Top image: The Jungle encampment, San Jose, 2014. Photo: Jon Evans / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

This spring, San Jose dismantled “the Jungle,” its last large unsanctioned homeless encampment, where about 100 people had lived along Coyote Creek near Story Road, across from Happy Hollow Park & Zoo. City officials promised shelter to everyone who lived there. Months later, the question is what happened to the people who say the promise skipped them, and whether the city’s shelter system has room for them before winter.

The second sweep

According to San José Spotlight, many former Jungle residents moved down the creek to trails behind the Interstate 280 overpass near Olinder Park, on Caltrans land. Caltrans planned to begin clearing that area, near McLaughlin Avenue and Woodborough Place, the week of Oct. 12 and continue through the end of October.

The size of the camp depends on who is counting. Emma Hartung, an organizer with Showing Up for Racial Justice, estimated that the Jungle sweep left about 40 people without shelter, and said she counted 45 people near Olinder Park one week and 36 the next. A Caltrans spokesperson put the number at 20.

“I felt deceived,” one resident, identified only as Carlos, told the Spotlight through a translator. “We weren’t taken into account.”

The city’s housing department said it could not comment on individual service histories. Spokesperson Sarah Fields told the Spotlight that the city’s practice before large encampment abatements “is to provide significant outreach and engagement prior to the start of the abatement,” as it did at Coyote Meadows. Caltrans said it notifies service providers and local governments before removals so they can offer shelter options.

The disagreement goes to the heart of San Jose’s policy. Mayor Matt Mahan has argued that people who repeatedly refuse shelter should face citations and arrest, the Spotlight reported. Assemblymember Ash Kalra, whose district covers East San Jose, disputes the premise. “To suggest that somehow these folks have rejected housing is simply not true,” he said, adding that sweeping people from a place of relative stability without housing them “is cruel.”

Some refusals are more complicated than they look. Jobino Medina Sarabia, 77, told the Spotlight he was offered a spot at a tiny-home village in North San Jose but turned it down because it was far from his doctor and the clinic he depends on in East San Jose. He uses a walker, and he is on the housing waitlist.

A flagship shelter changes course

The city’s interim housing inventory is itself in motion. This month, the City Council unanimously authorized negotiations with Episcopal Community Services of San Francisco to take over the Arena Hotel, a 90-room motel shelter on The Alameda, and pursue converting it into mixed-income housing, Hoodline reported, citing The Mercury News. City officials found the previous development team’s proposals financially infeasible. The project was funded with a $25.2 million state Homekey grant and $20.8 million from the city’s Measure E real estate transfer tax, and the city is seeking state approval to restructure the Homekey agreement and move required extremely low-income units elsewhere. Officials have not yet said where current residents will go once renovation begins.

Racing the weather

The timing is pointed. As the city prepares for a strong El Niño winter, its Oct. 15 storm-readiness release says teams will warn unsheltered residents about coming storms and connect them with temporary housing through the Here4You hotline. Creekside camps are among the most exposed places in the city; in February 2024, heavy rain flooded encampments along the Guadalupe River and forced evacuations, according to San José Spotlight.

The long view

San Jose has spent several years trying to prove that a big city can end large street encampments by building interim housing quickly and then enforcing against camping. Clearing the Jungle was a visible milestone. The aftermath shows the strategy’s weak points: counts that differ by a factor of two, shelter placements that work on paper but not for an elderly man with a walker, and a shelter portfolio whose financing can unravel and force a project to be redesigned.

The city’s own approach is evolving from emergency response to asset management, deciding which motels and villages to keep, convert or close. That shift may be necessary. Its success will be measured less by how many encampments are cleared than by whether the system has a bed, in the right place, for the person who is left when the bulldozers leave.

Sources: San José Spotlight (Oct. 10 and Oct. 14, 2026); Hoodline, citing The Mercury News (Oct. 7, 2026); City of San Jose news release (Oct. 15, 2026).