Letter from 49 Organizations re Item 3.3, Mayor’s Budget Message, March 18, 2025 March 17, 2025
Mayor & City Council, et. al
City of San José
200 East Santa Clara Street, 18th Floor
San José, CA 95113
Sent via electronic mail
Re: Item 3.3, Mayor’s Budget Message, March 18, 2025
Dear Mayor Mahan, Vice Mayor Foley, Members of the City Council, City Manager Maguire, and Budget Director Shannon:
This letter is being submitted by 49 organizations, representing many thousands of community members, constituents, clients, participants, and neighborhood leaders. Please consider our comments regarding the Mayor’s Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Message.
The Mayor‘s budget plan creates a debt that he plans to pay with fool’s gold. In doing so, the message disregards our community’s need for affordable housing, criminalizes homelessness, and circumvents the will of the voters by drastically shifting Measure E funds from their original intent.
Affordable Housing
The Mayor’s March Budget Message ignores the dire need for affordable housing in San José – one of the community’s top priorities. Fifty-one percent of households in the City are rent burdened, and these numbers are higher for Black and Latinx community members. Were these individuals not rent burdened, they would have an average additional $8,500 per household to spend on other needs and contribute to the local economy. This income-to-rent ratio leaves individuals one missed paycheck, car payment, or health emergency away from homelessness.
Affordable housing is essential for a community to thrive – it improves health outcomes, allows individuals to live where they work, improves children’s education, stimulates the economy, and provides a stronger, more diverse 1 Letter from 49 Organizations re Item 3.3, Mayor’s Budget Message, March 18, 2025 community. Furthermore, we know that a lack of affordable housing is the primary factor driving our homelessness crisis. The absence of commitment to and investment in affordable housing demonstrated in this budget message should be very concerning to everyone in San José.
Measure E
On that note, the permanent shift of Measure E funding is particularly distressing.
Measure E is our most significant source of affordable housing funding, and diverting funds only sets us further behind a need we are already failing to address. We cannot afford to undermine the City’s only reliable source for funding new affordable housing by throwing bandaids at gaping wounds. While we need a balance of permanent housing, temporary shelters, and prevention, this does not change the fact that temporary measures are not permanent solutions. We lack affordable housing, and the only true solution is to invest in it. San José’s voters already chose to invest in these solutions when they passed Measure E, and to divert these funds is to once again subvert their will.
None of this is to say that we do not need investments in prevention and temporary shelter, particularly for vulnerable community members. However, it is unconscionable to shift the vast majority of these funds without any concrete plans for keeping the pipeline flowing now and how we will reinvest in this priority in future budgets. The continued, misleading rhetoric about the costs of building affordable housing doesn’t instill confidence that the City intends to return to this priority.
Utilities and Workforce Housing
We are also concerned that the budget message proposes additional policies that will exacerbate our housing affordability challenge. The direction to create guidelines allowing property owners to charge utilities proportionally on master-metered properties cites concerns regarding conservation and costs for property owners, with no regard to cost for tenants. This is a policy that would have direct negative impacts on already struggling renters. For those who are rent burdened, even a small addition to monthly costs can tip the scale too far and send them into homelessness. These are the individuals we should be prioritizing – not corporations or landlords – and they comprise more than 50% of the City’s 2 Letter from 49 Organizations re Item 3.3, Mayor’s Budget Message, March 18, 2025 households.
The Mayor’s budget message has no plan to address the housing needs of San José’s residents earning less than 60% of the area median income, unless they are currently homeless and living unsheltered. San José has more than 140,000 households – almost 420,000 people and 43% of San Jose’s residents – with low, very low, or extremely low incomes. These are people our communities, and our economy, depend on. These are our teachers, our childcare workers, our grandparents living on a fixed income, our medical assistants, and people working in grocery and retail stores and many small businesses. A family of four would need to work at least 3 full-time minimum wage jobs to reach 60% of the area median income and qualify for the kind of housing the Mayor suggests should be our focus. How was the decision made to walk away from these families and individuals?
Criminalization of Homelessness
This budget message proposes punishing our unhoused neighbors for rejecting shelter conditions that the policy's creators would be unwilling to live in themselves. This cavalier criminalization proposal, coupled with diversion of funds from permanent housing that is safe, accessible, and affordable, is deeply troubling and ironic. There are numerous well-known and compelling reasons why some people may refuse temporary shelter, especially congregate shelter.
Homelessness is – and always has been and will be – a housing problem. No matter how one frames it politically, in the end, it will always come down to supply and demand. If there are not enough units for people to live in, there will be people living outside. It is despicable to arrest those who are the victims of our inability, or, in this case, unwillingness, to solve our housing crisis. It is even more inhumane to create a policing regime based on extremely slender evidence of the magnitude of refusals of shelter and at a time when there are nowhere close to the number of temporary units for people to move into.
It is well-established that arresting, incarcerating, and cycling unhoused people through jails and courts costs significantly more than providing housing.
Incarceration worsens barriers to housing and employment, making it less likely that people will eventually make it into a home. It also increases trauma and 3 Letter from 49 Organizations re Item 3.3, Mayor’s Budget Message, March 18, 2025 instability, disrupting social safety nets, connections to services, and healthcare.
Arresting people experiencing homelessness disproportionately negatively affects Black and Brown communities and people with disabilities, who are overrepresented in the homeless population. For all these reasons, the proposal is inhumane and wrong.
The Alternative
We are asking that you reject these short-sighted proposals and instead take evidence-based and meaningful steps to address our housing affordability crisis.
This means maintaining affordable housing investments by preserving some level of investment in Measure E, refusing to criminalize our unhoused community members, and firmly rejecting zombie policies such as RUBS that would exacerbate our housing affordability challenge.
We who have signed this letter know – through our experience providing services, protecting our community, and collaborating with the City Council – that the solutions outlined in this budget message are smoke and mirrors that will not lead to substantial improvements in the lives of San José’s residents. We envision and believe in a thriving community, where everybody has a home, people live near their jobs, and individuals have money to invest in the economy because their rent is a reasonable portion of their income. We ask that you also believe in this vision for San José and hope you will work with us to achieve it.
We appreciate the memorandum from Councilmembers Candelas and Cohen and agree that weighty policy items such as RUBS should, at minimum, go through regular policy development channels that include community engagement, staff level research, and mapping of historic Council decisions; they should also be subjected to priority-setting/red-green-light recommendations by staff at Rules.
And, as always, we agree that the City and County should improve collaboration and together deepen investment, in a coordinated fashion, in the solutions that actually work and don’t further harm traumatized people.
Lastly, we support the letters from Destination: Home and SV@Home.
Please consider this letter signed by 49 organizations as you decide what action to take on March 18. You can reach us by emailing [email protected].
4 Letter from 49 Organizations re Item 3.3, Mayor’s Budget Message, March 18, 2025
SIGNATORIES
Milan Balinton
African American Community Service
Agency
Almaz Negash
African Diaspora Network
Sheri Burns
Aging Services Collaborative of Santa
Clara County
Jeremy Barousse
Amigos de Guadalupe Center for
Justice and Empowerment
Vaughn Villaverde
Asian Americans for Community
Involvement (AACI)
Richard Konda
Asian Law Alliance
Elisa Koff-Ginsborg
Behavioral Health Contractors'
Association (BHCA)
Josh Selo
Bill Wilson Center
Jahmal Williams
Black Leadership Kitchen Cabinet
Shelley Swan
Carry the Vision
Dolores Alvarado
Community Health Partnership
Erin O’Brien
Community Solutions
Alexander Senegal
Joe Mora
Jocelyn Arenas
Destination: Home / LEABsv
David Low
Destination: Home
Eugene Torres
Family Supportive Housing
Kristopher Scott
Fresh Lifelines for Youth
Isela Reyes
Green Bean Collective Silicon Valley
Gail Osmer
Hands 4Helping
Wesley Saver
HealthRIGHT 360
Kiana Simmons
HERO Tent
5 Letter from 49 Organizations re Item 3.3, Mayor’s Budget Message, March 18, 2025 Gia Pham
Housing Choices
Teresa Gomez
Indian Health Center Of Santa Clara
Valley
Nathalie Carvajal
Latina Coalition
Darcie Green
Latinas Contra Cancer
Alison Brunner
Tristia Bauman
Law Foundation of Silicon Valley
Angelica Cortez
LEAD Filipino
Anjee Helstrup-Alvarez
MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y
Cultura Latino Americana
David Mineta
Momentum for Health
Héctor Sánchez-Flores
National Compadres Network
Lori Katcher
Neighborhood Hands
Eva M Terrazas
Pacific Clinics
Maria Daane
Parents Helping Parents
Heather Cleary
Peninsula Family Service
Carole Conn
Project Sentinel
Poncho Guevara
Sacred Heart Community Service
Michael Dao
San José State University Human
Rights Institute
Wisa Uemura
San Jose Taiko
Esther Young
School of Arts and Culture at MHP
David Padilla
SEIU 521
Andrew Siegler
Showing Up for Racial Justice Santa
Clara County
Gabriel Hernandez
¡Sí Se Puede! Collective
Kyra Kazantzis
Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits
Raj Jayadev
Silicon Valley De-Bug
6 Letter from 49 Organizations re Item 3.3, Mayor’s Budget Message, March 18, 2025 Sheri Burns
Silicon Valley Independent Living
Center
Victor Vasquez
SOMOS Mayfair
Sandy Perry
South Bay Community Land Trust
Yvonne Maxwell
Ujima
Sujatha Venkatraman
Cassandra Magana
West Valley Community Services
Adriana Caldera
YWCA Golden Gate Silicon Valley
7 2
Develop a Comprehensive Plan to Address the City’s Housing Crisis The mayor is proposing a poorly planned budget and housing strategy that fails to address the root causes of the city’s housing and homeless crisis. The proposed shift in housing strategy, prioritizing temporary shelter solutions and resurrecting past vagrancy-type laws that are discriminatory and cruel, provides no real solutions. Furthermore, the Mayor has articulated a goal of reaching "functional zero" homelessness. Achieving this goal is estimated to require over $250 million in one-time capital expenditure and anticipates annual operating costs of almost a quarter billion dollars to maintain the shelter program. All this with no plan for sustainable short, medium, or long-term funding.
Any meaningful plan must reflect the local context when evaluating homelessness solutions.
The region is characterized by a limited supply of housing affordable for working families, which drives up demand and prices. This is greatly exacerbated by Silicon Valley’s unique economy, dominated by the region's high-tech industries. These industries are characterized by a significant bifurcation in the labor market, with a concentration of high-wage earners in the technology sector alongside a substantial proportion of low-wage jobs in service and other industries. This disparity results in a situation where those at the top of the wage scale further drive rental and housing prices to astronomical levels. At the same time, a large segment of the workforce earns wages insufficient to afford housing or are highly rent-burdened, putting them at substantial risk of becoming unhoused. Currently, almost two people become unhoused for every one that manages to become housed.
While the urgency of addressing unsheltered homelessness is undeniable, diverting Measure E funds away from the construction of permanent affordable housing fails to recognize the local housing and labor market dynamics. As a result, adopting the mayor’s proposal will not lead to real long-term solutions but simply leave individuals in temporary shelters with no permanent housing options, thus creating a "bridge to nowhere."
Recommendations
In summary, the City Council should reject the Mayor’s poorly developed plan that seeks to remedy a budget shortfall and address the housing/homeless crisis by prioritizing temporary shelters and reenactment of outdated vagrancy laws that criminalizes the poor. These strategies will only perpetuate the cycle of homelessness.
A comprehensive plan to address our housing and homeless crisis is desperately needed and should be centered on permanent supportive housing and preventive services that have demonstrated their effectiveness in providing lasting solutions and preventing homelessness:
rental subsidies, legal support for tenants, and outreach services.
SHHAC strongly urges the city council to adopt the following components as part of the budget and housing strategy:
● Adopt a no layoff policy to protect jobs and critical public services.
3 ● Reject the Mayor’s housing proposals and the increase in penalties for unhoused individuals.
● Conduct a truly comprehensive planning process that engages with stakeholders: Adopt the principles of the Cohen/Candelas memo by implementing a comprehensive, inclusive, and data-driven planning strategy with clear metrics for success and regular public reporting. Foster ongoing dialogue and collaboration with affordable housing advocates, service providers, and individuals with lived experience of homelessness to ensure the development of the most effective and equitable solutions. ● Prioritize permanent supportive housing by opposing any permanent shift of Measure E funds to build temporary shelters. Maintain a significant portion of Measure E funding for the development of permanent affordable housing, recognizing its critical role in providing long-term stability and addressing the region's core issue of housing affordability.
● Invest in, and expand, preventive and cost-effective methods for preventing homelessness and rehousing individuals including tenants’ legal rights, rental subsidies, and outreach programs.
● Explore a full range of funding sources for housing. Direct city staff to develop a comprehensive inventory of potential funding sources for both temporary and permanent housing solutions. The analysis should include utilizing some of the City’s reserves on a short-term basis as well as the potential to sponsor a funding measure on the 2026 election. The results of this analysis should be presented at the budget hearings.
Sincerely,
Albert Carlson
On behalf of Sacred Heart Housing Action Committee (SHHAC)