Santa Clara County

Though it may not always make the headlines, Santa Clara County has the ninth biggest homeless population in the United States.

This auditory guessing game is part of Audiograph, a crowd-sourced collaborative radio project mapping the sonic signature of each of the Bay Area’s nine counties. By using the sounds of voices, nature, industry, and music, Audiograph tells the story of where you live and the people who live there with you. Every Thursday, we reveal the origins of that week's sound on Crosscurrents, and here in weekly blog posts.

When you walk inside the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park, you can tell right away that this is home for over 400 people. They’ve painted their units bright colors. There are traditional mobile homes that look like small rectangular bungalows – but there are also little cottages, Airstream trailers, and RVs. Kids zigzag between the park’s six streets on their bikes.

“I was 11 when we moved here with my parents. I practically grew up here,” says Erika Escalante.

This month a state Senate committee signed off on a measure regulating where e-smokers can vape, but local and public health officials have been at the center of the debate throughout California for more than a year.

I’m on the Valley Transportation Authority’s Line 22 bus somewhere between East San Jose and Palo Alto. It’s 2:30 a.m., and it’s raining. I start a conversation with a man sitting down, and ask him if he’s heard the nickname for the bus.

“Yeah, well there's the Motel 22 or Hotel 22. That's the big one I've heard.”

I ask him what he calls the bus.

“I call it home.”

Crews dismantled a large homeless encampment in San Jose Thursday. Called the “Jungle,” it’s thought to be the biggest homeless camp in the country. The camp was home to up to three hundred people who occupied over sixty acres of a park along a creek bed. But San Jose has been under pressure from different agencies who say the Jungle is polluting the creek.

Early Thursday morning, Tamara Cockrell walked away from the Jungle, pushing a shopping cart piled high with all her belongings.

While I was reporting “Finding a home on Hotel 22” about the way some homeless use Line 22 in Santa Clara County as a shelter, I looked up the bus line on Yelp. I found a bunch of reviews, mostly from regular riders of the bus. 

People said pretty typical things, like “love those fast aggressive male drivers” and “bus drivers please lower the bus so I can get my bike on the rack easier.”

But the one that caught my eye was from Helen Garcia. She wrote: