Safe ground homeless camps will test Sacramento’s humanity. Are we ready for this gut check?

This summer will be the ultimate gut check for Sacramento and whether this city is capable of doing anything meaningful to reverse the tide of the homelessness crisis.

The city council has gone all-in on safe grounds, the sanctioned sites where the homeless are allowed to camp or shelter in a city-approved location. Bathrooms, security, structure and support services are readily available. A decade ago, the idea was strongly opposed by elected officials, business leaders and many others, including some voices at The Bee.

Too few council members had the backbone or foresight to fight for sanctioned encampments because the idea seemed too extreme. As we all now know, the homeless situation has grown far more desperate in Sacramento.

The fact that we’re here, crafting an aggressive master plan that asks every neighborhood to step up with safe ground spaces, is the result of a years-long failure to respond at scale with any real urgency. Safe grounds are now an acknowledgment that Sacramento failed to produce the supportive housing that was needed to deliver on past strategies.

The opposition to more safe grounds around the city hasn’t really mobilized since Mayor Darrell Steinberg tasked his eight council colleagues with identifying potential sites in their districts. Well, it’s more precise to say the opposition hasn’t yet mobilized outside of the email inboxes of our elected city leaders. But that opposition will surely materialize with some pitchfork energy before the final vote in July.

The question now is whether council members are ready to fully back a politically challenging experiment like safe grounds and stand up for doing what is right and needed in Sacramento. In recent weeks, each council member made proposals for what’s doable in their districts. The early returns on that political question show that some are ready to meet this crisis. Other are not.

“It’s imperative every district takes its fair share,” said Vice Mayor Jay Schenirer, a longtime proponent of safe grounds. “We’ll fail if it’s not collective responsibility and collective accountability. If there are districts that do little, there will be folks in the districts doing a lot who are not happy.”

Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela has already taken the plunge with two sites in her central city and Land Park district — one beneath the W-X freeway; the other in a parking lot at Miller Park. Roughly 130 people can be housed in tents and cars at both, and Valenzuela said the underpass location will soon be expanded.

“We’re in this tension state where more people show up and we have nowhere to put them,” Valenzuela said. “That’s why I keep pushing this sense of urgency on my colleagues to open sites (right now). There’s so many people that would go to them if they’re available.”

It’s the same problem again — scale and speed. More than 11,200 people engaged with homeless services in Sacramento last year, according to Sacramento Steps Forward. If no one else on the council takes initiative, it could be months until more of the unhoused population is moved off the streets.

And some districts are clearly going to need prodding if Steinberg sticks with his decision not to require capacity minimums. Some council members even pointed to upcoming affordable housing projects as a piece of their district’s solution. How does that help triage a citywide crisis occurring right now?

Three council members — Angelique Ashby, Rick Jennings and Sean Loloee — identified just one new site in their respective districts, citing challenges around zoning, district makeup or meeting the council’s criteria.

For comparison, Councilman Eric Guerra identified at least 24, and Schenirer put forward 11.

Ashby is currently negotiating the conversion of an undisclosed 110-room hotel, which would be a breakthrough for her North Natomas district as its first homeless shelter. But it would only serve families, which account for 20% of the unhoused population.

Her other proposals were a small pilot that would match homeless LGBTQ youth with host families and up to 100 so-called scattered sites. Under that approach, the city would sign a master lease for apartment units in her district that serve as longer-term shelters.

“It plays to our strengths and deals with our weaknesses,” Ashby said. “North Natomas has big challenges — affordability, transportation, lack of resources. It can be challenging. … But what I do have to offer is a community that’s very accepting, particularly of families.”

Jennings is also hoping for 100 scattered sites in his district and expanding the capacity of faith-based organizations in the Pocket and Greenhaven area to get 30 additional tiny homes. But the only safe ground he identified was for 40 cars at the Franklin light rail station on Cosumnes River Boulevard.

In Loloee’s North Sacramento district, where the crushing gravity of the crisis is on full display along industrial corridors like Roseville Road, the only site he could muster was a transit lot for roughly 100 vehicles. During his April 27 presentation, he signaled he was open to adding more locations but also noted the frustration among constituents who feel like their district has “become the dumping ground when there’s issues.”

“It’s hard to argue against that,” he said.

The argument is pretty simple. This is no longer a downtown or river problem. Every neighborhood has been touched by the societal failure that is California homelessness.

Launching safe grounds aren’t ideal, but it’s light years better than the alternative: doing nothing — or doing what we’ve been doing, which led to this moment where a citywide triage is needed to address the crisis.

There are some incredibly difficult conversations coming this summer that will test the character of Sacramento. Are we actually ready to rethink what we know about homelessness and give safe grounds a chance? Or will this be the moment where we wasted this opportunity to help more people living on our streets?

“It’s our obligation to show we can create and build these facilities that improve the quality of life in our city, not detract,” Steinberg said.