The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

Beyond wishing you happy holidays, I wanted to share a story from the Coyote Creek Trail that feels true to the season—about light in the dark, and what happened on the trail since the beginning of 2025, when I first presented the project. Life for people living outside is paced by the seasons in a way most of us can ignore. While nearby neighborhoods brighten with holiday lights and front-yard ornaments, the trail stays undecorated. Winter is the hardest season: cold, and the rainiest.

For years, that contrast felt absolute. Despite well over a hundred visits since 2014, I hadn’t seen any marker of the holidays on the trail until December 2023, when a fellow jogger ran past in a Santa hat. We exchanged a few friendly words. She mentioned knee pain; I passed along a couple of exercises a physical therapist had given me. Small talk, practical help, one of those brief, ordinary moments that somehow feels more “seasonal” than any decoration.

Then, in spring 2024, I noticed something else that didn’t fit the usual picture of survival mode: a campsite along a newer and easily accessible section of the trail where someone had planted decorative flowers, in a dry patch of dirt beside a tent. Maybe rock purslane: dark pink blooms, tall leafless stalks, improbably vivid against the dust. By summer the flowers were gone, but the impulse remained. Potted plants and succulents hung from ropes and branches of a large leafy tree sheltering the camp.

People like to compress homelessness into a single story: job loss, addiction, mental illness, personal failure. The reality on the ground is messier and more varied than the assumptions. This particular resident told me he made his living reselling goods on eBay, including plants, like my wife does. A rented room didn’t have space for inventory, so he found another room closer to the creek—close enough to keep a tent for storage. Theft from the tent pushed the arrangement one step further: he started living there instead. He didn’t want to be photographed, but he did give me permission to photograph his camp.

By December, the decorating instinct came roaring back—this time unmistakably. Given his fondness for making the place his own, I was only half surprised to find multiple Christmas trees and inflatable figures, all loaded with ornaments. I returned at dusk with my wife, and he switched on the Christmas lights for us. We joked that he had a hundred times as many ornaments as we did. A patch of public land that most people pass without seeing had been turned into someone’s yard, lit up for Christmas. Not as a performance or a statement, but an act of stubborn normalcy.

And then it was gone. This first Christmas on the trail that I saw turned out to be the last.

At the time, camping along Coyote Creek was treated as allowable so long as people followed the City of San José’s “good neighbor” rules: limits on footprint, setbacks from schools and infrastructure, not blocking right-of-way, trash set out for weekly pickup, proper disposal of biowaste, no littering or environmental damage. When sites accumulated large amounts of debris, the city could do escalated cleanups removing materials outside the organized living space, whereas more severe violations resulted in abatements.

However, the legal ground had been shifting. In 2018, the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Martin v. City of Boise had held that a city cannot impose criminal penalties for sleeping outside on public property when no alternative shelter is available. In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Ninth Circuit’s Eighth Amendment approach in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, holding that the Eighth Amendment does not prohibit enforcement of generally applicable public-camping laws—leaving those choices primarily to local and state governments, which have been quick to react.

Around the same time, San José’s creek policy accelerated for a different reason: heightened pressure from a state agency to move encampments out of sensitive areas in order to meet water-quality compliance requirements of the Clean Water Act and its stormwater permits. Following a Santa Clara Valley Water District ordinance, the city planned to clear a 12-mile stretch along Coyote Creek starting in January 2025 and reinforce a new encampment ban after that. A Sept. 25, 2025 official city news release stated that “on average, 88% of trash found in San José creeks is due to illicit dumping near unhoused communities.” In the previous fiscal year, the city spent nearly $64 million to reduce impacts from encampments, removing 3.6 million pounds of trash.

Later this year, I joined a volunteer clean-up and was astonished at the amount of trash. We filled more than 100 large bags. It was physical proof that, even after the city actions, the creek corridor is carrying a burden far beyond what biweekly community days could solve. What would a sustainable response even look like?

This Christmas, the trail is lined with new “No Encampment Zone” signs (signaling that encampments can be removed immediately—without 72-hour notice) and the encampments in close proximity to the trail are gone. At what human cost?

Santa Clara County’s housing math is brutal. The 2025 point-in-time count found 10,711 people experiencing homelessness, while an analysis of interim programs counted about 3,454 temporary shelter beds (of which about 3,000 are located in San Jose, which has the 4th highest homelessness rate in the country) across 38 programs, roughly one bed for every three unhoused people. Besides safety concerns, Patrick Hogan, an unhoused man, is quoted reflecting on riverbed days: “There was more freedom of movement, more feeling of community, people looking out for each other, including people outside the homeless community. There was a real sense of belonging.” Since not everyone is seeking shelter, the city has pursued arrests tied to repeated refusals, part of a statewide crackdown on homelessness where Mayor Mahan and Governor Newsom are in alignment with President Trump. Even so, 1,400 individuals are on the county’s shelter waiting list, and more people have become homeless in San Jose and Santa Clara County. While safe camping sites and tiny homes have helped reduce the proportion of unsheltered among the homeless population, the sweeps have been swift, removing 462 encampments on Valley Water land from January to August. Over the year, I collected more than thirty (expired) area-wide abatement notices along the trail, each with a different date or location.

Alfredo never encountered anything like the current pace. He lived in relative dignity, even making artwork. His belongings were thrown away, in violation of official city procedures. People who had learned how to survive outdoors were suddenly forced to move without the gear that made survival possible. Now that his tent is gone, he sleeps under the porch of a public library. After I brought him a care package for the holidays, I was heartened to see that in the time it took me to jog to the north end of the trail and back, he had already painted a page in the new sketchbook.

If the holidays are supposed to sharpen our attention toward generosity, what are we actually seeing when we step onto this trail? And after the season passes, what would it look like to keep paying attention? What could change if more of us refused the comfort of not noticing? If resilience is something the trail keeps demonstrating again and again, in small gestures of care and persistence, can that resilience become contagious, and point toward a future where what’s hidden is no longer ignored?