“I think about it like this: When a ship is sinking, you don’t start building a brand-new ship — first you get the passengers into lifeboats. People are drowning outside every day — in addiction, in hopelessness, in unsafe conditions. Shelter is the lifeboat that will save them today.”
—San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan
It’s fair to say that San Jose is on a roll. The capital of Silicon Valley was recently named the safest large city in America, its police department has a 100 percent homicide clearance rate, and Matt Mahan is considered by many political observers, including me, to be the best mayor in the Bay Area. Despite its large population, San Jose functions better than other nearby cities, including the crown jewel San Francisco, where the rampant public drug use and homelessness continue to tarnish its shine.
On an unusually cool summer morning, Mayor Mahan is walking through one of San Jose’s newest interim housing sites. Dressed in a pair of dark blue jeans, a white button-down shirt, and a navy sport coat, he stops and leans over a metal trough full of flowers planted by residents. “Yarrow,” he says with a smile. Mahan, along with Elizabeth Funk, founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based nonprofit DignityMoves, are taking me on a tour of the Via del Oro Interim Supportive Housing Community, which offers 135 private rooms and comprehensive on-site services for up to 150 individuals transitioning out of homelessness.
Located at the corner of Via del Oro and San Ignacio in South San Jose, Via del Oro opened in April. DignityMoves built the homes on land owned by local philanthropist John A. Sobrato, who will lease the property to the city for $1 a year for the next decade. Rooms are each appointed with a bed and a nightstand, and eight of the rooms are ADA-compliant. The village has shared bathrooms and kitchen space. Nonprofit HomeFirst is providing case management and three daily meals. The grounds are simple, efficient, and clean, with community seating under an awning and a tidy dog park (pets are allowed, and HomeFirst makes sure they’re taken care of, too). The project cost $17.2 million to build on the 2.5-acre site and will require $2.7 million a year to operate (around $18,000 per bed).
“A year ago, this was an empty field,” Mahan says. “We have to keep innovating to make sure that every public dollar goes further and has more impact. There is a lot of underutilized private land, not just here in San Jose, but all over the state.”
San Jose has a goal of reaching “functional zero” of unsheltered homelessness (meaning more people are being housed than falling into homelessness) by focusing not on cost and time prohibitive “Permanent Supportive Housing” — the unrealistic goal of cities like San Francisco — but on Temporary Supportive Housing, which moves people indoors quickly and provides the necessary tools so they can lift themselves out of homelessness. System wide, the average stay in San Jose’s interim housing programs is under nine months, with some longer and some shorter depending on the individual.
Via del Oro is the city’s fourth temporary housing site to open in the past eight months, adding an additional 524 new beds or spaces: Pacific Motor Inn opened last August, the Branham Lane modular site opened in February, and the Berryessa safe parking site opened in May, with more sites coming, including five hotel-to-shelter conversions. San Jose plans to add 1,400 additional beds or spaces this year, but there are about 5,500 homeless people living on the streets. While he knows there’s still much work to do, Mahan is proud of his city’s progress. “This year’s point-in-time homeless count shows that the number of unsheltered residents in San Jose has dropped by nearly 23 percent, from over 5,100 people living outdoors in 2019 to fewer than 4,000 in 2025.”
When people are living in interim housing communities, they are still technically considered homeless in the city’s official statistics. So, while the number of individuals experiencing homelessness in San Jose is roughly flat in recent years (around 6,500 people), the proportion who are living indoors has grown 160 percent, from just 980 people in 2019 to 2,544 today. In percentage terms, San Jose’s sheltered rate has climbed from just 16 percent of the total homeless population in 2019 to nearly 40 percent in 2025, meaning almost four in 10 homeless residents now live indoors, marking the highest sheltered rate San Jose has achieved in well over a decade.
San Jose’s sheltered rate has climbed from just 16 percent of the total homeless population in 2019 to nearly 40 percent in 2025, meaning almost four in 10 homeless residents now live indoors, marking the highest sheltered rate San Jose has achieved in well over a decade.
Along with helping people get off the streets, Mahan also wants to prevent them from falling back into homelessness. “We’re expanding job training to all of our interim housing sites, and we asked our city manager to broaden the San Jose Bridge Program to be available to anyone at these sites.” The Bridge is a successful program for homeless San Jose residents that provides employment, job training, assistance with long-term career goals, job placement, and support in securing permanent housing. The city is also implementing Homeward Bound to reunite those living on the streets with family who are willing and able to take them in.
Currently, San Jose’s interim housing system has a 95 percent average utilization rate, with over 70 percent of those in interim housing remaining off the streets and 40 percent graduating to permanent housing. According to San Jose’s dashboard, the utilization rate for all interim sites between July 1 to Sept. 15, 2025, was 97 percent. HomeFirst program manager Sabrina Shakur says at Via del Oro there are case managers on-site 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as well as an on-site mental health clinician. Along with their pets, residents can bring their possessions, live with their partners, and there are no curfews. That doesn’t mean there aren’t rules — people must be respectful, productive members of the community. On our visit, the village was buzzing with people having breakfast and getting ready for their day, which might include counseling for past traumas or addiction, job training or interviews, or working with staff on securing permanent housing.
San Jose also offers placement for different populations. For example, Evans Lane is for mothers and children while Salvation Army Emmanuel House provides a soup kitchen, overnight housing for men, a residency program of up to two years for those who have income and remain sober, and classes including financial literacy, Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, employment development, and bible study. The city also has two safe parking sites. “We can’t have unmanaged encampments,” Mahan says. “Our goal is within 30 days to have you in the broader interim system.”
The one population the city isn’t serving is the severely mentally ill, not because Mahan doesn’t want to, but because that responsibility lies with Santa Clara County, which doesn’t fund on-site interim housing. “For 90-plus percent what we are doing works, but for that smaller subset who need intensive treatment in a residential facility, that is handled at the county level,” Mahan explains. “San Jose needs help with case management from the county and financial assistance — they have expertise, which would free up operating expenses to house more people, and there are currently around 2,000 empty mental health beds.” Mahan stresses that San Jose won’t reach functional zero without help at the federal, state, and county levels. “We need them to do their jobs when it comes to providing adequate support to those on our streets who are unwilling or unable to accept the housing and shelter options we can offer. Only our state and county can legally build and operate the mental health and addiction treatment facilities we need to help those hardest-to-reach cases. Even if we were legally able to do it, putting them in our interim housing sites wouldn’t work for them, and it would be disruptive to the larger population these sites do work for.”
The difference in San Jose and San Francisco
This year, DignityMoves was named a World Changing Ideas Awardee by Fast Company in the Social Equity and Accessibility category. Selected from more than 1,500 entries, the honor places DignityMoves’ innovative interim housing model among the top 100 ideas transforming the world today. “Mayor Mahan has worked closely with us and our approach and Via del Oro is a great example of that,” Funk explains. With 10 communities open and nine more in development, DignityMoves hopes to serve up to 2,000 residents per year by 2026.
In 2022, DignityMoves partnered with the city of San Francisco and Tipping Point Community (the nonprofit founded by San Francisco Mayor Danie Lurie) to open 33 Gough in the South of Market neighborhood, which provides 70 private rooms for individuals. I have been past the site many times, and the difference in the surrounding areas of 33 Gough and Via del Oro is stark. In front of 33 Gough, drug users line the sidewalks whereas at Via del Oro, there isn’t a single person loitering outside the facility, period. I asked Funk why that is. “First is urban density,” she says. “The site in San Jose is in a quasi-suburban setting, not downtown, so it would be less likely to visibly see encampments. San Jose has a lot of waterways and parks where encampments tend to congregate — San Francisco doesn’t have as many options for encampments to ‘hide’ so you see it much more on the streets. Yet in San Francisco you really only see much homelessness in downtown and the Tenderloin. It’s not visible in most other districts. That concentration is a unique relic of the approach we’ve taken to the Tenderloin, congregating the vast majority of our Permanent Supportive Housing and services there, so people linger there. Also, San Francisco has a higher percentage of people experiencing chronic homelessness — 35 plus percent versus 29 percent in San Jose.”
But Funk also credits San Jose’s mayor, saying via email, “Another factor is the amazing progress that San Jose has made in decreasing its unsheltered rate. Mahan has made a huge push adding over 1,000 more interim housing beds this year. As a result, since 2019 San Jose’s sheltered homelessness rate increased by 160 percent (the percent sheltered versus unsheltered), and unsheltered homelessness dropped by double digits (over 22 percent).”
When I asked Mahan why I didn’t see drug dealers and users in front of Via del Oro, he was succinct. “Because I won’t tolerate it. I expect enforcement; the chief knows it and he’s on board. I know there have been problems downtown at St. James Park … what’s happening there? Stayaway orders for drug dealers. If they’re caught anywhere near the park they go to jail.”
I asked Funk if she thought San Francisco’s permissiveness plays a role. “Yes absolutely. That’s a big one,” she says. “Of course, again you’re really mostly talking about the Tenderloin. It’s too rampant to really control. But aside from illegal activity, one of the biggest differences is that Mahan’s strategy is very clear: If a neighborhood is willing to allow an interim housing community, the quid pro quo is that they offer those beds to the people who are sleeping in the immediate area, then they close it off as a ‘no return zone.’ The result is that the immediate area can see the visible and measurable difference on their streets. It also comes down to honoring that commitment and keeping that area clear. The result? When we go before city council to get a new project approved, the majority of voices that are opposed are people angry it’s not coming to their neighborhood. I’m not kidding. When I tell mayors that they roll their eyes in disbelief — the NIMBY pushback is incredibly daunting to elected officials. But the secret is to harness that energy, not work against it. By contrast, in San Francisco when they opened the Navigation Centers, they loosely made a similar promise but never upheld it. It drives me crazy. In fact, generally when I go to our 33 Gough project, I see tents and people laying on the street on the very same block. It makes my blood boil.”
There is, however, a downside to San Jose’s policy, Funk says. “The people who are ‘service resistant’ and don’t want to accept the interim housing bed pick up their tents and move to another area. So, the neighborhoods that don’t have interim housing actually look worse. But there are of course always downsides. In general, I really believe in Mahan’s approach — on a rolling basis, neighborhood by neighborhood, you begin to declare victory.”