Housing, Bikes, and Measure E: A History

Jun 1

You may have caught wind of a debate currently raging about Measure E in San Jose. The debate is nuanced, a fight over continuing to allocate funding towards affordable housing or to shift that money to temporary housing. What does this have to do with bikes? I’m glad you asked. I’ve been wanting to tell this story for a while and it’s a long one so if you’re game and have time for a deep dive into homelessness policy and history, read on.

First, many of you know that SVBC is one of a few bike coalitions that understands the link between bikes and land use/housing.

We know that if we build cities so that destinations are within walking and biking distance, people are way more likely to walk and bike. That’s why we don’t just care about bike plans but we care about general plans and larger scale plans like North 40 in Los Gatos and Sequoia Station in Redwood City.
We also know that you, our wonderful supporters, do not like cars on our coveted bike trails. And, you don’t like the trash that is associated with our brethren who live adjacent to the trails and creeks. They, like many of your kids currently still living at home, can’t afford a house of their own, a house that comes complete with garbage collection services.

This is why we, as an organization, are housing advocates. So, what’s the story and how did we get to a point where housing is so unaffordable that we have to worry about cars on bike paths?

During Covid, homeless people became more and more visible, in part due to CDC recommendations to not disrupt existing encampments. The result has been a growing chorus of voices who have concluded that our current system is failing because they SEE more homeless people.

How we got here

This conclusion that the system is failing is what I want to talk about. To do so, I’m going to rewind the clock to the year 2000, when I first started working for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, (SVLG), overseeing their policy work related to transportation, housing and land use.

SVLG is a powerful organization such that if you wanted to pass a tax or policy, it was wise to get their blessing. One of the issues most concerning to the business leaders of SVLG was and is housing as an impediment to recruiting and retaining talent. So, they hired me to push cities to build more housing, a role that afforded me a front row seat to many significant policy decisions that were being made in Silicon Valley.

From the free-market perspective of the business community, the housing crisis was a simple supply and demand problem. Build more housing, in particular housing that is more dense, like condos and apartments, to create the lower rungs on the equity-building ladder. SVLG was very focused on housing for workers and while there were voices on the margins trying to get attention on homeless people issues, for the most part, the policy focus of the Valley’s policy-makers, driven by the Leadership Group’s lobbying, was centered on the construction of housing that was attainable to folks making between 50 to 120 percent of the area median income (AMI). Housing affordable to those making below 50% of AMI was not a priority.

Of note is that because of the severity of the housing crisis in the lead up to 2000 the Leadership Group considered a voter approved revenue raising measure. They polled voters and concluded it would not pass. So instead they, under the leadership of Carl Guardino, helped to form the Housing Trust of Santa Clara County (now renamed after Silicon Valley), an effort to raise a $20 million fund from the public and private sector that would be distributed in equal parts for affordable rental housing, first-time homebuyer loans, and housing for homeless people.

Overall, however, the prevailing housing strategy was mainly focused on a market-based supply-side solution, banking on the fact that if we built enough housing, housing would become affordable. That has never happened because demand has always outpaced supply.

Strategies for the ‘hardest to house’ gain steam

All the while, there were voices on the margins, like Phyllis Ward, a 5 foot tall 80-year old force for good who kept insisting that we needed to focus on housing for people with zero income. We needed a strategy for the hardest to reach and the hardest to house.

In 2011/12, those voices began to gain steam and after a couple blue ribbon task forces started by then Supervisors Jim Beall and Don Gage along with the CEO of the Housing Trust, Chris Block, a group of folks pulled together by the then San Jose Housing Director, Leslye Corsiglia, decided to start an organization focused on housing for homeless people. Jen Loving was recruited to lead and I served on the Advisory Board early on.

Destination Home (DH) was formed and in its fledgling state, Jen and a few others were lonely voices beating the drum for housing for homeless individuals. They oversaw the development of the County’s first plan to end homelessness, a plan steeped in research and data on the best practices for addressing homelessness, particularly a concept called housing first.

Housing first is a national model that recognizes that if you put someone in housing and include “wrap around services” for whatever they might need whether it be job training, therapy, financial education etc, that we’ll be better able to help get folks off the streets permanently. That plan was an important step in building the momentum to take the need to house homeless individuals seriously. Then DH and their partners launched Housing 1000, a community wide effort to get 1,000 chronically homeless people off the streets.

In 2015, County Supervisor Cindy Chavez came to the Leadership Group to pitch an idea. She knew we needed money to end homelessness and that meant we needed to convince the voters to pass a local housing bond dedicated to the most vulnerable. Remember I said that if you want to do anything of significance in the funding and policy world, you need to get the blessing of SVLG? She asked and they balked. Coincidentally, now Mayor Mahan was on the Board of SVLG at the time.

For most people, that would have been the end of the story. But Supervisor Chavez had concluded that this issue was too important so she decided to move forward without the blessing of the powerful business community. A ballot measure was qualified and the voters said yes to Measure A, an affordable housing bond for Santa Clara County.

Phew! Yay! Finally we had a funding stream to make a dent in housing the unhoused and we had the attention and political will of policy-makers.

The debate over use of Measure E dollars

Destination Home then got to work raising private funding to augment the Measure A bond. Cisco was the first to step up making a $50 million dollar philanthropic investment in the Plan followed by $50M from Apple. And in 2020, San Jose passed Measure E. The combination of all of these new funding streams created the long desired support for this County-wide initiative to prioritize our most vulnerable community members. In fact, 6 years later more than 20,000 people have moved from our streets into permanent housing with another 23,000 people getting the support needed to stay in their homes, and 50 NEW projects for lowest income residents in our community are in various stages of being open, built and/or funded.

So when people today say that the system has failed, keep all this in mind. The actual commitment to focus on ending versus managing homelessness has really only been underway for less than a decade. Plus we had to navigate a national pandemic where the deepest effects of COVID were felt by the lowest income households of color, threatening to thrust many into deeper housing instability. We have lots of people living on the streets for reasons that have more to do with the people in power failing to recognize that homelessness should have been a priority. So, while the system does indeed have many flaws, the system hasn’t failed. It hasn’t even been given a chance.

Today as a bicyclist, you see folks on the trails living in tents. Dogs are offleash, perhaps leading you to a new PR on Strava, (the silver lining of being chased by a dog?) Trash and debris lead to flats. And importantly, we see fellow community members, many of whom rely on bikes for transportation, suffering, unable to afford housing.

So, how do we as bike advocates help address housing issues and what is the current debate about Measure E?

Ultimately, this comes down to money and time. People who have long been at this, the people in the above story, had San Jose’s Measure E in mind as a source of funding for permanent affordable housing. Today, the current mayor wants to redirect that funding to temporary housing because folks need housing now and he sees interim shelter as taking less time and less money to get off the ground. Both permanent and temporary housing are needed but the midstream change in focus from permanent housing to temporary interventions is a strategy shift not fully embraced by the unhoused or subject matter experts.

Other elements at play

Before I wrap this up and provide some direction on how people like us can get involved, I want to mention that there are a lot of parts to the story that I am glossing over in an effort to keep this less of a tome. Those elements include:

The cost of housing between permanent and interim shelter, both the up front costs as well as ongoing operating costs
The efficient use of land for permanent, dense housing compared to temporary shelter housing
The time it takes to build different types of housing
What the data actually says about what types of strategies work
Issues related to the fact that shelter is not housing, folks have no leases, no legal recourse, no property rights

These are all issues that take more time to delve into and I encourage you to learn on your own.

How you can help

So, what can you do? First, next time housing is proposed near you, don your bike helmet, show up at the community meeting and say yes, we need to build more housing. Community opposition is one of the reasons these new communities take so long to build and end up costing so much. It’s a drag on the process and time is money, especially when heights are reduced and project design modifications are made based on unfounded fears of “those” people.

Second, support the direction of the professional people who do this for a living as well as the wisdom of those who are unhoused. Destination Home and SV@Home are organizations that are leading the charge on housing issues.* Subscribe to their newsletters, get up on the issues, and heed their calls to action. These conversations are happening now in the context of San Jose’s budget and the daily press conferences by those attempting to sway public opinion oversimplify complex policy issues.

Finally, if and when there is another measure to fund affordable housing, support it. We have immense wealth in this Valley and we should be pulling together and pedaling in the same direction to make sure our most vulnerable are cared for.

*Disclosure: The author served on the Board of Housing Trust for over a decade and was a co-founder of SV@Home