Sacramento, check your outrage: You didn’t want a mayor with power to spare the homeless
Come on, Sacramento.
Let’s not not respond with selective outrage and collective amnesia over who is to blame for the deaths of five homeless people amid 60-mph-hour winds and the worst storm to hit our region in years last week. What are we doing?
In one breath, some are calling for City Manager Howard Chan to be fired for not opening a city warming center at the downtown library that might have spared homeless people from the wicked weather. But retroactive outrage directed at Chan conveniently overlooks how the will of Sacramento residents played a role in the decisions that led to that horrible night of shame.
Twelve weeks before what was described by some as a “night of terror” for the homeless, Sacramento residents rejected Measure A – a ballot initiative which would have transferred many administrative powers in the city from Chan to Mayor Darrell Steinberg.
The votes were not close, with “no” votes winning by 15 percentage points. Just shy of 120,000 people voted no on Measure A, beating “yes” by 30,717 votes.
That’s what they call a rout. Here was one of the primary arguments employed by opponents of Measure A: “The notion that the mayor is more accountable than the city manager I think is a false notion,” said Heather Fargo, the former Sacramento mayor, in a video distributed by the No on Measure A forces during the election campaign.
“City managers are professional. They are trained to manage large organizations. The city is a billion dollar operation. It has 5,000 employees. It’s really a big business and it needs someone who is prepared and trained to handle it.”
Have any words aged that badly in Sacramento in the last three months?
Imagine if Measure A passed
I get why long time residents like Fargo were so opposed to Measure A. Some people want Sacramento to stay provincial as it always has been. And special interests, such as the city fire union, want things just as they are. They are successful at getting their way on the council so long as no one official is too powerful.
But I never got why young progressives jumped in bed with these interests protecting a status quo that works for them. People like Fargo argued that Measure A would be bad for neighborhoods, but which neighborhoods was she talking about?
Almost 60% of the city opposed empowering Steinberg and a Bee analysis of the vote showed that the strongest opposition came in the most well-heeled communities in Sacramento.
A city of well-educated policy wonks and political people in neighborhoods where everything is just dandy wanted Chan – who is not elected – to run the city. Measure A was most popular in Meadowview, Valley Hi, North Sacramento and parts of Natomas.
So as it turned out, progressives ended up on the same side as the wealthy neighborhoods and against struggling neighborhoods.
It’s ironic considering what might have happened if Measure A had passed.
If executive authority to run the city, its employees and its vast processes had transferred to Steinberg on Jan. 1, there should be little doubt that he would have opened the city warming center on Jan. 26, sparing 60 homeless people from winds and rain that knocked out power across the region and wrenched mature trees off their roots as if they were were plastic toys.
Why didn’t Chan act that decisively?
Because that’s not how city managers operate in Sacramento.
Chan works at the pleasure of nine city council members. He must be able to count to five, a council majority, to get things done.
Chan would argue with this, but he is not accountable to voters the way Steinberg is. Chan is accountable to his nine city council bosses and all the employees in the city. What was Chan advocating before the city council the night that homeless people were left out in the elements?
He wanted more cops for the city, a plan that Steinberg opposed.
Why was Chan doing this? Because that’s what city managers do in Sacramento.
They try to increase the number of employees under them, especially if those employees are in law enforcement because more law enforcement gives people who vote in big numbers, people in affluent communities, a sense of safety. It gives business leaders a sense of safety. And that, dear friends, is how Sacramento works.
That’s what Sacramento was voting for on Measure A. If you thought otherwise, you were mistaken.
Measure A was a vote for the status quo in Sacramento. Yet, now, progressives are furious.
A group called Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness sent an email to city council members on Monday that said: “You need to hold Howard Chan accountable for his lack of leadership. He failed our unhoused neighbors...He should have the decency to resign, and if he does not, you need to fire him immediately.”
Back to Measure A: People fought hard to keep Chan in power and the city council as a whole to keep Chan in check. That means it would take a majority vote to fire him. I checked on Monday, and guess what? It’s not happening.
He still has more explaining to do, but his council bosses don’t seem inclined to remove him. Does that make you angry? Well, that’s the system of city government you voted for.
Besides, even if the warming center had been opened, that would not have helped hundreds or thousands of other homeless people in the city and county. Would leaving them outside have been OK?
Steinberg’s record on homelessness
But here is the biggest irony: The people who are furious about what happened were the same people who opposed Steinberg, and he has done more, and cares more, about homelessness than any other politician in the region.
He was the driving force behind the city getting in federal dollars to devote to outreach and case management for the homelessness. He worked with the county to get $44 million for additional mental health services in the homeless community.
He was the force behind a 200-bed triage center on Railroad Drive. He was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to lead the state’s commission on homelessness and supportive housing. He has moved the city to buy tiny homes to house the homeless. He won council approval to develop a master plan to locate homeless services in the city that, if approved in June, would allow the city to increase the speed and volume of homeless projects.
Steinberg also called for a statewide legal right for people to be indoors.
Steinberg’s words inspired a potentially landmark lawsuit filed in Los Angeles by the LA Alliance for Human Rights. The Associated Press wrote that this suit “accused officials in greater Los Angeles of failing to comprehensively addresses the homelessness problem. “
The LA Alliance for Human Rights suit seeks to change the trajectory of L.A.’s homelessness crisis by compelling the city and county of Los Angeles to create tens of thousands of new beds for the homeless and provide them with services to keep them healthy and safe. If successful, it could trigger statewide policy changes.
This week, U.S. District Court Judge David Carter is holding a hearing in L.A.’s Skid Row to discuss with officials how to mitigate the “extraordinarily harsh” conditions for homeless residents. Carter wrote in a court order that the city of Los Angeles has abdicated its responsibilities to homeless people.
The judge has said the L.A. homeless case has some parallels with Brown v. Board of Education, the 1950s case that desegregated public schools, in that, sometimes, the judicial branch must step in when other branches of government fail.
“Steinberg’s op-ed in the Los Angeles Times was a cornerstone of this lawsuit,” said Daniel Conway, a Sacramento-based policy advisor for the LA Alliance for Human Rights.
“(Steinberg’s) writing was a foundational document in how we approached this whole thing...He acknowledged that despite good intentions, the emphasis on permanent supportive housing has not worked, it is too expensive, there are too few units. Steinberg also said that the housed and unhoused should have the right and expectation to live indoors while enjoying clean and public spaces. He really took on conventional wisdom”
But as Sacramento’s city charter is currently written, the mayor of Sacramento gets to run meetings on Tuesday’s while the city manager runs the city. That might work for getting more cops, but between Steinberg and Chan, who is better equipped to deal with homelessness?
That question did not come up in the Measure A campaign.
This story was originally published February 2, 2021 at 12:00 PM.
