‘Absolutely a disgrace.’ Sacramento didn’t open emergency shelters as storm ravaged homeless camps
City and county officials in Sacramento did not open warming centers Tuesday night to shelter the homeless, leaving many with nowhere to go amid torrential rain and dangerous winds that destroyed encampments and injured some of the city’s most vulnerable.
Facing pressure from activists and others worried about the continued wave of severe weather, the City Council scheduled an emergency meeting for 3 p.m. Wednesday to come up with a plan to get more people indoors immediately this winter. The city will open at least one warming center Wednesday night, at the downtown Tsakopoulos Library Galleria, Mayor Darrell Steinberg announced Wednesday.
Despite the forecast for fierce winds and heavy rains, the temperature Tuesday night did not hit 32 degrees — the threshold that triggers the city to open a warming center this winter, though a wind chill dropped it below the freezing mark. The city opened a warming center Monday night at the library galleria, but closed it Tuesday, just hours before the storm rolled in.
While sitting in a council meeting Tuesday night, Steinberg received an email from Loaves and Fishes Advocacy Director Joe Smith. It said entire encampments were going to be destroyed across the city that night.
“There’s a huge storm out here,” Steinberg exclaimed during the meeting after reading Smith’s email out loud, rain and wind pelting against the window of his Greenhaven home. “People are gonna die tonight and it’s just business as usual ... Stop talking about anything but what it’s gonna take to bring more people inside in larger numbers. That’s the only thing that matters. Nothing else matters. None of it.”
As Smith predicted, Wednesday’s storm destroyed encampments across the city. Several tents along the riverfront were crushed by downed trees and branches, injuring people. Cold rain streamed through the flimsy roofs of tents, tarps and campers. Dogs, afraid of the storm, ran loose in the streets. At least one homeless person died, the coroner’s office said.
Homeless activist Crystal Sanchez said 30 homeless people sent her messages until 5 a.m., begging for help.
“(They were) scared to death, tents ripping,” Sanchez said. “I don’t know even how we are going to help them all.”
At Loaves and Fishes, a woman showed up Wednesday morning wearing just a bra and underwear, shaking from the cold, said Shannon Dominguez-Stevens, director of the nonprofit’s Maryhouse facility for women. The woman’s tent had blown away during the night, leaving her exposed to the frigid elements.
“She was completely soaked. Her skin felt like ice, her body was shivering,” Dominguez-Stevens said. There were several others in similar states, she said.
One man named Kirk was in a destroyed River District tent Wednesday morning, shaking in his sleeping bag so bad he couldn’t stand, Smith said. Smith suspected had hypothermia. He called him a ride to the hospital.
“It’s like a natural disaster out there,” Smith said.
Residents of a camp at the end of Basler Street, near the American River north of downtown, assessed the damage the storm had wrought Tuesday morning. Clarence Cooper said he tried his best to hold down a pole holding up his tent as the wind whipped before diving into a smaller tent for shelter.
“It took off,” he said. “I ain’t ever seen a storm that strong.”
Dominguez-Stevens is glad the city is moving toward action, but said it was “absolutely a disgrace” that leaders could not find a way to get people indoors ahead of the storm. She said the storm resulted in more severe damage to the homeless population than any storm she’s seen in her seven years at Loaves and Fishes.
“It’s shameful that in 2021, a city the size of Sacramento can’t pull together and figure out a way to get people sheltered for a night that we anticipated was going to be disastrous,” Dominguez-Stevens said.
Councilwoman Angelique Ashby wants the city to explore opening city facilities immediately for the homeless, including community centers, she said.
Open hotels for homeless amid storm?
City officials are also exploring whether they can open many more hotels for the homeless and be reimbursed from the federal government, under an executive order President Joe Biden signed Thursday. The order mentions the possibility of reimbursing cities for opening “non-congregate shelters” during the coronavirus pandemic through September, though is unclear on the details.
City Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela said she wants the city to spend up to $5 million to open the hotels this week, in the hopes of being reimbursed by the federal government. The council Tuesday agreed to delay Steinberg’s proposal to buy tiny homes for the homeless for one week while officials look into the idea.
It’s not yet clear if the city will indeed be eligible for federal reimbursement, but the city expects to have a roughly $40 million surplus for the budget that ends June 30, Valenzuela pointed out.
“If we can move people into hotel rooms, let’s do it,” Valenzuela said. “There was a massive storm last night and I’m already getting reports of people being found dead on the street.”
At least one homeless person died Tuesday night, near 26th and W Streets in midtown, although coroner’s officials do not currently believe it was weather-related, Sacramento County Coroner Kimberly Gin said. Another homeless person was found dead Tuesday night in North Sacramento, near Howe Avenue and Fair Oaks Boulevard, although that person likely died earlier in the day Tuesday or on Monday, Gin said.
Even when the official cause of death is not weather-related, severe weather often exacerbates existing medical issues, especially in seniors, and can contribute to deaths, medical experts and advocates say.
“They may not have died of hypothermia, but they died because they were outside,” said Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness.
The city and county currently have three hotels sheltering hundreds of homeless people during the pandemic under the state’s Project Roomkey program, as well as a 50-bed women’s shelter in Meadowview. But those shelters, like all shelters in Sacramento, are typically full. According to a January 2019 count, more than 5,570 people are homeless in Sacramento County on any given night. In 2019, a record high of 138 homeless people died on the streets.
This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 1:21 PM.
