Sacramento County supervisors don’t care about the homeless — they just want them to disappear
When the Sacramento County supervisors’ meeting started at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, the board chambers were nearly full — a rarity for staid, local government. The seats were occupied mainly by retirees and longtime homeowners who could afford to travel downtown for an afternoon to share public comment on the day’s agenda: Proposed amendments to two county ordinances that would directly affect the unhoused population living on the American River and Dry Creek parkways.
Those in attendance seemed to hold a very specific view on the problem. Namely, that the thousands of homeless people living along the rivers and creeks must go.
Comment after comment decried the illicit drugs, loud music, screaming and mental health problems, crime — and, above all, the excrement and trash — that is causing irreparable harm to Sacramento’s waterways.
Of the two ordinance amendments ultimately approved by the supervisors in a 5-0 vote that evening, the first would prohibit camping within 25 feet of the high water line on the American River and Dry Creek parkways — which environmental activists wanted raised six times higher. The second would prohibit fires and camping on flood levees and fire risk zones, or near homeless shelters and youth-serving facilities.
Homeowners and residents took to the podium to decry the environmental damage being done to the parkway. Argument after argument was a bleak carbon copy of one another:
“There are people living and doing drugs on the river trail.”
“I refuse to accept that we will just hand over the American River to people who are disrespecting it.”
“Encourage them to do better.”
“We have laws. It’s time to enforce them.”
“Protect the public from the dangers of homeless camps.”
The problem, as they see it, was “when” the homeless would go — not “where” they would go.
But it’s exactly this kind of superficial reasoning and shallow demands that coerce and justify inadequate public policy, like the kind passed by the supervisors Wednesday evening after four long hours of public comment and deliberation.
These ordinance amendments are a popular but futile policy that will inevitably open Sacramento County up to costly lawsuits and misuse of public tax money that would be better spent creating affordable housing, permanent housing, supportive housing, respite shelter, safe ground or any other kind of venture that would make the parkway a less desirable option for the homeless.
Yet, even if the supervisors had the will to make these changes, they clearly are instead moved and controlled by constituents who don’t want the problem to be fixed, they just want it to disappear.
But human beings don’t just disappear.
Climbing out of a canyon
Watching Sacramento County government at work on Wednesday was like watching a flash flood travel through a bone-dry canyon.
Once the tedium of procedures gave way to public comments, supervisors waited for the deluge to pass over them from their high ground on the boardroom dais.
And so it was on Wednesday, when dozens of speakers used their three minutes — and often more at the leniency of board Chair Don Nottoli — to plead with the Board of Supervisors to ban all camping on the parkway. The anger was palpable, but the cognitive dissonance was stunning.
How can anyone look at the thousands of homeless people and not hold their government leaders accountable for a dereliction of basic duty? Who looks at the piles of trash, embedded mattresses, tires and rusted shopping carts that clog Sacramento’s creeks and waterways and thinks it is right to further punish and push out the people who live like this?
The supervisors’ somber faces were just a minute shy of shedding crocodile tears, disingenuous at best, while they viewed videos and pictures of volunteer trash pickups. Ironic, considering their own, overwhelming power to change these very scenes.
Instead, they passed the blame once again to their inability to work with the city of Sacramento, and District 1 Supervisor Phil Serna played on his phone while it was made clear — over and over again — that it was his district that harbored the worst of the problem. When it came time to speak, he claimed that the county is overshadowed by the city of Sacramento, with City Hall “just two blocks down the street.” And yet what he failed to mention was the city’s role in providing an almost identical number of shelter beds to the county despite having a budget almost six times smaller.
But these elected officials are clearly prey to the same dissonance their constituents exhibit when faced with the choice of an environmental disaster or a humanitarian one. They seem inclined to pit the problems in opposition to each other rather than understanding their reliance on one another.
Just like the raging, sudden river of a flash flood, the supervisors move where the force takes them. And when their boardroom is overflowing with retirees and homeowners screaming about how something must be done now — today! — it’s far easier to stand on the shaky ledge of stopgap laws than it is to climb out of the deep canyon they have dug themselves.
Appeasement solutions
If homeowners and constituents are frustrated with the state of the parkway, Sacramento’s “crown jewel,” then they would do better to look in the mirror. If Sacramento County has created harmful laws, then we must first take a hard look at the community members it creates these ordinances for.
These ordinances are merely temporary solutions against the apparent crime of being homeless in Sacramento County. They are only meant to appease the housed residents who fight viciously against any progress that could alleviate the problem. They don’t want the homeless ruining the parkway, but neither do they want any semblance of shelter, assistance or service in their neighborhoods that could assist their impoverished neighbors.
And they are your neighbors — whether they’re housed or not.
Instead, Sacramento County leaders chose to criminalize a form of human existence without addressing basic needs for shelter, relief, food and water. A person’s finances or living situation, or their mental health or addiction, does not and should not exclude them from the same care we seek for ourselves. And yet when housing is proposed, a veritable and familiar chorus rings, ready to oppose it.
If unhoused people live on the fringes of our communities, it’s because we pushed them there. Rather than offer a hand up, Sacramento County chose no hand at all. They chose force, leaving the unhoused more destitute and hopeless than before.
