Elk Grove defends city’s homeless response in answer to Sacramento County grand jury report
Elk Grove leaders defended their response to homelessness while stopping short of endorsing a joint county-wide strategy recommended in a blunt Sacramento County grand jury report that blasted county and cities’ efforts to address the ongoing crisis.
Elk Grove’s letter to Sacramento Superior Court Presiding Judge Michael Bowman, dated Thursday, responds to the grand jury’s investigative report, “Homeless Should Not Mean Hopeless,” released in May.
Elk Grove “has one of the lowest rates of unsheltered homelessness in Sacramento County,” read the response, citing the 2022 point-in-time count, a census-taking of the city’s homeless population. “Nevertheless, homelessness remains a topic of great importance to the City Council, city staff and Elk Grove residents.”
Sacramento County and the county’s incorporated cities are legally required to respond to grand jurors’ findings.
The grand jury in May blasted as “an endless loop of failure” the combined response of county and cities’ leaders to the thousands living on the streets, the rising numbers of unhoused deaths, and the hundreds of millions of dollars spent tackling the crisis. The panel called on county and city leaders to work together to develop a comprehensive homelessness strategy.
“Too often, jurisdictions work independently or informally together, spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and they fail,” the grand jury wrote in the May report. “Leaders in Sacramento County must prioritize a more effective regional approach to solve the burgeoning homelessness problem.”
Nearly 10,000 people sleep unhoused on Sacramento County’s streets, grand jurors said in their report. Elk Grove counted 45 unhoused people in its 2022 tally, up from seven in 2021. City officials, though, have estimated as many as 150 people are homeless in Elk Grove.
Elk Grove’s homeless population makes up less than 1% of those unsheltered in Sacramento County, say city officials.
Grand jurors called on county leaders and Sacramento County’s seven incorporated cities to form a joint powers authority to address homeless by December.
But Elk Grove remains cool to the idea, saying the recommendation “requires further analysis.”
Major changes to how the county and cities respond to homelessness “would best be considered by jurisdictions with a greater number of their residents facing unsheltered homelessness,” the city’s letter read.
City leaders maintain Elk Grove has seen success, citing its mix of outreach and navigation services, transitional housing and efforts to move the unhoused into permanent housing. They point to $2 million in city Measure E sales tax funds and another $1 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars that will go toward a winter shelter, beefing up mental health access and preventing people from falling into homelessness in the first place.
Nearly 675 affordable housing units are under construction and nearly 100 more are readying building permits in October, say city officials. Yet another $9 million in land and loan funding is in the queue to develop an additional 220 affordable housing units, officials say in the letter.
Sacramento County has also opened a wellness center in Elk Grove that offers behavioral health services.
Jurors commenting on Elk Grove’s response remarked on the resources at its disposal to address homelessness.
“Elk Grove is fortunate enough to have sufficient funds and staffing to understand and manage its homeless population,” jurors wrote in May. “Most of the other cities in the county do not have this enviable level of resources.”
Elk Grove’s response to the report comes a year after two major decisions affecting the city’s unhoused: an ordinance barring encampments from nearly all public spaces in the city; and its rejection of a proposed affordable housing development in Elk Grove’s historic Old Town to provide permanent housing and services for low-income families who had been homeless.
State housing officials put Elk Grove on notice after the council’s no vote on the Oak Rose apartment project last July, which led to California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s lawsuit against the city in March alleging Elk Grove repeatedly ignored state housing law.
Elk Grove is contesting the suit.
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