City officials are taking the final steps to shut down one of the South Bay's biggest homeless encampments.
About 200 people live at the camp known as "The Jungle," near Story Road in San Jose.
Crews will post signs about the shutdown Monday morning, and anyone still living there on Thursday will be cleared out.
The team, made up of employees of San Jose city and Santa Clara County departments and non-profit service providers, plans to start cleaning the homeless camp of structures, debris and waste on Thursday, a process that will take about two weeks, according to city spokesman David Vossbrink.
The closing and clearing of the camp, next to the creek off of Story Road between Interstate Highway 280 and Kelley Park, has been in the works for 18 months and about 130 people have already moved out over the past six to eight months, Vossbrink said.
The shutdown was planned to coincide with the opening of Santa Clara County’s cold weather shelter program.
The city recently received a regulatory notice from the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board to put a stop to human and other unsanitary waste from the Jungle that is polluting the creek, which carries water that ends up in the San Francisco Bay, Vossbrink said.
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"We are responsible as a city for preventing pollutants flowing into the bay," he said.
Ray Bramson, the city's homelessness response manager, was at the Jungle Monday morning talking to residents and letting them know that authorities will begin to clear the camp on Thursday if weather permits.
About 50 camp residents agreed to move and the city intends to transition all of the camp's dwellers into decent housing, Bramson said.
"In the next couple of days, we're going to find a safe place for them to go to," he said.
A survey of area homeless people conducted for the city last year found that 96 percent would accept an assignment to permanent housing, Bramson said.
The difficult part is obtaining the right kinds of housing to meet the diverse needs of the people, some of whom have chronic physical and mental health problems, Bramson said.
Others have different barriers to finding housing, such as poor credit that does not allow them to qualify for apartment leases, or criminal records yet to be expunged that inhibit their ability to find jobs that pay the rent, he said.
The city, which has appropriated $2 million to permanently house homeless individuals from San Jose, is also going to offer transportation for the homeless to their new homes, according to a report issued Monday by city housing director Leslye Corsiglia.
After the camp is cleared, a group called Watershed Protection Team, a partnership between the city and the Santa Clara Valley Water District, will regularly patrol the cleared camp and elsewhere on Coyote Creek, the Guadalupe River and Los Gatos Creek to clean up litter and prevent illegal camping, she said.
The city has already started installing boulders to thwart vehicle access to the Jungle area and 1,500 feet of eight-foot-high steel fencing along the western and eastern banks of Coyote Creek to block access to it from Story Road, according to Corsiglia.
Bay City News contributed to this report.
