Sacramento County is spending $23 million on land to build a shelter. It has no plan
On Tuesday, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the purchase of a property on Watt Avenue in North Highlands for nearly $23 million. The county hopes the site will help place unhoused people in cabins. This is also the first time Sacramento County will provide parking spaces for people living in vehicles.
“I’m hopeful that those that have been critical of the county for months now, insinuating that we’re not doing as much or we’re not doing anything at all... now understand that we were doing our due diligence,” District 1 Supervisor Phil Serna said during the vote.
As usual, Serna misunderstands: We haven’t been criticizing the Board of Supervisors for months, but for years.
The county is years behind where it should be; the homeless population in unincorporated Sacramento County is second only to the city of Sacramento.
But while the board has abdicated much of its responsibility to the city, despite having nearly seven times the amount of funding, unincorporated county constituents — like those residents living in North Highlands — can only wait for the board to act, while trailers, cars and tents line Roseville Road for miles, and the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department blames Boise v. Martin.
We aren’t insinuating: We’re telling you that the county has not been doing enough, and it still isn’t.
Doing the work is, admittedly, hard: It takes years to work through the bureaucratic red tape to stand up a site like the one proposed for North Highlands. If the sale goes through, and if the community doesn’t protest it, and if the county can get all the funding and certifications it needs to outfit and staff the site — then it has a fair chance of opening sometime in the next 2-3 years.
The city of Sacramento, for example, approved a $100 million blueprint to open 20 shelters and sanctioned camping sites across the city. Not a single one of them has opened.
County staff didn’t want to say it, but they don’t even have a full plan yet. And that’s because they’re being pushed by the seller to either buy the land or move on.
So the county is hurriedly buying this property at more than $22 million, plus closing fees — when it was actually valued by an independent appraiser at closer to $17 million.
Overpaying for this site won’t prevent NIMBY opposition.
The property, at 4837 Watt Avenue, is near an existing encampment and McClellan Business Park, and is one of the most dangerous stretches of road in the old neighborhood. My family and I used to get breakfast at a now-closed restaurant that was mere feet away from the county’s proposed site, and its windows were always pockmarked with bullet holes. (Great waffles though.)
Beyond this development, the county should start asking every community to share the burden of sheltering our unhoused neighbors. There is no way to solve homelessness unless we streamline the process.
If it’s going to require hundreds of millions of dollars to shelter the homeless, it’s the least we can do to make sure that money actually results in shelter.
I hope the Watt Ave. project will be a success. I hope it’s everything the county’s Department of Homeless Initiatives expects it to be. I hope its proximity to existing camps, a health center and the addition of a dedicated parking lot for car campers provides the necessary care and safety to the thousands of Sacramentans who need it.
But we won’t know that outcome for years, and there are 9,000 homeless people in Sacramento who need help right now. They needed a project like this years ago.
