Mayor McCarty said downtown Sacramento homeless population down 70%. Is he right?
Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty said Tuesday at the annual State of Downtown breakfast event that downtown homelessness had dropped 70% since 2023.
“Homelessness in the central city is down significantly as well. Of course, it’s not over. We can see it every day, a reminder that our work is not done. The downtown point of time count has dropped dramatically since 2023 by 70%,” McCarty said during the annual event Tuesday at the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center. “Again, not solved, but headed in the right direction.”
Homelessness advocates and service providers said they were surprised by the figure, noting that the official Point-in-Time results have not yet been released. So where did the 70% figure come from?
It came from the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, the nonprofit 66-block improvement district that represents downtown businesses and that hosts the annual breakfast event. It is unclear whether the drop reflects fewer people experiencing homelessness downtown or a shift to nearby neighborhoods outside the partnership’s boundaries.
“Our unofficial count at the end of 2022 was 175, and our unofficial count at the end of 2025 was 72,” said Madelyn Bussola, a partnership spokesperson. “Our public space team walks the district roughly once a quarter and observes the number of tents in (the) district and those sleeping on the street before 6 a.m.
“It is not scientific, which is why we refer to it as unofficial.”
That represents a 58.9% drop.
McCarty said 70% because the partnership on Feb. 12 gave the Mayor’s Office different numbers, 206 and 56, according to a spokesperson for McCarty’s office — a 72.8% difference.
During the official, federally mandated Point-in-Time count every other winter, volunteers fan out across the county to count people experiencing homelessness. The collected data is then analyzed by an outside statistician before the report is issued. The latest count was held over two nights in January, and the results are scheduled to be released in late spring or early summer, said Kim Winters, a spokesperson for Sacramento Steps Forward, which leads the effort.
The most recent PIT count report, released in 2024, found that there were roughly 3,053 unsheltered homeless people living in the city. The report did not break down how many were living downtown or within the partnership.
Nonprofit questions drop
Despite the drop McCarty mentioned, Angela Hassell, executive director of Loaves & Fishes, said the number of people it has served with meals and services from 2023 to the present has remained essentially flat. The nonprofit, located just north of downtown in the River District, serves between 9,000 and 10,000 unduplicated people a year.
Hassell said Loaves & Fishes has seen a 1% decrease since 2023 in the number of people served, a figure that does not include shelter beds.
“A 70% decrease in downtown homelessness feels like a wildly inaccurate number based on our experiences in serving folks in downtown that are homeless,” Hassell said.
McCarty through a spokesperson declined to comment on Hassell’s remarks.
The vast majority of the people who go to Loaves & Fishes for meals sleep within a two-mile radius of its campus — which includes the American River Parkway — and travel there on foot or by bicycle, she said.
Hassell said a drop in visible downtown homelessness could be in part due to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, in which the court ruled that cities can enforce bans on camping in public spaces even when no shelter beds are available, finding that such enforcement does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Since that ruling in 2024, Sacramento can legally ban people from camping on public property even if no shelter bed is available to them.
In July, the City Council voted 6-3 to ban homeless people from sleeping outside City Hall. McCarty voted in favor.
McCarty during the speech also said the city would be opening new shelter beds at the Roseville Road shelter, as well as new tiny home shelters for seniors.
“We’ve opened 500 new beds in the last 15 months,” McCarty said. “But we’re not done. We’ve embraced a solid six-point plan to create 600 more beds moving forward. We’re pairing accountability with cost-effectiveness, and it’s making a difference here in Sacramento.”
The county has also been adding shelters, with a $64 million, 275-bed Watt Avenue shelter set to open this summer.
In total, there are now 2,800 city- and county-funded shelter beds in Sacramento, more than ever before. But there is still a wait list of over 3,000 people, including 600 families, for a shelter bed on any given night, Emily Halcon, the county’s director of homeless services and housing, has said.
A Sacramento Steps Forward database found there are at least 9,000 homeless people living in the county, as of December. That number counts people who have engaged with service providers in the last 30 days.
The Bee’s Ishani Desai contributed to this story.
This story was originally published February 25, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
