Santa Clara County Bolstering Homeless Shelters During Cold Snap

Santa Clara County is bolstering its main homeless shelters in San Jose and Gilroy for the four-month cold weather season in the wake of the closures of a shelter in Sunnyvale and The Jungle homeless camp, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

The San Jose Fire Marshall inspected the James F. Boccardo Reception Center and permitted HomeFirst, a nonprofit that heads the county’s homeless programs, to expand from 100 to 350 beds through Jan. 4 during the current cold snap, HomeFirst spokeswoman Claire Wagner said.

The Boccardo Center, at 2011 Little Orchard St. in San Jose and the largest homeless facility in the county, will also have extra floor mats, blankets and sheets available and stay open 24 hours through Jan. 4 so clients can check in late and stay warm and dry inside all day, Wagner said.

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The National Guard’s active armory at 8490 Wren Ave. in Gilroy, which has 100 beds, will expand by 50 beds to offer cold weather shelter to the homeless, remain open for two extra hours to 8 a.m. each morning until Jan. 4 and all of New Year’s Day on Thursday, Wagner said.

San Jose’s low temperature is forecasted with lows of 37 and 40 respectively for today and Friday, according to the National Weather Service.

The daytime weather will be sunny through Saturday and temperatures in the 50s to around 60, National Weather Service officials said.

The demand for cold weather shelter appears to be greater this year, since the March 31 closure of the 175-bed National Guard Armory in Sunnyvale and the sweep by county and San Jose city officials that closed the homeless encampment known as The Jungle near downtown San Jose on Dec. 4, according to Wagner.

“With the loss of the Sunnyvale armory, it makes the extra beds at the BRC only more important,” Wagner said.

Each cold weather season, from the day after Thanksgiving Day to the end of March, there are about two cold snaps and while so far this year temperatures have not fallen that much, “I think this level of activity is what you would see in an actual weather emergency,” Wagner said.

Outreach efforts by employees of the county’s Valley Homeless Healthcare Program, which searches for distressed homeless people, saved a person Monday night who was suffering from hypothermia from the cold, Wagner said.

Program employees got the person a voucher to stay at a motel room when the individual declined to go to a shelter, Wagner said.

About two weeks ago, three women showed up to donate 300 ponchos to the outreach program for the area’s homeless, she said.

One of the county’s biggest providers of volunteers to aid the homeless this year was the San Francisco-based technology firm Cisco Systems, she said.

Last year, four homeless people died during cold, wet weather conditions between Nov. 28 and Dec. 5.

Of the four people who died, three were in the Willow Glen area of San Jose and one was in Saratoga.

From Nov. 15 of last year to this past Nov. 15, the cutoff date set by the county, 33 homeless people have died, considerably fewer than the 48 who passed on during that period in 2013, Wagner said.

Since 1999, the county has maintained a memorial at the Boccardo center with the names of homeless people who succumbed within its borders that numbered 1,121 as of Nov. 15, 2013.

--Bay City News

--Image via Shutterstock

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