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Homeless encampment grows on Apple property in Silicon Valley
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Leroy N. Soetoro
Aug 21, 2021, 4:56:48 PM8/21/21
to
https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/08/10/homeless-encampment-grows-on-apple-
property-in-silicon-valley/
Apple promised to help quell the Bay Area’s homelessness crisis with a
series of big-ticket investments, but the tech giant soon may have to get
more directly involved — addressing a problem that has spread to the
company’s front door.
A large homeless encampment is growing on the site Apple earmarked for its
North San Jose campus, two years after Apple made waves with a $2.5
billion pledge to combat the Bay Area’s affordable housing and
homelessness crisis.
What started as a few RVs parked on the side of Component Drive has grown
over the past year into a sprawling camp of dozens of people, a maze of
broken-down vehicles and a massive amount of trash scattered across the
vacant, Apple-owned property. People with nowhere else to go live there in
tents, RVs and wooden structures they built themselves. At least two
children call the camp home.
Apple is trying to figure out what to do, but it’s a tough situation.
Clearing the camp likely will be difficult both logistically — it’s more
challenging to remove structures and vehicles that don’t run than tents —
and ethically — there are few places for the displaced residents to go.
“There are approximately 30-35 unhoused people living in the area with an
estimated 200 tons of hazardous trash and debris on the private property,
making this a complicated and challenging situation,” Daniel Lazo,
spokesman for the city of San Jose’s department of Parks, Recreation and
Neighborhood Services, wrote in an email. “There are also an estimated 65-
75 operable and inoperable vehicles at the site.”
Residents of the camp say there may be as many as 75 people living there.
Apple is “in talks with the city on a solution,” company spokeswoman Chloe
Sanchez Sweet wrote in an email, without providing additional details.
The number of people living without homes in the region has grown
dramatically in recent years — it’s estimated there are about 30,000
homeless people in the five-county Bay Area. The crisis has become even
more noticeable during the COVID-19 pandemic, as cities cut back on
clearing encampments, allowing unhoused people to shelter in place and
camps to grow and become more entrenched.
As the problem intensifies, local tech companies — some of the region’s
main generators of jobs and wealth — have felt mounting pressure to
intervene. Google and Facebook each pledged $1 billion to fight the
housing shortage and homelessness in 2019, and Apple followed by
committing $2.5 billion.
The vacant land off Component Drive figured into Apple’s $2.5 billion
commitment. Apple originally bought the land in a push to acquire real
estate in North San Jose for a new tech campus, but so far, the company
hasn’t done much to develop it. In 2019, the tech company promised to make
$300 million of land it owns in San Jose available for new affordable
housing — including a portion of the Component Drive property.
But it’s unclear when anything might be built.
For Tigs Smith, who has been living on Apple’s land for the past year, the
tech company’s promises mean little when they do nothing to help her or
her neighbors. Smith, a 40-year-old construction worker, lives in a tiny,
one-room house she built herself on the Component Drive property — where
she landed after her ex-boyfriend kicked her out of the home they shared.
She recently moved her 16-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son into the
tiny home with her.
Now, Smith hopes Apple will do something to help.
“All I need is a place to put me and my kids at night,” she said. “All I
need is that one little push in the right direction.”
Apple already has committed $50 million over five years to help San Jose-
based Destination: Home reduce and prevent homelessness. So far the
organization has used some of that money — plus $50 million from Cisco —
to finance nearly 2,000 new units of housing for people who are homeless
or at risk of becoming homeless.
That money also has funded a new online portal, set to launch next spring,
that will help unhoused people track the status of their requests for
housing help. And it helped the county expand its homelessness prevention
system to serve 1,500 households per year, according to Destination: Home.
But those efforts won’t necessarily help Smith and her neighbors.
Richard Scott, a retired Santa Clara County homeless outreach worker who
now volunteers his services to unhoused communities, hopes Apple creates a
sanctioned encampment on the Component Drive land.
“My bet is that Apple will not want to be the private company that chases
the homeless out,” he said.
Meanwhile, San Jose is gearing up to clear a much larger camp at West
Hedding and Spring streets, near the San Jose airport. That clean-up,
which comes at the behest of the Federal Aviation Administration, could
displace more than 200 people — some of whom might move to the Apple camp
or other nearby camps.
In an attempt to shelter some of those people, city officials have
proposed creating a new modular interim housing site near the San Jose
Police Department headquarters on West Mission Street. The City Council is
set to consider the proposal next month.
Relocating people living in the Apple camp “will understandably create
stress for many residents,” Lazo wrote. “It is important to City staff
that the process be handled with compassion and respect for the people
displaced.”
--
"LOCKDOWN", left-wing COVID fearmongering. 95% of COVID infections
recover with no after effects.
No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.
Donald J. Trump, cheated out of a second term by fraudulent "mail-in"
ballots. Report voter fraud: sf.n...@mail.house.gov
Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.
Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.
property-in-silicon-valley/
Apple promised to help quell the Bay Area’s homelessness crisis with a
series of big-ticket investments, but the tech giant soon may have to get
more directly involved — addressing a problem that has spread to the
company’s front door.
A large homeless encampment is growing on the site Apple earmarked for its
North San Jose campus, two years after Apple made waves with a $2.5
billion pledge to combat the Bay Area’s affordable housing and
homelessness crisis.
What started as a few RVs parked on the side of Component Drive has grown
over the past year into a sprawling camp of dozens of people, a maze of
broken-down vehicles and a massive amount of trash scattered across the
vacant, Apple-owned property. People with nowhere else to go live there in
tents, RVs and wooden structures they built themselves. At least two
children call the camp home.
Apple is trying to figure out what to do, but it’s a tough situation.
Clearing the camp likely will be difficult both logistically — it’s more
challenging to remove structures and vehicles that don’t run than tents —
and ethically — there are few places for the displaced residents to go.
“There are approximately 30-35 unhoused people living in the area with an
estimated 200 tons of hazardous trash and debris on the private property,
making this a complicated and challenging situation,” Daniel Lazo,
spokesman for the city of San Jose’s department of Parks, Recreation and
Neighborhood Services, wrote in an email. “There are also an estimated 65-
75 operable and inoperable vehicles at the site.”
Residents of the camp say there may be as many as 75 people living there.
Apple is “in talks with the city on a solution,” company spokeswoman Chloe
Sanchez Sweet wrote in an email, without providing additional details.
The number of people living without homes in the region has grown
dramatically in recent years — it’s estimated there are about 30,000
homeless people in the five-county Bay Area. The crisis has become even
more noticeable during the COVID-19 pandemic, as cities cut back on
clearing encampments, allowing unhoused people to shelter in place and
camps to grow and become more entrenched.
As the problem intensifies, local tech companies — some of the region’s
main generators of jobs and wealth — have felt mounting pressure to
intervene. Google and Facebook each pledged $1 billion to fight the
housing shortage and homelessness in 2019, and Apple followed by
committing $2.5 billion.
The vacant land off Component Drive figured into Apple’s $2.5 billion
commitment. Apple originally bought the land in a push to acquire real
estate in North San Jose for a new tech campus, but so far, the company
hasn’t done much to develop it. In 2019, the tech company promised to make
$300 million of land it owns in San Jose available for new affordable
housing — including a portion of the Component Drive property.
But it’s unclear when anything might be built.
For Tigs Smith, who has been living on Apple’s land for the past year, the
tech company’s promises mean little when they do nothing to help her or
her neighbors. Smith, a 40-year-old construction worker, lives in a tiny,
one-room house she built herself on the Component Drive property — where
she landed after her ex-boyfriend kicked her out of the home they shared.
She recently moved her 16-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son into the
tiny home with her.
Now, Smith hopes Apple will do something to help.
“All I need is a place to put me and my kids at night,” she said. “All I
need is that one little push in the right direction.”
Apple already has committed $50 million over five years to help San Jose-
based Destination: Home reduce and prevent homelessness. So far the
organization has used some of that money — plus $50 million from Cisco —
to finance nearly 2,000 new units of housing for people who are homeless
or at risk of becoming homeless.
That money also has funded a new online portal, set to launch next spring,
that will help unhoused people track the status of their requests for
housing help. And it helped the county expand its homelessness prevention
system to serve 1,500 households per year, according to Destination: Home.
But those efforts won’t necessarily help Smith and her neighbors.
Richard Scott, a retired Santa Clara County homeless outreach worker who
now volunteers his services to unhoused communities, hopes Apple creates a
sanctioned encampment on the Component Drive land.
“My bet is that Apple will not want to be the private company that chases
the homeless out,” he said.
Meanwhile, San Jose is gearing up to clear a much larger camp at West
Hedding and Spring streets, near the San Jose airport. That clean-up,
which comes at the behest of the Federal Aviation Administration, could
displace more than 200 people — some of whom might move to the Apple camp
or other nearby camps.
In an attempt to shelter some of those people, city officials have
proposed creating a new modular interim housing site near the San Jose
Police Department headquarters on West Mission Street. The City Council is
set to consider the proposal next month.
Relocating people living in the Apple camp “will understandably create
stress for many residents,” Lazo wrote. “It is important to City staff
that the process be handled with compassion and respect for the people
displaced.”
--
"LOCKDOWN", left-wing COVID fearmongering. 95% of COVID infections
recover with no after effects.
No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.
Donald J. Trump, cheated out of a second term by fraudulent "mail-in"
ballots. Report voter fraud: sf.n...@mail.house.gov
Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.
Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.
sms
Aug 21, 2021, 6:27:13 PM8/21/21
to
On 8/21/2021 1:56 PM, Leroy N. Soetoro wrote:
> https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/08/10/homeless-encampment-grows-on-apple-
> property-in-silicon-valley/
<snip>
> Apple already has committed $50 million over five years to help San Jose-
> based Destination: Home reduce and prevent homelessness. So far the
> organization has used some of that money — plus $50 million from Cisco —
> to finance nearly 2,000 new units of housing for people who are homeless
> or at risk of becoming homeless.
The crux of the problem is that $100 million pays for the construction
of only about 200 units of housing in this area, if you're lucky. The
State stopped allowing cities to divert sales tax revenue to fund
affordable housing when former Governor Jerry Brown got rid of
Redevelopment Agencies. Trump's enormous corporate tax cuts meant huge
decreases in revenue to the federal government that now lacks the money
to help fund affordable housing.
In Apple's home city, Cupertino, an apartment building with 18
affordable studio apartments, that was completed a few years ago, cost
about $780,000 per unit. This is for 350 square foot studios! The
"one-percent rule" would mean a market rent of $7800 per month, but
since this is subsidized housing, for VLI (very low income) residents,
the rent is much lower than that, around $1500 per month. A bunch of
different entities contributed money, including the City, the County,
and private donors
<https://www.sccgov.org/sites/opa/newsroom/Pages/ribbon-cutting-veranda-cupertino.aspx>.
Cupertino also approved a new project with a whopping 1,201 affordable
units and 1,201 market-rate units, but State Law allowed the developer
to make the affordable units smaller, and lower-quality, than the
market-rate units, so small that none of the 1,201 affordable units are
suitable for families with children. That project has not yet broken
ground, and it's not certain whether or not it will move forward.
Meanwhile, there is a severe glut of market-rate rental apartments with
property owners offering big incentives to get people to sign a lease:
“Vacancy is through the roof,” said Sid Lakireddy, president of the
California Rental Housing Association. “The market’s beaten up.”
<https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2021/01/bay-area-renters-market-luxury/>.
The pandemic has further contributed to the housing glut as middle class
workers abandon expensive rental apartments, buy houses in outlying
areas, and remote-work all or most of the time. Prices for new homes
have skyrocketed at the same time rents have plummeted. How about this
house that sold for $1 million
<https://news.yahoo.com/burned-home-california-still-sells-191510692.html>?
It's not uncommon for owners of large apartment complexes to offer
several months of free rent, or multi-thousand dollar gift cards to
entice new tenants. Meanwhile, new rental housing projects are on hold
because of the housing glut--no big developer wants to build luxury
market-rate housing and flood the market and drive down rents even
further. When that market-rate housing doesn't get built, the affordable
housing that is required to be part of those new developments also
doesn't get built (or the in-lieu affordable housing fees don't get
paid). In San Jose, depending on location, a 1200 square foot
market-rate apartment would require an affordable housing in-lieu fee of
over $50,000 if the property owner didn't want to include 15% affordable
units in the project.
It's sad and ironic that we have a severe homelessness problem, a severe
shortage of affordable housing, and an enormous glut of empty
market-rate apartments, all at the same time. There are over 1.2 million
vacant housing units in California, and less than 200,000 homeless
individuals.
What Denver did was clever, but a little upsetting, propping up
market-rate rents by paying the difference between what a low-income
person could pay, and the inflated market-rate rent for empty rental
units that the property owner couldn't rent at the rents they were
asking
<https://www.denverpost.com/2018/07/10/denver-rent-buy-down-program-green-light/>.
The concern expressed is that this perpetuates inflated market-rate
rents since the property owners have no incentive to lower rents to fill
empty units. But at least it quickly gets people off the streets.
> https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/08/10/homeless-encampment-grows-on-apple-
> property-in-silicon-valley/
<snip>
> Apple already has committed $50 million over five years to help San Jose-
> based Destination: Home reduce and prevent homelessness. So far the
> organization has used some of that money — plus $50 million from Cisco —
> to finance nearly 2,000 new units of housing for people who are homeless
> or at risk of becoming homeless.
of only about 200 units of housing in this area, if you're lucky. The
State stopped allowing cities to divert sales tax revenue to fund
affordable housing when former Governor Jerry Brown got rid of
Redevelopment Agencies. Trump's enormous corporate tax cuts meant huge
decreases in revenue to the federal government that now lacks the money
to help fund affordable housing.
In Apple's home city, Cupertino, an apartment building with 18
affordable studio apartments, that was completed a few years ago, cost
about $780,000 per unit. This is for 350 square foot studios! The
"one-percent rule" would mean a market rent of $7800 per month, but
since this is subsidized housing, for VLI (very low income) residents,
the rent is much lower than that, around $1500 per month. A bunch of
different entities contributed money, including the City, the County,
and private donors
<https://www.sccgov.org/sites/opa/newsroom/Pages/ribbon-cutting-veranda-cupertino.aspx>.
Cupertino also approved a new project with a whopping 1,201 affordable
units and 1,201 market-rate units, but State Law allowed the developer
to make the affordable units smaller, and lower-quality, than the
market-rate units, so small that none of the 1,201 affordable units are
suitable for families with children. That project has not yet broken
ground, and it's not certain whether or not it will move forward.
Meanwhile, there is a severe glut of market-rate rental apartments with
property owners offering big incentives to get people to sign a lease:
“Vacancy is through the roof,” said Sid Lakireddy, president of the
California Rental Housing Association. “The market’s beaten up.”
<https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2021/01/bay-area-renters-market-luxury/>.
The pandemic has further contributed to the housing glut as middle class
workers abandon expensive rental apartments, buy houses in outlying
areas, and remote-work all or most of the time. Prices for new homes
have skyrocketed at the same time rents have plummeted. How about this
house that sold for $1 million
<https://news.yahoo.com/burned-home-california-still-sells-191510692.html>?
It's not uncommon for owners of large apartment complexes to offer
several months of free rent, or multi-thousand dollar gift cards to
entice new tenants. Meanwhile, new rental housing projects are on hold
because of the housing glut--no big developer wants to build luxury
market-rate housing and flood the market and drive down rents even
further. When that market-rate housing doesn't get built, the affordable
housing that is required to be part of those new developments also
doesn't get built (or the in-lieu affordable housing fees don't get
paid). In San Jose, depending on location, a 1200 square foot
market-rate apartment would require an affordable housing in-lieu fee of
over $50,000 if the property owner didn't want to include 15% affordable
units in the project.
It's sad and ironic that we have a severe homelessness problem, a severe
shortage of affordable housing, and an enormous glut of empty
market-rate apartments, all at the same time. There are over 1.2 million
vacant housing units in California, and less than 200,000 homeless
individuals.
What Denver did was clever, but a little upsetting, propping up
market-rate rents by paying the difference between what a low-income
person could pay, and the inflated market-rate rent for empty rental
units that the property owner couldn't rent at the rents they were
asking
<https://www.denverpost.com/2018/07/10/denver-rent-buy-down-program-green-light/>.
The concern expressed is that this perpetuates inflated market-rate
rents since the property owners have no incentive to lower rents to fill
empty units. But at least it quickly gets people off the streets.
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