Columbus Park revitalization plan will lead to abatement of San Jose’s largest encampment

With Columbus Park, the scenes of an apocalyptic film, San José leaders have requested that the largest homeless people camp is dissolved as it is pushing with plans to claim space and build Oamenits.

Despite the intentions of revitalizing Columbus Park that dates back to several years, the camps of homeless people and recreational vehicles, many of which are inoperable, have overcome the recreational area, including the fields that once the baseball games.

But on Tuesday, the City Council unanimously approved a new plan to fill a large section of the park with soccer fields, horseshoe, pickletball, living room and basketball football, and puts them into operation by 2027.

“This is supposed to be a public park, a shared space for families, children and elderly, but you would not know when looking at it today,” said the mayor of San José, Matt Mahan. “Years ago, Columbus Park was a center for youth sports, a rare source of outdoor recreation and a unattended historical area. Restoring it is equity, ensuring that working families in this part of the city have access to it from the public space.” “

The San José City Council has attacked the revitalization of the park since 2019 when it approved that it is the last project financed by the measure P – the measure of $ 228 million parks infrastructure approved by the voters in 2000. To date, proposed 89 of the 89 financed of the 90 or 90 or 90 of the investment.

Before Tuesday’s approach, the city attributed delays in the project to the complexity of the SIT, the lack of personnel, the coordination of the agency and the crisis of homeless.

A few years ago, the city passed through the reduction process, since it seemed to advance with improvements in the park, but could not properly secure the site, which led to unleashed residents to move. Underlining the rapid deterioration of the site site and safety conerns, Mahan said that the acample has generated 400 priority a priority of calls from life of life life. Living living living living living living living living living life Live Living Life Live Living Life Live Hip Living Live Live Live. The surrounding community.

“My mother was involved in community development in Africa and, in fact, those were better conditions than here because people cook in communication, work together to try to improve things, collect firewood and housing if you wish,” said Richard Lynch, a discouraged resident who has made Columbus his home during the year of the settings. “Here, you can’t do anything and drugs make people crazy and violent, so it is really a very difficult situation.”

Parks and recreation enthusiasts also defended the decision as more than an investment in a public project, but also a first step to take the vision of a larger park.

“Columbus Park was a place where neighbors gathered, children practiced sports and school sports practiced together,” said the president of the Guadalupe River Board, Elizabeth Loretto. “This project will help us bring that spirit back. We are not only building a park. We are bringing memories and making space for new ones.”

But while the city has addressed construction to begin at the beginning of 2026, there are questions about what will happen with the hundreds of non -vegetated residents that the city will expel.

The home of homeless people Gail Osmer criticized the City Council for allowing conditions to deteriorate and for what he believed was the lack of a plan for residents who currently live there.

“What human rights do people now have in Columbus?” Osmer said. “It is a Third World country, and the city has allowed it.”

Mahan said that the city intends to offer a dissemination in a similar way to the way in which it did launched the ITSIZED and Live-IN-vehicle compliance program, where it will publish notifications with weeks in advance and offer to connect people who live there with the services.

When pointing out that San José could 1,400 intermediate housing placations about next year, taking into account the hotel and motel conversions with the small houses, the safe sleep and the safe parking sites, Mahan acknowledged that the contractions could when Nightbor could when Nightbor is the last time.

After multiple council members expressed Conns about moving hundreds of people without an adequate plan, Mahan went back to the city stopping its own progress.

“We make reductions every day in the city, without a place for people to leave, and if we keep our customers in a standard to say that we have to have a refuge bed much more, a permanent housing placement for people des before Andcamp Parks,” he said.