 people live on the streets here," Wagers said.
He concluded that the current strategies, which include shelters, clearly aren't working and that the homeless continue to be criminalized. The jungle is said to have had somewhere between 200 and 300 residents at its peak.
"Now there are little encampments everywhere and they're still being bulldozed, literally into the ground. People are out here literally in fourth-world conditions. You know, this is Silicon Valley and when the media would go down into the Jungle they couldn't believe that people were living in such squalor. I hope the new mayor will take the mantle on this and create affordable housing."
Last Friday a homeless woman suffered minor injuries when she was accidently run over by a Caltrans truck that was clearing out one of those encampments.
