Silicon Valley’s homeless in search of new accommodation

Until very recently, "the Jungle" in San Jose was the largest encampment of homeless people in the United States. Today it lies empty, having been cleared by the authorities of the last of its residents on Thursday this week.

Located in Silicon Valley, an area made famous by companies such as Apple, Google, and Yahoo, the camp had become symbolic of income disparity and displacement in an area with the highest median rents in the country.

Almost 300 people called this place home, but last Monday residents of were told by police officers that they had 72 hours to leave.

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Grace Hilliard, who had lived in “The Jungle” for about 15 years before it wasw cleared out on Thursday by the San Jose city authorities. Photograph: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

“ATTENTION!!!”, read a yellow eviction notice, taped to the side of a makeshift tent on Wednesday. “The City of San Jose will be conducting a cleanup of illegal encampments in this area”. Most of the residents had left by then; 144 of them had been re-housed by the city and others had moved off to find a new place to sleep. Those who stayed behind huddled in their tents, while unrelenting rain battered their flimsy tarpaulins.

The following day, officials arrived with police officers and contractors dressed in bio-hazard protection gear to remove the makeshift homes and the accumulated human waste and detritus that remained after more than 15 years of settlement.

Nancy Ortega cried as she watched workers loading rubbish trucks. “It’s junk to everyone else”, she told reporter, “But to us, these are our homes.”

For 18 months, the city of San Jose has been conducting a $4 million (€3.2 million) outreach programme to find homes for all residents of the Jungle, but high rents and a rising demand for accommodation made this an impossible task. With bad credit ratings and the stigma of living rough, many homeless people struggle to find housing even with two-year rent vouchers supplied by the city.

Activists believe that San Jose officials are making a symbolic gesture in dismantling the Jungle, when over 4,700 people still live on the city’s streets and there are as many as 247 tent cities in the county.

“Right now there’s a lot of chaos, stress, tension. People here have nowhere to go, and they know that they’re going to be displaced,” said Robert Aguirre, an outspoken resident of the Jungle and an opponent of the city’s “cleanup” operation.

The day before the eviction it poured rain, and residents’ saturated belongings and refuse lay strewn over the whole area. At the camp’s entrance, piles of white bread rolls disintegrated on to a sodden mattress, and discarded toys, bedding and food packaging had all turned to filth in the deluge. A couple of squirrels and a rat braved the unusual weather to inspect the wet leftovers.

The Jungle was more of a shanty town than an encampment; a network of tents, tarpaulins, tunnels and even a treehouse, spread across 68 acres along a stream called Coyote Creek. On its last day of existence the place was so wretched that it is hard to believe that it could exist anywhere in the US, let alone in an area where talented people from around the world come to seek their fortune.

Last year, the population growth of Silicon Valley accelerated due to a 52 per cent increase in foreign immigration since 2012. It is because of, rather than in spite, of this influx of talent that housing is so hard to come by.

“Every day, a Yahoo bus goes by. I’ve been in San Jose for about 40 years. The majority of people in the Jungle are from San Jose. They were born here, they were raised here, they saw what this land was like before it became this”, Aguirre, himself a former tech worker, said.

Although many of the people who made their homes among the trees of the Jungle are afflicted with mental illness and addiction, many of them had also worked regularly. However, in Silicon Valley a minimum wage job will not earn you a roof over your head.

The city had been under pressure to speed up the closure of the Jungle from the regional water board, which claimed that the “direct discharge of human waste into Coyote Creek has threatened the state controlled waterway”. This cut short the “housing first” approach that city officials had intended to implement.

The encampment had also been overlooked by law enforcement and increased violence had gone un-policed. While some residents enjoyed the lack of scrutiny, many had come to live in fear and a woman was recently killed there. On Wednesday, one of the few residents seen hurrying through the rain carried a large dagger in his holster.

“A lot of us are scared and confused. We don’t know where to go. We don’t know what to do” one woman said, as she watched her former neighbours drag their possessions through the mud and off down the street, through rush-hour, morning traffic.