Sacramento council approves new housing for homeless seniors that could charge fees
Sacramento plans to scale back its congregate housing homeless shelters and instead turn its focus to building interim housing micro-communities that could charge homeless seniors a fee.
These efforts, some of which are not yet official mandates, received support at Tuesday’s City Council meeting from the majority of the elected body, Interim City Manager Leyne Milstein and the city’s homelessness director Brian Pedro. The city will implement these new strategies while dealing with a structural budget deficit, decreased state funding and slow efforts to build permanent housing.
Sacramento funds 18 shelter sites at an annual operating cost of $34.5 million. Despite these efforts, the region’s homelessness population has nearly doubled since 2017 and thousands of people remain on shelter waitlists.
“I don’t think that we can wait for things to be perfect,” said Pedro, director for the Department of Community Response. “We’re waiting for the perfect model to appear. This is pretty close to as perfect as we can get with what we have available to us.”
Specifics on these interim housing micro-communities remain unknown, including locations, size and if fees will be charged. Locations and size of the three approved micro-communities will be under the authority of Milstein. The council will vote if fees will be charged at a later date though the majority were supportive of the idea.
“I fully support and embrace what we are doing today and the direction going forward,” said Mayor Kevin McCarty.
Charging people at some shelters had been discussed by Pedro for months, but Tuesday marked the first time it was publicly discussed by the council. Such an idea remains uncommon across the country and faced pushback from multiple public speakers and Council members Roger Dickinson, Caity Maple and Mai Vang.
“People in this condition aren’t like the rest of us, aren’t they?” Dickinson asked. “They don’t have money to go out to dinner and to go to the movies.”
The proposed temporary micro-communities would develop housing for up to 40 seniors on vacant city land and require fees of roughly 30% of an individual’s income, Pedro said. Services at these locations would include security, wellness checks, electrical, plumbing, internet, laundry, storage and voluntary supportive services.
“You’re not in a room for the night,” Pedro said. “You’re in more than an extended stay, but you’re not completely in a house.”
Pedro said such an idea will be more cost efficient and create a better dynamic compared to city congregate housing shelters like the X Street Navigation Center. Over five years, the city estimated it would save $4 million using interim housing micro-communities instead of congregate shelters.
Seniors are the target population because people 50 and older are the fastest growing homeless population and typically receive Social Security to pay for rent, Pedro added.
The idea of fees received backlash from council members and public speakers on Tuesday. Dickinson raised concerns for if homeless individuals could afford such fees and if it would cause them to remain in emergency shelters.
“How many people will be deterred from going under a roof because they have to pay a fee for rent to do that?” Dickinson questioned.
Others, including public speaker Cherie Dimmerling, asked why the city does not try more Safe Ground sites like Camp Resolution — a former homeless camp of mostly senior women living in trailers — which closed down last year. These sites are relatively low cost to the city and often lauded by homeless advocates for providing self autonomy.
“You can’t think of a better way to use the money than say safe ground sites,” Dimmerling said. “When they work, they work well.”
As part of his presentation, Pedro called Camp Resolution an “utter failure” and said the city had issues with providing services. The city previously cited fire code violations and other alleged lease violations for dismantling the site.
Pedro also said on Tuesday that the city would also “slowly ramp down” its congregate shelters and explore more interim housing options. No timeline was given.
Earlier in the meeting, the council unanimously approved new contracts at three of its congregate shelters that would lead to reduced staffing and decreased services.
“We don’t want to alarm anybody that we’re shutting shelters down tomorrow,” Pedro said.
Pedro started Tuesday’s workshop with an overview of Sacramento’s homeless response since 2017 when the city launched its first shelter.
Since that time, the city has opened 1,375 shelter beds and spent more than $115 million on homeless programs and projects. Another $15.5 million was spent on encampment clean-up. As of last year, an estimated 6,600 homeless people lived in Sacramento County.
Pedro said challenges to the current system include reduced state homelessness funding, the high cost of emergency shelters and the city falling behind its housing goals. Last month, a report found that Sacramento had built less than a third of the units needed for extremely low or very low-income tenants in 2024.
The cost to build the required extremely low-income housing units by 2029 would be nearly $2.3 billion, Pedro said.
“We don’t have an immediate plan in place to get our unsheltered off the streets,” Pedro said. “We have emergency shelters and as much service that we can provide, but there’s nothing that’s specifically looking at how we can house our unsheltered other than by emergency shelter.”
This story was originally published April 30, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
