Sacramento will ease restrictions on opening warming centers for the homeless
The city of Sacramento will open warming centers for the homeless this winter for the first time in four years.
City officials will open a 60-bed shelter at the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria in downtown Sacramento when temperatures dip below 33 degrees, Mayor Darrell Steinberg announced in a news release Tuesday. The city will also open warming centers in about 60 trailers at the Cal Expo fairgrounds, currently being used for coronavirus isolation, as they become available. The number of motel vouchers will also be increased.
“It feels cold and it’s not even winter yet,” Steinberg said. “This is the right thing to do.”
The new library galleria threshold is less strict than the current controversial protocol, which says warming centers can only open if there are three consecutive nights of temperatures hitting 32 degrees or less. Temperatures are not expected to hit the new threshold this week in Sacramento, according to the National Weather Service, but are expected to dip into the 30s.
Homeless activists, who have been pushing city and county officials to open the warming centers for weeks, said the city’s plan does not go far enough.
“It’s still way too low of a number,” said Joe Smith, advocacy director for homeless nonprofit Loaves and Fishes. “It’s cold now. We just finished a storm and we’re about to head into another one.”
Smith said officials need to open more centers and keep them open all winter, including when it’s warmer than 32 degrees but raining or windy. Bob Erlenbusch of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness agreed: “It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s like a half step.”
But the more days the city has a congregate warming center open, the more it risks a coronavirus outbreak among the vulnerable homeless population, said Daniel Bowers, the city’s director of emergency management.
“It’s risk versus reward here,” Bowers said. “You don’t want to just expose them in a public setting if there’s not a public health weather-related emergency need.”
Sacramento has so far successfully avoided a major coronavirus outbreak among the homeless like those that occurred in shelters in San Francisco and in San Diego. As of Dec. 7, there have been 16 cases of the virus among the homeless since March, a city and county report said.
The library galleria, which the city opened in the summer as a daytime cooling center, has multiple floors to allow for social distancing, Steinberg said.
The beds will be set up 12 feet apart, with glass partitions separating them, Bowers said. Guests will be required to wear masks when they are walking around or sitting up in bed.
The new threshold was set by the county’s department of public health, the release said. The plan for the library galleria, at Eighth and I streets, can be modified as the pandemic circumstances change.
Timeline for motel vouchers, trailers
Unlike the library galleria, the trailers and motel vouchers will not be triggered by a temperature threshold.
The city is paying about $35,000 in federal coronavirus stimulus funds for up to an additional 50 motel rooms per night through the end of the month, the release said. Those new vouchers will supplement a long-running Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency program, and will start to be given out immediately, Bowers said.
Once homeless people receive one of the new vouchers, they can stay in the motel room through the end of the month if they want to, Bowers said.
Priority will be given to families and those most vulnerable to the elements, and people should call 211 for more information, the release said.
The trailers will not open immediately, as they’re currently being used to isolate homeless people who test positive for the coronavirus. As of Saturday, there were 28 people in the 62 trailers, county spokeswoman Janna Haynes said.
Once the trailers are no longer needed for medical isolation, a company will thoroughly clean them and they will be turned into warming centers for women and children for the duration of the winter, Bowers said.
After that, the city will keep the trailers and eventually turn them into homeless shelters, potentially moving them off the Cal Expo site and including them in a new homeless “master plan,” Steinberg said.
“We will do all we can even with all of the COVID restrictions to provide our homeless neighbors with a warm, safe place to come inside,” Steinberg said in the release. “I urge the rest of the region to do the same.”
Sacramento County is planning to allocate $600,000 in state funding to expand motel vouchers this winter, Haynes said. About 40 to 60 of the new vouchers will be available for three nights at a time, when certain weather thresholds are hit, which take into account wind and rain, Haynes said.
Activists have been urging officials to open warming centers for weeks, as overnight temperatures dip into the 30s and rain is becoming more frequent. In November, a homeless man named Gregory Tarola, 63, died while sleeping outdoors near Loaves and Fishes. His cause of death is not yet determined, but he was found in the morning covered in blankets wet from the rain, activists said.
According to city and county guidelines adopted in 2012, temperatures must hit freezing for three consecutive nights for officials to open warming centers. That didn’t happen the last two winters, and the centers did not open. In the winter of 2016-2017, the city opened three warming centers and the county opened two.
The official severe weather guidelines are not being updated at this time, the city release said. But it appears that both city and county officials are preparing to take action without the strict guidelines being met this winter.
Activists also urged officials to open the centers last winter, when a man named Carl Ulmer died on the street. Steinberg said it was important to open the centers this year, partly due to coronavirus.
As of Dec. 5, there are 439 homeless people staying in three Project Roomkey motel rooms to protect them from the virus, and about 50 women staying in a new shelter in Meadowview, but there are likely thousands still on the streets.
Volunteers in January 2019 counted 5,570 homeless people living in Sacramento County, mostly sleeping outdoors and mostly in the city — a 19% increase from 2017. About 10,000 to 11,000 people would become homeless throughout the course of 2019, the report estimated. A new homeless count set for this winter is canceled, but it seems like more people are suffering, Steinberg said.
“COVID has exacerbated all of the stresses in our community,” Steinberg said. “Including the plight of people who are unsheltered.”
This story was originally published December 15, 2020 at 11:29 AM.
