The Sacramento man who must move the homeless to communities that don’t want them | Opinion
Sacramento City Manager Howard Chan says he is perhaps weeks away from making a historic breakthrough in the city’s battle with its homeless challenge, the establishment of new encampments at locations that he alone will choose.
How this unfolds is anyone’s guess, but one thing is certain. With funding limited, these new encampments will be largely self-governed under the management of non-profit organizations. Chances of a public backlash feel high if not inevitable. And then Chan and the City Council will either weather the storm or surrender to a chorus of public anger from residents who want homeless people to be sheltered somewhere else.
In a recent interview, Chan was forthcoming about his approach to the task, but silent on details. This is not a moment of government transparency. This is a moment to quietly, and carefully identify safe ground for some of Sacramento’s most distressed, and controversial, residents.
“Some of the council members already are pinging me. Where is it going to be?” Chan said. “I said I am still working on it.”
Sacramento is resorting to an insular and undemocratic way of establishing these safe encampment sites because the previous open and democratic approach resulted in no action. City council members more than two years ago began to suggest nearly two dozen sites. None proved workable. “It was just a recipe for disaster,” Chan said.
The failure prompted a bare majority of the City Council on August 1 to delegate the job to Chan, with remarkably little direction. He alone has to sort this out.
Chan has two big challenges. Where and how?
As for where he has a clear game plan.
It is all about land already owned by the city, empty space of a half-acre or more and land that requires no other government to say yes for the homeless to take up residence.
“It’s going to be based on readiness,” he said. “It’s going to be based on what we can deliver quickly.”
The city owns more than 900 parcels inside its boundaries, Chan said. His staff has already whittled those parcels down to a “first tier” of candidate sites. How many? He would not say.
Chan is not ruling out sites that have no water, electricity, or sewer service.
Mark Merin, a long-time attorney whose Safe Ground Sacramento group has been urging the city to do this for years, is worried that some city-owned sites may not be workable from the perspective of its future residents.
The city “can’t take a disparate group of people, stick them on a place that is foreign to them, and say here is your new home,” he said. “They have to offer them a place that is somewhere close to where they have some experience.”
Chan is aware of the concern. “That’s an interesting question,” he said. “I guess it remains to be seen. If you’re asking if (potential sites are) close to other homeless encampments? Preliminarily, maybe.”
How to set up these homeless encampments poses a much wider range of choices for Chan. But he is clearly focusing on less expensive approaches.
In the financial spectrum of existing city encampments, on the expensive side is what is happening now at the city’s Miller Park along the Sacramento River. The city is paying about $3.2 million for a non-profit operator to manage a tent encampment of about 100 residents for the remainder of the year. Insurance alone is $500,000, he said at a recent council meeting.
Chan said available funds would be exhausted by duplicating the Miller Park approach just once somewhere. Given that the county’s estimated homeless population is closer to 9,000, a solution for about 100 of them is not enough.
The opposite side of the budget spectrum is Camp Resolution in North Sacramento, where a similar number of homeless residents, mostly women, now reside in a managed encampment. Direct city funding is essentially nothing, with the city leasing the land via negotiation with Merin to a non-profit organization. The county provides water and other social services.
“If we want speed and numbers, it’s going to be way closer to this,” Chan said.
How about security to protect both the encampment residents and neighbors?
“We’re going to increase the (police) patrols around that site,” Chan said. As for internal security, that will be up to the non-profit organization that signs an agreement with the city to both indemnify it and manage the encampment. “It’s all up for negotiation,” he said.
The Council did direct Chan to think about the neighbors and policies to engage them. Mario Lara, the city’s assistant city manager for public safety, is hoping for a three-way conversation between the neighborhood, the city and the non-profit that is managing the encampment.
“Whoever agrees to operate one of these sites will be available to the community to answer questions,” Lara said. “And we will certainly keep a close relationship with them.”
Once a future encampment site has been fully vetted and Chan is close to an agreement with a non-profit, then and only then will he approach the district’s city council member.
“I have unilateral authority,” he said. “And I’m going to do it whether the council member wants it or not. I’m going to give them the opportunity to talk with their communities about it.”
He does not expect this to be easy. “I expect there to be some pushback, potentially,” he said. Once the dialogue with the local council leader has taken place, Chan expects to finalize the agreement with the non-profit manager.
And then the public gets to know. And then we find out how the public reacts, whether business leaders still like Safe Ground, whether we move forward or fall backward.
Chan did not seek out this assignment, but he seems genuinely committed to seeing it through. And he envisions these sites as lasting for perhaps 12 to 18 months, until more permanent shelter spaces such as tiny homes are established in both the city and county.
“I am both anxious and excited about it, because we just need to turn the corner on this,” he said. “And I think that it was courageous of this council to turn the keys over to me. I feel grateful that they trust me with that.”
Lara says the city staff is fully behind its leader.
“Howard has unified this team,” he said. “Every department head, everybody wants to have a unified (approach) in terms of understanding that this is a difficult challenge that the city manager has been tasked with.”
Hopefully Sacramento County and the Board of Supervisors will be watching very closely. The city council is upstaging them in terms of both taking action and huge political risk. And Sacramento appears to have a city manager more than willing to stand up for his decisions.
“People are going to hate the sites no matter where I site them,” Chan said. “I want to remove the politics and posturing from it, because this is an emergency and we need sites.”
This story was originally published September 5, 2023 at 6:00 AM.