“Why should someone have to move across the city to access help?” said Edie Irons, director of communications at All Home, a nonprofit that works on regional approaches to solving homelessness. “They might turn down shelter for many reasons. One could be they are far away from where they became homeless.”

In San Francisco, proponents of the ordinance hope the legislation will help win over reluctant homeowners, which hasn’t proven easy.

Vera Genkin lives in the Sunset and said she “has a big heart for all these people,” but she worries unhoused people from other places will come to her quiet neighborhood looking for services, despite evidence showing people often live in the neighborhoods and cities where they became homeless.

“Why are we being expected to pick up problems of homelessness that did not start here?” she said. “Why is this county supposed to pay with city municipal funds for some other county’s homelessness? I don’t understand that either, so the same equation applies to me between districts.”

Efforts to expand shelters to new neighborhoods have been fraught across the Bay Area.

At a town hall meeting earlier this summer, San José’s housing director Erik Soliván presented a plan to open the first temporary housing site in the city’s sleepy Cambrian neighborhood: a converted motel that would provide shelter for senior women and mothers with children.

An RV trailer parked on Lake Merced Boulevard and State Drive near San Francisco State University in San Francisco on Oct. 1, 2025. (Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)

He was met with jeers.

“Put it in your backyard!” one man yelled, in a video recorded by the San Jose Spotlight.

“I live in downtown, and I have three of them,” Soliván replied.

San José Mayor Matt Mahan and the city council have embarked on an aggressive expansion of short-term shelter in recent years — building out a system of tiny home villages, RV parking lots and sanctioned encampments that have amounted to nearly 1,900 placements across 22 locations as of June.

As in San Francisco, most of them remain clustered in the city’s downtown core, or in South San José near Monterey Road. Meanwhile, more upscale neighborhoods such as West San José and Evergreen have no shelter sites.

San José City Councilmember Pamela Campos speaks the Day Without Childcare rally in front of the Federal Building in San José on May 12, 2025. (Martin do Nascimento/KQED)

“These emergency interim housing sites are one part of what is needed in the continuum of housing, and so we need to make sure that we are distributing them equitably throughout the city,” said Councilmember Pamela Campos, whose District 2 seat includes much of South San José. “Every district in San José is affected by homelessness; therefore, every district should be playing their part in addressing our homelessness crisis.”

Earlier this month, the Rue Ferrari interim housing site, in Campos’ district, was expanded from 122 to 266 beds, making it the largest tiny home community in the city. Campos celebrated the move but worried that her sprawling district lacks public transit for residents of Rue Ferrari to easily access jobs and services.

“If there’s a way to ensure that we are not putting more than the fair share of emergency interim housing in one district than others, that’s definitely a policy that is worth exploring,” she said. “It cannot continue to be the same neighborhoods and the same places, especially when we’re going into neighborhoods that are severely lacking in the resources and amenities that are needed to support people who are working hard to stabilize their lives and move forward in an upward trajectory.”

Resistance isn’t the only barrier

Mahan has said he would like to see shelters expand into every council district in the city. But he pointed to barriers beyond community pushback. In District 1, for example, which borders Sunnyvale and Cupertino, Mahan said available land is simply too scarce.

“That is one of the most densely built-out and expensive places in the city, where it is very hard to secure land. We just don’t have a good parcel that is city-owned to build a solution there,” he said. “And it can’t be a tiny parcel because we need enough scale to make it worth taxpayers’ investment in providing services. So there are just many factors.”

San José Mayor Matt Mahan speaks during a press conference outside City Hall on July 31, 2025. (Joseph Geha/KQED)

And he said any ordinance governing shelter placement, such as the one passed in San Francisco, could limit opportunities to quickly move people off the street. Mahan pointed to another South San José tiny home site that opened earlier this year, on private land owned by developer John Sobrato, who leased it to the city at virtually no cost.

“If we had had a restriction on having a second site within half a mile, we would not have been able to move forward [with] that site,” Mahan said. “So if you create a straitjacket through policy, you start missing opportunities.”

Mahan and the council have instead sought to placate the concerns of residents living near existing shelters by instituting a no-encampment zone around each site, granting first preference for beds to people living in the immediate area, and starting community advisory groups to solicit feedback after a shelter opens.