The city of San Jose, CA is trying to address the 6,000 unhoused people on its streets with a program called “Homeward Bound.” The City Council has allocated $200,000 for the program which aims to get people off the streets by buying them a bus or train ticket to get back home to their families. It’s a so-called “reunification” strategy that San Francisco has also used to do something about its unhoused residents, and is partially driven by the fact that there are physically not enough spaces in shelters to house everyone.
But what happens after they return “home”? Do the lack of stable jobs and affordable housing suddenly improve? Do the families receiving the unhoused get access to health care and recovery services to help support them? The city’s Mayor Mahan says he’s open to paying for other costs but only on a case-by-case basis. The majority of the budget is going towards paying for the administrative staff and the bus and train tickets themselves. This solution ignores the real factors that led to people living on the streets to begin with, such as San Jose being one of the 10 most “impossibly unaffordable” cities in the world.
Another strategy that the San Jose mayor has proposed involves penalizing unhoused people who refuse to be moved into temporary housing provided by the city. This would involve arresting those who have declined to stay in shelters three times within an 18 month period. But neither criminalizing the unhoused, nor shipping them off, will solve the crisis of homelessness.
