Sacramento plans to open 60 tiny homes for homeless within 30 days. Where will they go?
With coronavirus cases surging and winter underway, Sacramento leaders are pushing ahead with a city ordinance allowing sanctioned homeless encampments on public and private property and have set a goal of opening 60 “tiny homes” for the homeless within a month.
The City Council will consider a so-called “Safe Ground” ordinance at its meeting Tuesday, Mayor Darrell Steinberg announced Thursday.
The mayor plans Tuesday to ask the City Council to direct city staff to erect 60 tiny homes on either public or private property within 30 days. The city does not yet have the tiny homes, but the mayor’s office said in the news release the shelters are “readily available,” including “some originally developed for disaster relief.” Tiny homes “can be deployed and assembled within days or even minutes,” the mayor’s office said.
Choosing sites for the tiny homes will be up to City Council members, the release said.
“The only way we can make a difference in the number of people experiencing homelessness is to provide housing options on a mass scale in locations throughout the city, and that’s what the master plan will accomplish,” Steinberg said, referring to a larger homeless plan the council is set to approve in June. “We also know that people are suffering now, and we have to do what we can in the moment to help alleviate that suffering and the impact of unsheltered homelessness on our neighborhoods and businesses.”
Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela said she will “enthusiastically” welcome the tiny homes into her district, which includes the central city and Land Park. She named a gravel lot on Front Street next to the California Automobile Museum as one potential site, which could fit all 60 tiny homes if the property owner agrees.
“It’s near the river, there’s lots of fresh air, there’s no residents over there,” Valenzuela said.
Valenzuela is also exploring potential “Safe Ground” sites for sanctioned tent or car camping on Caltrans land under freeways and in downtown parking garages, which are mostly vacant during the pandemic. A garage at Capitol Avenue and 21st Street might be one good option, she said. A portion of the Amtrak train station parking lot under the overpass could be another.
City staff is expected to post a map of more than 1,700 public and private properties later Thursday that could be used for additional sites for tiny homes and Safe Ground sites. The map, previously released in the fall, might contain fewer sites this time around. Steinberg gave council members the option to remove sites they don’t think are appropriate prior to the re-release.
City Councilman Jay Schenirer said he is also working to find sites, but wants to hold community meetings before naming them, in addition to ranking their feasibility.
“It’s important that we build larger shelters to meet the magnitude of the problem, but every tiny home helps alleviate suffering, and it’s something we can do right now,” Schenirer said in the release. A 50- to 100-bed shelter, previously delayed by the Trump Administration, is set to open in his district under the W-X freeway this summer.
The tiny homes would likely be used as temporary shelter while service providers work to get the guests into more permanent housing.
In June, the city opened about two dozen cabins at a North Sacramento church property for young homeless people. So far, of the 55 people who have stayed there, 11 have moved into permanent housing, eight have moved into temporary housing and three have moved into transitional housing, according to the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency.
Homeless advocates in July opened one Safe Ground site, where people are living in about a dozen tents in a fenced lot with showers, bathrooms and clean drinking water in the Alkali Flat section of downtown. Later that month, Steinberg announced he wanted to buy 500 tiny homes to place on sites across the city. Eight of them have been sitting on a city lot since the summer, unused.
Where could Safe Grounds go?
The ordinance the council will discuss Tuesday would allow the city to duplicate the Alkali Flat Safe Ground across the city — an idea city leaders previously resisted for years.
The ordinance would allow small Safe Ground camps with up to 24 people to open on properties zoned for assembly uses, such as churches, according to a city staff report. It would also allow them to open on industrial or commercial-zoned properties that are a half mile from temporary residential shelters and 500 feet from schools, child care facilities, parks and museums.
The Downtown Sacramento Partnership, Midtown Association, and five other associations requested in a September letter that the council include single-family houses and duplexes in the 500-foot buffer. The River District, the group representing the area just north of downtown, sent a letter asking for that area to be exempt altogether due to an “over concentration of services” in the area.
Valenzuela said she wants to ask the council to remove the museum buffer, and also wants a 300-foot buffer instead of 500 feet, at least for her district.
The cost to get the Safe Ground or tiny homes up and running is about $300,000 to $780,000, with annual ongoing costs of between $24,000 and $600,000, the staff report said. The cost will partly depend on how many services are offered, including services to help people find permanent housing, as requested in the Downtown Partnership letter. The projected costs are much lower than the $5 to $10 million it costs the city to open and operate large shelters for two years.
Of the 658 people who rotated through Railroad Drive, a shelter in a North Sacramento warehouse that cost the city about $5 million, 164 landed in permanent housing — a cost of about $30,000 per permanently housed person.
Homeless crisis grows in Sacramento
In 2019, 138 homeless people died in Sacramento County — about one person every two and a half days, according to an annual report. Homeless advocates say homeless deaths go up in the winter, as the cold exacerbates many existing medical conditions among the vulnerable population.
Volunteers in January 2019 estimated there were 5,570 homeless people living in Sacramento County on any given night and between 10,000 and 11,000 people who would experience homelessness at some point during the year. Most of the people counted were sleeping outdoors in the city of Sacramento.
In addition to addressing homelessness, the city must also work to prevent people from becoming homeless, Steinberg said. During the first six months of 2020, about 3,790 people in Sacramento County escaped homelessness, but another 3,736 became homeless, a database found.
The city expects to receive $15.3 million from the federal government’s latest coronavirus stimulus package later this month for rental assistance, according to the news release. That’s much more than the $4.7 million in federal funds allocated for rental assistance last year. That money provided about 1,175 families with cash to pay rent, but more than 4,400 applied, according to the SHRA. Many of those applicants were outside the city, in the county, Steinberg has said.
The council is also exploring using Measure U sales tax revenue to back bonds so the city can create a $100 million affordable housing trust fund to spark the construction of new affordable units in the city.
The council meeting, set for 2 p.m. Tuesday, will be livestreamed on the city’s website.
This story was originally published January 14, 2021 at 9:35 AM.
