Darrell Steinberg attacked homelessness as Sacramento mayor and was attacked for it | Opinion
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Sacramento mayor won’t run for re-election
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg will not seek re-election next year. Steinberg, who was elected in 2016, will serve the rest of his term, which runs through the end of 2024. Read more of our coverage from the mayor’s announcement here.
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Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg may not fully be appreciated for being a consequential leader during difficult times until he leaves office roughly 19 months from now. That clock is ticking after Steinberg announced Thursday that he will not run for a third term, which is the right move for Steinberg and Sacramento. Both need a reset.
A free-for-all to replace Steinberg featuring a half dozen candidates or more is in the offing, and the next nine months will be a season of promises and posturing from a field of rookies and retreads. Whoever prevails will learn that being mayor of Sacramento can really stink.
Look at what’s happening at Sacramento City Council meetings now: Trolls spew antisemitism and disrupt meetings while making people feel unsafe. The political discourse in the city has deteriorated, and Steinberg has caught some of the worst of it — death threats, masked assailants vandalizing his home and profanity routinely hurled in his direction at council meetings.
Steinberg has been blamed by some for the proliferation of unhoused people on city streets when plenty of others bear responsibility: the Sacramento County supervisors, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, cities neighboring Sacramento, the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency and the state of California, to name a few. In his time, Steinberg pushed some of these stakeholders to do more, and they generally responded with anger and defensiveness.
The irony is that Steinberg has taken most of the heat for homelessness while being the most active elected leader trying to address the issue. Sacramento business leaders became angry with the guy who was trying to do something about homelessness instead of getting angry at others doing nothing.
Steinberg threw himself into the crisis and campaigned on it. He made specific promises and asked that voters hold him accountable for them. That’s what we say we want from elected officials, but Steinberg demonstrated why most Sacramento politicians fear being out front on the issue — you get punished for that.
The 63-year-old Steinberg also had to contend with a generational move leftward among young progressives entering politics in a city known for being centrist. That meant Steinberg spent recent years as the man in the middle, too liberal for business leaders frustrated by the social costs of homelessness and too centrist for young progressives who wanted change faster than Sacramento could move.
The rap on Steinberg was that he told everyone what they wanted to hear, but that’s not really true.
More often than not, his critics got mad at him for saying the opposite of what they wanted to hear. Or Steinberg did the opposite of what opposing city factions wanted during one of several calamities that struck Sacramento.
The George Floyd demonstrations of 2020 were a case in point. Protests by day gave way to vandalism and chaos by night in Sacramento’s urban core. City police decided that they would not pursue suspects or make mass arrests on a warm Saturday night almost exactly three years ago. Downtown was battered by looters and thieves.
Merchants blamed Steinberg and other city officials though few good options were available to city cops in a fluid and dangerous situation.
The next night, the National Guard and armored vehicles were called in, angering progressive protesters.
“Am I willing to make anybody mad to do the right thing? I always have been,” Steinberg told me at the time.
“In a situation like this, you are criticized from both sides (business owners suffering losses to property and protesters angry about a show of force by law enforcement)...But the buck stops with me.”
After being elected in 2016, Steinberg had about a year when he was feted as one of the most accomplished politicians to do the job. He was fresh from leading the state Senate, where he enjoyed the support of a majority caucus, a bigger staff at his disposal, and he was safely removed from a restive public while doing his thing within the ornate grandeur of the state Capitol.
Things changed for Steinberg and Sacramento in 2018 when city cops killed an unarmed Stephon Clark, and Sacramento was portrayed as the home of police brutality against Black people in the national news. That’s when city council meetings started becoming chaotic, with Clark’s brother Stevante disrupting a meeting by jumping up on the council dais. Steinberg showed Clark restraint and compassion. The mayor was proud of how he handled the situation, but some Sacramento residents privately fumed that Clark and others with him should have been arrested.
This difference of opinion persists to this day. But Steinberg understood that homelessness and civil disobedience cannot be remedied by police action. Meanwhile, COVID and the George Floyd protests soon followed, and the political tenor in Sacramento changed.
Steinberg kept working. He led other big city mayors to secure millions in state funding to help pay for enhanced homeless services in Sacramento. He negotiated changes to the housing approval process that created more affordable housing in the city. Steinberg helped push the city and county toward finally agreeing on a legally binding pact that has the two governments working together to address homelessness more effectively.
Steinberg negotiated settlements in two lawsuits that threatened to slow Aggie Square, a sprawling innovation hub to be constructed next to the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. There were many more accomplishments and some setbacks. Steinberg was sometimes prone to over-promising or being too transactional.
But he deserves praise for decades of commitment and service to his city and region.
More than anything, Steinberg is a good and decent man who wanted the best for Sacramento and worked hard to do his best for the city. There is no doubt he will work tirelessly until his last day in office in December of 2024. Then someone else will become mayor and, with luck, will be shown grace that was denied Steinberg from a community that still has some growing up to do.
This story was originally published May 25, 2023 at 10:00 AM.
