Liccardo lays out pragmatic, innovative strategies for area homelessness; local housing advocates squawk

In his annual State of the City address, SJ Mayor Sam Liccardo sounded like a clear-eyed CEO as he outlined changes to the city's homelessness problem by acknowledging past mistakes and pivoting to more effective solutions. Liccardo advocated a move away from the expensive and slow Permanent Housing First strategies favored by local housing nonprofits, and towards a faster, cheaper, transitional housing model which is being implemented successfully by cutting-edge cities. Local housing advocates, predictably, decried the mayor's direction. Below are excerpts from Liccardo's speech and comments by Jennifer Loving of Destination Home and Edward Ring of the California Policy Center.

From a transcript of Liccardo's speech as published by SJ Spotlight:

[Our failure regarding homelessness is] the failure of decisions predicated on the belief that if we just keep doing the same things the same ways, eventually progress would come, contrary to the palpable evidence on our streets. In the Silicon Valley spirit of failing forward, we embrace the lessons of our failure and pivot toward better solutions. Here are a few.

First, we’ve learned that we need more immediate solutions, rather than merely waiting for permanent supportive housing to get built to address this crisis. Measure A’s passage in 2016 has been helpful, but it gave too many false hope that it would solve homelessness.

In reality, the first apartment complex funded with that 2016 measure didn’t open its doors in San José until 2020. At a cost of more than $750,000 per unit, conventional approaches to building housing will not stretch public resources to address anything more than a small fraction of the need. This crisis demands faster, cheaper, and more nimble solutions while we build permanent housing.

When the pandemic first hit, I convened our city team to use our emergency authority to pilot a different approach, what I call Quick-Build apartment communities, using prefabricated modular units on public land. We built three such projects in the first year alone, not in years but in months, and not at $800,000 per apartment, but at $110,000 per apartment. We have two more planned under construction, and we’ll succeed due to the incredible generosity of Peter and Susanna Pau and John and Sue Sobrato, who have committed nearly $15 million to spur our efforts, as well as partners like Destination: Home and AllHome. We’re also accelerating a concept that we first piloted in 2016, buying motels to house our homeless, which has enabled us to move hundreds of unhoused through motels into permanent housing.

The state of California has since embraced this model, and we now have funding from Governor Newsom’s Homekey initiative to expand motel conversions. Now, we need to embrace what we’ve learned and scale the impact. I’ve proposed that we get 1,000 Quick-Build apartments under construction or completed by the end of next year and convert 300 more motel rooms by that time. Doing so will get more people off the street faster and more cost-effectively than we could before.

Jennifer Loving, recently of Destination: Home, as quoted in the Merc:

Jennifer Loving called Liccardo’s comparison of modular units to permanent housing a “mistake.”

“These modular units provide a better version of shelter and should be embraced, but people aren’t going to live in a 6 by 6 room on the side of a freeway off-ramp forever,” Loving said. “These small modular rooms shouldn’t be replacing permanent homes. We need to do both.”

Edward Ring of the California Policy Institute says that Loving's insistence on building $400k+/unit housing is financially unsustainable and ethically dubious: 

In Los Angeles today, temporary shelter (designed to last three years) is being constructed at a cost of just over $50,000 per bed, and “permanent supportive housing” units are being constructed for more than $400,000 each on average. These costs are absurd. Designing solutions that cost less, but offer shelter to 100 percent of the homeless, is vastly preferable to solutions that cost so much that only a fraction of the homeless get assistance.

Low-cost creative solutions exist. Off-the-shelf tents, sheds, prefab “tiny homes,” and prefab homes made from shipping containers are all less costly options. Relocating the homeless to repurposed industrial or retail sites that are already built out and not on premium real estate would cut costs.

More from Ring on sustainable housing solutions can be found here.

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Photo by Wikimedia Commons.