More people are sleeping on sidewalks in Sacramento – even as federal spending rises
More and more people are living on Sacramento’s streets, in makeshift encampments or their cars — or what the federal government calls “other places not suitable for human habitation.”
Seventy percent of homeless people in Sacramento County were living in unsheltered conditions in the 2019 count, up from 56% in 2017 and 40% in 2015.
Federal lawmakers say they understand the gravity of the problem. The issue got unusually unified political support this year as House and Senate budget-writers quietly agreed on more spending.
Congress wants to spend about $2.8 billion in fiscal 2020, the 12-month period that began Oct. 1, on homeless assistance grants, the major funding source to help the homeless. Final votes are likely sometime this month on what would be about a 6% increase over last year.
Advocacy groups dealing daily with the homeless generally praise the effort.
“The programs are great,” said Steve Berg, vice president for programs and policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Virtually all that money, though, is to maintain and improve previously funded projects.
That’s barely enough to keep pace, particularly in high-cost California. “The cost of building is so high, the level the funding is not sufficient,” said John Parvensky, acting executive director at the National Coalition for the Homeless.
He noted that the 6% increase would not be enough to cover rising rents in many places.
While it’s critical to spend to keep already housed people in place, the current funding level makes it difficult to help people now on the streets or in emergency shelters, Parvensky said.
“The bottom line is that current HUD funding is very effective for those who are targeted – which are generally some of the more vulnerable and chronically homeless people and some families,” said Michael Ullman, National Homeless Information Project coordinator.
But stopping the flow of new people into homelessness, and the streets or shelters, is much more complex, he said. Ullman urged a “complete rethinking of the problem and the definition of homelessness.”
“The white upper class policy maker cannot fathom living 10 or 50 to a large room — maybe it’s not great, but it’s not homeless. And two-thirds of the people currently defined as homeless live in congregate housing,” he said.
California’s homeless crisis
Those who deal with the problems day after day understand Ullman’s concern.
Overall, Sacramento’s survey found 5,570 people are homeless on a given night, up 19% from 2017. Of those people, 1,670 were sheltered and 3,900, or 70%, were unsheltered. That’s double the national percentage of 35% and despite millions of dollars in both state and local funding spent to address the problem.
El Dorado County last year was tied for first with Clackamas County, Oregon, among suburban areas in the number of chronically homeless people who were unsheltered, and second in the percentage of suburban families who were unsheltered.
“My hope is that some in our delegation understand the crisis in California, that the numbers are increasing dramatically in the West Coast in general,” said Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness.
Forty-seven percent of all unsheltered people in the country last year lived in California, the HUD data show. One-third of all homeless unaccompanied youths live in the state.
In Los Angeles, officials are able to provide housing for an estimated 150 new people a day. But an estimated 180 are coming into the system every day.
“Too often, folks are falling into homelessness faster than we can house them,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told Congress earlier this year.
Among major U. S. population centers, the city of Fresno, Fresno County and Madera County had the highest percentage of homeless people who were unsheltered in the nation — 88.7%, according to HUD data. The next four highest percentages were also in California.
Asked if Washington is sensitive enough to West Coast problems, Rep. David Price, D-North Carolina, who heads the House subcommittee that writes the housing spending bill, said, “I know what’s going on there and I think a lot of my colleagues do. We have given homelessness a very prominent place in this bill.”
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, the top subcommittee Republican, was more circumspect.
“That’s a good question,” he said. “I don’t have a good answer because I can’t tell you I’m an expert on what every state is doing.”
What’s needed, advocates say, is political pressure to put more money into programs that are already working.
“We know this approach works and our country has seen the success of these efforts,” Joseph Horiye, Western region program vice president at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which promotes community programs, told Congress.
“We know that progress can be made when the federal government provides adequate resources.”
This story was originally published December 16, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
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