A large homeless encampment is growing on the site Apple earmarked for its North San Jose campus, two years after Apple made waves with a $2.5 billion pledge to combat the Bay Area’s affordable housing and homelessness crisis.

What started as a few RVs parked on the side of Component Drive has grown over the past year into a sprawling camp of dozens of people, a maze of broken-down vehicles and a massive amount of trash scattered across the vacant, Apple-owned property. People with nowhere else to go live there in tents, RVs and wooden structures they built themselves. At least two children call the camp home.

Apple is trying to figure out what to do, but it’s a tough situation. Clearing the camp likely will be difficult both logistically — it’s more challenging to remove structures and vehicles that don’t run than tents — and ethically — there are few places for the displaced residents to go.1

Residents of the camp say there may be as many as 75 people living there.

• 1. “There are approximately 30-35 unhoused people living in the area with an estimated 200 tons of hazardous trash and debris on the private property, making this a complicated and challenging situation,” Daniel Lazo, spokesman for the city of San Jose’s department of Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services, wrote in an email. “There are also an estimated 65-75 operable and inoperable vehicles at the site.”