Sacramento launches first ‘Safe Ground’ homeless camping site under downtown freeway
For years, dismayed Sacramento city officials watched as unhoused people set up disheveled tent cities under downtown freeways. Now, in a strategy shift, the city is inviting some homeless to do just that — but in a controlled fashion.
Saturday, under a newly bolted “Safe Ground” sign on a pole in a parking lot at 6th and W streets, crews setup up a row of port-a-potties and cleaning stations, and city officials put out the word:
“This is a place where not only you can stay without being asked to move every day, but we can ramp up case management and make this a full-service triage center,” Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela, who represents downtown, said.
The City Council recently voted to set up a series of indoor or outdoor triage centers citywide where the unsheltered can come for services and, in this case, set up residence.
There will be room for 100 to 150 unhoused at the site under the W-X portion of the Capital City Freeway, Valenzuela said. She, Mayor Darrell Steinberg and Bridgette Dean, the city’s new director of the Community Response Office, were there Saturday overseeing set up.
Steinberg said the city hopes in a week or so to erect the first row of 30 pallet homes on site, also known as “tiny homes,” which are hardly bigger than a large closet and can be assembled or disassembled in an hour.
“This is a part of what we’ve been pushing for for years,” Steinberg said. It’s the simplest form of having a roof overhead, he said, but if it is combined with an onsite counseling trailer and overseen by trained formerly unhoused people, it could become the first of a series of city-sponsored sites where people experiencing homelessness can stay and get help to fix the problems that put them on the street in the first place.
The Safe Ground lot is on the outer edges of the former site of the Sunday Farmers Market, across the street on W from Southside Park, and across X Street from O’Neil Park. The portion of that lot under the freeway will be used by Caltrans as part of its construction zone.
The effort is being organized in a hurry as the city reacts to a yet another crisis moment in Sacramento’s years’ long struggle to deal with a massive street camping problem. Caltrans recently disclosed that it planned to evict an estimated 200 to 300 people who have been living in makeshift tent cities on the sidewalks under the W-X freeway between 6th and 26th streets.
The state is turning the area into part of the construction zone, starting Monday, for a nearly half-billion-dollar freeway widening and remodeling project.
Caltrans officials said they began issuing 72-hours notices to freeway residents on Friday.
In an effort to keep those people from filtering into central city residential areas or from setting up riverside encampments, Valenzuela, Dean and other city officials negotiated an agreement with Caltrans to allow unsheltered people to migrate to the parking lot at 6th Street, and eventually potentially to live in other safe ground sites at unused parking lots under other local freeways.
The effort represents an initial test to see how many unhoused street dwellers trust the city enough to choose to stay at a city-sponsored “Safe Ground” site.
Valenzuela said “some folks may not be ready for this.” A number of under-freeway residents already have moved away on their own since word got out about the construction project, she said. Several unsheltered people living under the W-X freeway recently told The Bee they were not inclined to live at a city-run site, fearing that the city would impose rules that are too strict, and expressing concern about other problematic homeless people they might find themselves living next to.
But Valenzuela said she hopes trusted outreach workers from local non-profit groups can persuade some people to give the 6th Street site a try. Those outreach workers spread the news last week as part of an effort led by the city fire department to deliver COVID-19 vaccine doses in the tend cities under the freeway.
Councilwoman Angelique Ashby said in particular she wants to see the city set up some triage centers specifically for women, children and families, to keep them separated from other unsheltered people who may behave problematically because of mental health problems.
This story was originally published March 27, 2021 at 1:56 PM.