Sacramento to reopen homeless site at Miller Park, but it will look different. Here’s how
The city of Sacramento will reopen its only sanctioned campsite for homeless people at Miller Park — this time with trailers instead of tents.
City Manager Howard Chan decided to reopen the safe ground after Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela last week criticized him for closing it.
“I’m thrilled to be moving forward with trailers in Miller Park,” Valenzuela said in a city blog post Tuesday. “The safe ground at Miller Park has been an incredible resource, allowing us to address the urgency of the homelessness crisis in our community. This new setup will provide guests with a much better experience with climate control and other amenities that were not previously available.”
The safe ground opened about a year ago with room for 80 people to live in identical tents, with security, bathrooms, showers, drinking water, medical services and help finding housing. Chan closed the site along the Sacramento River during severe rain and wind storms last month, due to flooding concerns. After the storm, Valenzuela asked him to reopen it and he declined, citing a plan to shift the funding to affordable housing.
This time instead of tents, the safe ground will have 15 temperature-controlled trailers. Each trailer will contain three beds, serving a total of 45 people. That’s down from the 80 people who were staying in the tents at the site, but the trailers will provide people relief from the deadly heat, cold and rain. At least two unhoused men have died so far this winter from hypothermia.
The trailers, intended for the homeless, have been sitting unused at a city lot since 2021. There are still additional trailers there, as well as tiny homes.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services provided the trailers to the city in 2020, and the city used them to quarantine COVID-positive homeless men and women at Cal Expo. But the city stopped using the trailers in June 2021 when other options, mainly motels, became available for quarantine shelter space.
“It has always been our intention to reopen the Miller Park site in partnership with the County of Sacramento,” said City Manager Howard Chan in the blog post. “I would like to thank the county for its collaboration on this effort, and we look forward to announcing and implementing additional strategies to address homelessness in the near future.”
The trailers at Miller Park are included in the city and county’s roughly 2,300 shelter beds and spaces. There are an estimated 9,300 homeless people in Sacramento, most of whom are living outdoors.
This story was originally published February 14, 2023 at 5:10 PM.
