Hundreds of homeless living under a Sacramento freeway are being evicted. Where will they go?
Downtown Sacramento has seen social and economic upheaval in the last year that has challenged and often overwhelmed city leaders. There’s more to come.
As many as 300 homeless people living in rows of sidewalk tents under the elevated W-X section of Highway 50 are about to be ordered to pack up and move. Caltrans is launching a highway widening project, and the teeming tent cities between Sixth and 26th streets are directly under the construction zone.
Caltrans and city officials are negotiating a way to get them safely relocated. But where?
Robert Ash, 41, a former tattoo artist living under the freeway with his wife Candace, their Siamese kitten Meow Meow and a scruffy dog named Sugar, had no idea until told last week by a Sacramento Bee reporter that his colony of 22nd Street denizens is about to be uprooted.
“I’ll have to tell my neighbors. I don’t think any of us out here knew that,” he said, sitting on the curb feeding his pets pancakes from Pancake Circus. “I guess we’ll pick up and move. I don’t know where. “
The upcoming evictions are the latest of several problematic moments involving Sacramento’s burgeoning street population during COVID-19, many of whom have migrated from hidden campsites to more open sites under freeways. Pandemic health orders prohibit police from rousting them.
In January, a huge wind and rain storm flattened tents during a night in which several homeless died, including one living under the W-X freeway. City leaders hurriedly rewrote rules to get a couple of overnight warming centers open more often. But they were quickly forced to close again when four people tested positive for COVID-19.
The city has since reopened those shelters, one of them in the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria, often previously used for wedding parties, galas and other formal events. This Tuesday afternoon, the mayor and city council will consider a plan to expand the use of those warming centers, turning them into year-round drop-in centers where people can stay overnight regardless of weather.
Mayor Darrell Steinberg said those could be places where people experiencing homelessness could get help from mental health and substance abuse counselors, with the possibility of then moving into a more formal homeless shelter - and to more permanent housing and potentially integration back into society.
“We have an obligation to move as many people indoors as possible,” Steinberg said. He called the Tuesday vote the most important the council will take on homelessness over the next four years. The city is working on a homeless master plan as well.
Homeless shelter options
The city also is building a shelter for street residents on Broadway at Alhambra Boulevard, but it won’t open until this summer, and will only handle 50 people because of COVID-19 restrictions.
Those efforts do not solve the immediate problem of what happens to hundreds of homeless people – including dozens who live in parked vehicles – under the freeway when Caltrans launches construction in the coming weeks. Caltrans contracted crews already are stationing equipment in the parking lots under the freeway.
Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela has taken the lead, along with city housing and homeless staff, in attempting to find solutions. It’s an emergency “triage moment,” she said, but perhaps also an opportunity to find a path to some fundamental change.
Valenzuela toured the freeway area Thursday with Caltrans officials and is hoping to win approval to allow displaced homeless people to move onto two parking lots the city leases from the state between Sixth and Eighth streets and W and X streets.
It’s the former site of the city’s Sunday Farmer’s Market, which has been moved temporarily to Arden Fair Mall to avoid the construction zone. Valenzuela said she has asked Caltrans to allow the city to set up temporary encampment sites on the portions of those two lots that are north and south of the freeway overpass, just outside the construction area.
The city is getting mobile showers and bathrooms it can install on the site, Valenzuela said. The site would be patrolled or monitored by the city and by advocates for the homeless. She said the city may be able to set up temporary storage for items, such as recyclables, that some homeless residents have collected.
Caltrans officials acknowledged those discussions with Valenzuela and the city, but said a deal has not been finalized.
Valenzuela also said she is hoping the city can expand its hotel room voucher system in the coming weeks, adding more rooms and making them available for longer than just a few days for some of those living under the freeway who are more in need of getting indoors.
She said she and city staff also are exploring whether they can rent some of the emergency tiny homes that were used after the Camp Fire in Butte County and locate them on parking lots under the Business 80/Capital City Freeway overpasses in the R Street area.
It’s proving to be a tricky task, though, with bureaucratic hoops to jump, some of which might take months.
“This isn’t perfect,” Valenzuela said. “It’s a ‘lemonade (out-of-lemons) situation,’ but this feels like it might actually work out. It is faster than we’ve moved before. Staff has been moving quickly. I think there is an energy now to figure this out.”
More housing needed
Bob Erlenbusch of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness called the approach humane, and Crystal Sanchez, head of the Sacramento Homeless Union, said Valenzuela’s efforts are laudable. But Sanchez said homeless people don’t trust the city and many won’t be inclined to huddle in a large encampment overseen by officials. Nor is that the best solution she said for the many who have mental health, drug and gang-related issues that make it less appropriate for them to mingle in large encampments with others.
“Honestly, this is a ‘band-aid on a bleedout’ situation,” Sanchez said. “We have been waiting years for real-time housing.”
City officials in particular do not want the people living under the freeway to simply scatter into neighborhoods.
But Ash, the former tattoo artist, is among those who say they are not necessarily inclined to live at a city-controlled site, preferring places where he has freedom and doesn’t have to follow city rules.
Ash, who became homeless after being shot multiple times in his left leg during a dispute, said he knows his current neighbors under the freeway on 22nd Street and gets along well with most of them. “There are always problems, but for the most part they are balanced out. We know each other.”
He has no family nearby to connect with. He thinks he may move to a place called The Badlands, which he said is a wilderness area at the interchange of Highways 99 and 50. But there already are homeless encampments there, and he doesn’t know much about them.
“Who knows what you are going to run into,” he said. “There’s predators out here.”
‘I want a front door again’
Across the street, Robert Erhart, 51, who said he worked for UPS for 17 years, is far more eager to get off the streets where, he said, “you see things you never want to see. You meet people you never want to meet.”
He has some family in the area, but said he hasn’t told them how he ended up homeless and doesn’t want to ask them for help. He wasn’t surprised , he said, when he heard the people living under the freeway will be ordered to leave. That happened frequently before COVID-19 hit.
“That’s part of the un-housed experience,” he said.
He would consider moving to a city-run site, especially if he feels safe there. “I don’t want to be in a construction zone,” he said.
But he doesn’t trust the government to come through, and said he might try to move in with some musician friends at a bus parked near Miller Park, a few miles away.
What he really wants is for the city or county to come to his aid and help him figure out a way to get off the streets.
“I want the security of a front door again,” Erhart said. “I want to work and pay taxes.”
At the moment, that may be a long shot, just given the numbers: The city currently has 1,200 beds for homeless people where they can get access to social services that might help them get off the streets permanently. But, according to Steinberg, there are at least 6,000 people in the city experiencing homelessness.
This story was originally published March 8, 2021 at 5:00 AM.