San Jose Is Displacing Its Unhoused Residents to Prepare for Super Bowl Tourism

Tens of thousands of football fans are expected to flood the Bay Area for Super Bowl LX to witness the highly anticipated match between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, where the National Football League championship will be held for the second time in a decade. A series of fan-facing events in San Francisco promises to attract a majority of the Super Bowl tourists visiting the area this week, but nearby cities like San Jose are also trying to attract some of the tourists their way.

But amid the buzz and fanfare, a darker cloud looms — as the booming tech region makes space for these visitors to sprawl, its unhoused communities are being driven further to the sidelines.

“It’s all about the optics,” said Todd Langton, executive director of Agape Silicon Valley, a volunteer-based organization designed to serve unhoused people throughout San Jose. “It’s about getting from the clean airport to the nice stadium and checking out the restaurants and hotels downtown.”

The Super Bowl’s sanitized optics have consistently relied on the erasure of thousands of unhoused people who set up near these high traffic areas in host cities. Just last year, Louisiana ordered an emergency declaration to relocate people living on the streets near the Superdome ahead of Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans. Before then, both Los Angeles in 2022 and Atlanta in 2019 came under fire for similar “homeless sweeps.”

Even in 2016, San Francisco — Super Bowl 50’s unofficial host city — also faced controversy for displacing unhoused communities, namely near the Moscone Center, the epicenter of the year’s “Super Bowl City” festivities. Robert Aguirre, advocate for the unhoused and former resident of San Jose’s infamous “Jungle” — the largest homeless encampment in the U.S. — even recalls San Francisco’s push to use former military battleships and aircraft carriers known as “mothball fleets” as temporary housing units during the Super Bowl.

“City council members proposed bringing a mothball fleet into San Francisco Harbor and moving all of the unhoused people there,” Aguirre told Truthout. “And really, the only people who were in favor of it were the wealthy white people and business people, because they wanted the streets cleaned up so that they could make more money.” While the mothball fleets never came to fruition, San Francisco was nonetheless characterized by the hundreds of tents and tarps underlying the I-80 freeway, stretching over dozens of blocks and side streets as the city prepped a downtown staging area for Super Bowl City.

This year, eager to avoid controversy, the region’s solution to the “homeless problem” at first glance seems a bit more humane — investing heavily in temporary housing. This is especially true in San Jose, home to more than 6,000 of Santa Clara’s 10,711 unhoused residents. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan’s “clean-up strategy” has been over a year in the making, with Mahan announcing a plan to build up to 1,400 new beds through the construction of temporary housing sites and interim housing communities before the end of last year. The move makes sense — according to a 2025 Silicon Valley Pain Index report, not only does Santa Clara County have the highest number of unhoused people of all nine Bay Area counties, but San Jose alone is one of the most expensive U.S. cities for household bills, with 40 percent of San Jose renters and homeowners spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing alone.

And as the cost of living swells, federal budget cuts further erode social safety nets and threaten to push more people into the grips of homelessness. In fact, the Trump administration has already cut funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), putting 170,000 vulnerable people at risk of homelessness. Nearly 1,000 vulnerable Santa Clara households are at risk of losing emergency housing vouchers within the next year as a result of HUD cuts.

Mahan’s plans to develop more temporary housing as a buffer against these federal aid cuts seems admirable, but San Jose’s unhoused advocates are aware of the bitter truth that underlies these emerging policies. To build these temporary housing sites, the city utilized funds from its Measure E tax — a property transfer tax designed to fund construction of permanent, affordable housing. “The mayor convinced enough of the city council to take Measure E money — which was originally for building permanent supportive housing — to build temporary interim housing,” Aguirre told Truthout. The city’s single largest revenue source for affordable housing has also been used to pay for operational costs of the city’s shelters on multiple occasions. So far, an estimated $40 million that was originally intended for permanent affordable housing has instead been used to shelter unhoused residents in the short term.

“What ends up happening is they shove everybody into these temporary units that they build — they could be motel rooms, some are essentially tent cities built in a parking lot,” Aguirre told Truthout. Aguirre added that these “tiny home villages” become sites for surveillance and further control by the state. “What I’m hearing on the streets is that the people who work there are more like prison guards,” Aguirre said. “They will tell you what things you can keep and what you’re allowed to bring in your place,” he explained. “You’re not allowed to have anybody come into your unit. You can’t bring food into your unit — you can only eat it in the common area … So let’s say you want to watch the Super Bowl, for example, and you’ve got your TV set up and your nachos ready, you want to invite people over — you can’t do that. That’s a violation.”

According to Aguirre, people living in these units are reluctant to file grievances because the process is reviewed by the same enforcers of the site’s regulations. “The grievance process is reviewed by these [guards]. So people don’t want to complain because they don’t want to get attacked,” Aguirre told Truthout. “They don’t want any kind of retribution, and they don’t want to make trouble for the other people living in that same commune.”

Beyond these glaring issues within the temporary housing units, Mahan’s push for temporary housing isn’t isolated. In fact, right after San Jose City Council made the decision to reallocate Measure E funds to short-term housing last year, the city conducted 530 encampment sweeps, including clearing Columbus Park — the largest encampment in San Jose and home to around 370 unhoused people and about 120 lived-in vehicles. Before this, Mahan launched the Oversized and Lived-In Vehicle Enforcement program, expanding temporary RV bans across the city. Since San Jose has effectively criminalized homelessness, unsheltered people only have three chances to refuse temporary housing before facing arrest for trespassing.

For Todd Langton, these accelerated abatements are the start of what he refers to as a cyclical “game of Whack-a-Mole,” especially as the city prepares for high-profile events. “In these transitional housing facilities, [unhoused people] can stay for up to six months, two years maximum,” he said. “So [the city] finds out where unhoused people are, then accelerates abatements, giving them no choice but to move someplace else, accept temporary housing, or lose everything,” Langton told Truthout.

“Most of the time, they’re not even offered housing. And then, as soon as the Super Bowl or the World Cup or whatever is over, they’re back on the streets again,” he added.

After all, temporary housing is just that — temporary. “Without enough permanent housing, there really is nowhere for them to go afterwards,” Langton told Truthout.

While Santa Clara County has secured funding to develop a low-income housing project in San Jose, Aguirre says the city itself is still thwarting efforts to expand affordable housing. On January 27, an adjustment to San Jose’s inclusionary housing policy — requiring market-rate housing developers to allot a portion of their investments toward affordable housing — passed the city council in a 9-2 vote. This new adjustment effectively raises the income threshold to qualify for housing, shifting its prioritization of extremely low- and moderate-income people toward middle-income and working professionals. “They raised that bar so that people making over $150,000 would qualify,” Aguirre, who attended the city council vote, told Truthout. “Now, people making $35,000 and less won’t even qualify because [developers] are going to want to rent to the higher-earning people.”

With Mahan recently announcing his bid for California governor, both Aguirre and Langton insist that the city’s policy of prioritizing abatements and building temporary housing has all been part of a bigger build-up — one that attempts to put San Jose in a better light. “This whole campaign to try to clean up the city — to get rid of the people that are wandering around at all hours — it’s so [tourists] can’t see them,” Aguirre told Truthout.

In the shadows of this misleading light, somewhere beyond the roaring fans in Levi’s Stadium, are hundreds of displaced people forced to start over again and again.