New Sacramento homeless help plan emerges: Day and night triage centers citywide

In a new approach to resolving Sacramento’s entrenched and growing homeless problem, the City Council on Tuesday unanimously voted to expand its modest winter warming center program into a series of full-time, year-round, day-and-night drop-in respite and triage centers.

The goal, according to Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, is to use incoming federal funds to open an undetermined number of drop-in centers spread around the city where homeless can show up to sleep at night or escape the streets during the day, but where social workers ideally would be on duty to guide some of them toward help to get permanently off the streets.

The concept would represent a notable new rung in the region’s homeless services, more robust than warming or cooling centers, but likely smaller and more nimble than formal homeless shelters. The city continues to pursue expansion of its homeless shelter program as well.

“Today’s action could be a turning point for the city,” Steinberg said. “The warming center (program) was an emergency response for weather. Today I am calling for defining ‘emergency’ as year-round, and saying let’s use every public and private space we can to bring people indoors.”

Homeless service providers, who called warming shelters inadequate, lauded the triage program.

The plan remains conceptual at the moment, with the timing, the number and the operational aspects of the triage centers uncertain.

The city has three formal warming centers currently open, from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m., that could potentially be transformed into respite and triage centers: the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria in downtown Sacramento, a city parking garage at 10th and I streets, and the Sacramento Capitol City Seventh-Day Adventist Church in the Lemon Hill area of south Sacramento.

The galleria space hosts nearly 60 people a night. the church though is averaging just four since it opened two weeks ago.

City officials are expected to talk with county officials, as well as with other potential helper agencies to identify sites around the city that can serve as drop-in centers, most likely indoors, but some possibly outdoors. Steinberg said council members could also nominate sites in their districts.

At Councilwoman Angelique Ashby’s suggestion, the city will attempt to dedicate at least one of the triage centers to women, children and families, so that they do not have spend nights in a center with unhoused people whose behavior can be problematic.

“You can spend one minute inside the Galleria (warming center next to Chavez Plaza) and know it is not a place for kiddos,” Ashby said. “We set a land-speed record in moving them out.”

While most homeless shelters have basic rules for who can stay there, the triage centers will in concept be open to almost any unhoused person who wants to drop in. The city would contract with social service companies to operate the sites, but will oversee and control the operations.

Triage centers could be opened as soon as suitable sites are found, Steinberg said, saying the city doesn’t want to wait.

“Now, now, now,” he said. “We can be very aggressive.”

The city plans to create what it calls a homeless master plan in June for dealing more holistically with unhoused individuals, but officials said the triage center concept can move forward ahead of that because of the need to do more now.

The city’s years-long struggle to get more unhoused people off the streets has taken on a greater sense of urgency in the last year, starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlighted how entrenched the problem is in Sacramento and likely increased the number of people living on the streets.

Steinberg estimated some 6,000 people in Sacramento are currently unhoused.

A major wind and rain storm in late January wrecked havoc on homeless encampments, throwing a spotlight on arcane rules that, at the time, appeared to prohibit the city from opening warming shelters except in rare instances.

Several homeless people died the night of that storm, something Steinberg alluded to emotionally during an evening City Council meeting that day as the winds picked up.

“There’s a huge storm out here,” he exclaimed. “People are gonna die tonight. We can’t get a goddamn warming center open for more than one night because the county has rules? I’m sick of it.”

This month, another 200 to 300 homeless people will be forced to leave their encampments under the W-X freeway downtown when Caltrans turns the area into a construction zone for a freeway widening project. City Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela this week negotiated an agreement with Caltrans to let many of them move to a nearby lot near Southside Park, where the city formerly held a farmers market on Sundays.

That’s acceptable temporarily, Steinberg and Valenzuela said, but the ultimate goal is to get people under roofs. The triage centers, they said, could provide a new tool to get toward that goal.

Several council members pushed City Manager Howard Chan to engage the county, which has a variety of social service responsibilities that the city does not formally have, in hopes the county will lend some expertise and help in advancing the work that could be done at triage centers.

This story was originally published March 10, 2021 at 5:00 AM.