At the rumble of the trash compactor’s approach, and the arrival of two police cars, many of the creekside camp’s residents elect to take their leave.
One emerges from a blue-green tent flap and whizzes past us on his bicycle, mouthing a “good morning.” For the authorities, he’s left behind a collection of trash and assorted items, heaped neatly away from his home and angled toward the road.
It’s around 9:30am on the banks of Penitencia Creek in San Jose, and Santa Clara Valley Water is here for creek clean-up. This public agency that provides water to county residents is charged with keeping water sources clean and preventing floods. My late arrival has set the work back a half-hour but “It’s O.K.,” assures Feliciano Aguilar, the field supervisor, all smiles. His hands are on the wheel of a pickup truck, and he’s already sweating from the sun. “We’re out here almost every day. And it’s hard work out here, so the crew doesn’t mind when they get a break.”
The crew is eight men strong—all in high-viz vests and disposable gloves, with trash pickers in hand. The police are there for the crew’s protection.
They’re executing what Santa Clara Valley Water calls its “Good Neighbor” program, in which the agency’s crews regularly remove truckloads of trash and debris from encampments built by unhoused people. Since they’ve been given prior notice, the camp’s residents set up signage saying “TRASH HERE” and placed buckets, bags, or uncontained heaps of stuff outside their homes. Like your average Monday trash collection, minus the dumpsters.
The Valley Water crew gets to work picking up trash left outside of tents. Some of the unhoused people have cut out clearings in the creekside shrubbery for added privacy. (Anushuya Thapa)
The decisions Aguilar and his crew make, though, aren’t always straightforward—residents often aren’t around to ask what’s personal belonging and what’s waste, and it can be hard to tell. And when hundreds of people have set up encampments along nearly 70 miles of public creeks—water sources meant for everyone to drink from or play around, and for steelhead to spawn in—agencies like Aguilar’s face difficult resource management questions.
Now, Valley Water is getting $3 million in federal funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to ramp up the cleanups across nine of the county’s creeks, and undo other ecological damage—like fixing up human-dug caves and stairways along river banks, or removing rafts of entangled trash that are clogging salmonid streams. But with no long-term housing solution for the people living in the camps, trash and damage tends to reappear rapidly. Most camps are cleaned up on a monthly or quarterly basis. The whole operation (trash compactor, laboring crew, police escort, and all) is as expensive as it looks.
Since 2020, the program has cost Valley Water over $3.2 million. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s $3 million grant might end up being a drop in the creek, so to speak. “If we allow people to live on waterways, this work would need to continue indefinitely,” says Jennifer Codianne, Valley Water’s deputy operating officer. To make the investment worth it, the agency’s been proposing ways to make these kinds of encampments illegal—a move that’s drawn public criticism.
Federal funding for this type of creek cleanup isn’t new. In 2011, EPA gave the City of San Jose $1.6 million to clean up Coyote Creek. Luisa Valiela, the program manager of EPA’s grant fund, says similar grants have gone to land stewards in Oakland, in Contra Costa county, and up and down the state of California. She acknowledges the area will need more money in the future.
“Addressing water quality problems—even if it is a long-term investment—is needed and is the intention of the San Francisco Bay Water Quality Improvement Program,” Valiela says.
It’s dry season, so Pen Creek is still flowing—just several feet below ground. Where the bed is low enough, the creek pokes its head out in the shape of a puddle. But for most of the channel, the water stays low, letting thousands of river rocks get their turn in the sun.
The workers step down into the riverbed, using staircases that creek residents have dug out of the banks. Man-made structures along other waterways are even larger. Along Coyote Creek, for one, residents have dug out entire caves to serve as makeshift homes. Loose sediment from such earth-moving can get into the waterway and clog the gravel that female steelhead trout swish into nests (called redds).
The 20-foot channel where Penitencia Creek runs is mostly dry in the summer. The crew uses staircases along the banks that were dug by unhoused people, picking up trash as they go. (Anushuya Thapa)
“Salmonids are declining throughout California, in even natural settings,” says Jon Jankovitz, a Valley Water environmental services manager. But broader causes like warming waters aside, localized impacts are still serious, he says. “Some of the stuff, you don’t need to be a scientist or ecologist to really see the breadth of impacts—we’re dealing with a lot of trash and refuse and hazardous material that flows directly into our waterways.”
The watersheds that Jankovitz’s team oversees harbor significant numbers of chinook salmon, and a small but consistent showing of steelhead. Along with the trash cleanup, the EPA grant will pay for some river banks to be recontoured and seeded with native plants. But for Jankovitz, this kind of work is a “constant money flow.”
He describes the work that Valley Water does, like planting oak trees and elderberries, to replace plants sacrificed in the name of flood control. “Then, potentially immediately downstream, there may be some fires or tree-cutting that is totally unregulated and permitted from the unhoused,” he says. It’s put Valley Water in a position where the agency can’t maintain the sites it has restored as required.
As it stands, Valley Water staff can’t just ask creek residents to leave. Well, they could ask, but, as Aguilar points out, lots of people have pets. Or nearby friends. Or entire living rooms and potted-plant gardens sheltered underneath tarp. Leaving their lives behind for a bed in a communal shelter is a lot to ask—and that’s if shelters and beds are available at all.
The funding that Valley Water’s getting from EPA can only tackle so much, as long as people don’t have permanent places to live. “It’s like a Gordian knot of managing the real crisis that humans are experiencing, along with looking at environmental degradation and wanting to fix it,” says Valiela.
A fully furnished tent—complete with sofa, pantry, and interior decor. The crew leaves it untouched, picking up only what was left outdoors. (Anushuya Thapa)
In San Jose’s 2023 homelessness census, at least 4,411 people were found experiencing “unsheltered” homelessness—living along streets or waterways instead of within shelters or temporary housing. Countywide, the number was 7,425. Legally, unhoused people are protected by the 2018 federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling Martin v. Boise—it prohibits cities from enforcing laws against camping in public spaces if the city can’t offer the campers somewhere to spend the night. (As is often the case in San Jose, Aguilar notes.) That ruling prompted Valley Water to stop clearing encampments. But the agency is nonetheless now proposing a no-camping ordinance on the lands that it owns. It would establish “water resources protection zones”—areas prohibiting camping or any unauthorized presence after sunset alongside riverbanks, punishable by jail time and up to a $500 fine.
“It’s like a Gordian knot of managing the real crisis that humans are experiencing, along with looking at environmental degradation and wanting to fix it.”
Luisa Valiela, EPA’s SF Bay program lead
Amigos de Guadalupe, a nonprofit dedicated to housing and immigration justice, submitted a letter to the public record arguing against the ordinance, saying it “unjustly penalizes unhoused individuals when there is nowhere near enough shelter available in Santa Clara County to properly house everyone.” The NAACP San Jose branch, too, wrote a letter in opposition.
The board of Valley Water will vote on the ordinance July 9 at a public meeting, but removing unhoused people is just part of its approach. Codianne says the agency has set aside land farther from creek beds for the city to build temporary shelters on. “These are areas that we need to maintain for flood protection and regulatory compliance. The path forward from here is that [Valley Water] and City of San Jose need to collaborate on this.”
Separately, in June the City of San Jose began finding spaces for “sanctioned encampments”—areas where unhoused people could be relocated to pull them away from waterways. City staff are hoping to move 500 people by the end of the year.
Even within the EPA grant, Valley Water is trialing a mix of solutions that include both carrots and sticks: on one hand, the water district plans to install 32 portable toilets for creek residents, and has consistently funded outreach programs for them. On the other hand, it will also spend money to drop in boulders and other barriers nearby waterways, to prevent people from living in or even accessing some places. “Moving forward, you will see a lot of changes in the community,” says Codianne. “And hopefully it’ll be positive changes for everyone—for the waterways, for the fish and wildlife, and for the unhoused [people] themselves.”
On Pen Creek, two hours into the cleanup, the crew has reached the tail end of the long line of encampments. There stands a small memorial. Flowers jut out of a ceramic vase, and incense smoke draws loops in the air. A miniature Bible sits to the side. The display, propped up by river rocks, remains untouched by the clean-up crew. The trucks and workers give it as wide a berth as they can manage. If the ordinance passes and enforcement begins, it’ll all have to go.
