Sacramento’s closure of Camp Resolution proves the city never learns from its mistakes | Opinion

The City of Sacramento has only proven one thing during its sweep of North Sacramento’s Camp Resolution this week: It never learns from its mistakes.

Monday morning saw the long-feared-for end of the self-governed camp for homeless people in a vacant, city-owned lot in Old North Sacramento. Camp Resolution once had the city’s support, and even signed a lease for the land with a non-profit organization led by homeless advocate attorney Mark Merin. It was occupied by a majority of female, elderly and disabled residents and reportedly had a waitlist of over 800 people.

However, concerns about ground contamination and reports of people sleeping in tents played a role in the city’s decision to move forward with the closure after many months of desperate delays by residents of the camp as they struggled to find alternate accommodations.

It is dismaying that a self-governing Safe Ground site — which cost the city almost nothing — has ended in such acrimony; a disappointing example of the disconnect between Sacramento’s homeless population, two major homeless nonprofits now at loggerheads and a city that has no problem with its branded bulldozers running through a community.

There were certainly missteps on the part of the local government as well as the homeless who occupied the camp. But it is unfair to blame homeless people who had little option other than to sleep on some piece of land and chose this site to do so.

It would also be unfair to suggest the city has done nothing to alleviate the homelessness crisis: A recent audit found the city pays the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency $4.6 million a year to operate a 100-bed shelter on X Street, and $3.5 million a year to operate a 100-bed shelter in Meadowview.

But this Editorial Board maintains, as we have time and time again, that Sacramento must have more housing and shelter capacity. The urgency to get more homeless off the streets and into shelters and safe sites that so resonated at City Council meetings of the past is now gone.

The city of Sacramento simply will not solve homelessness by dismantling sanctioned and unsanctioned encampments while there are not enough shelter beds available as a humane alternative.

And yet, we are aware that the U.S. Supreme Court has given communities a free pass to sweep homeless people with no place to go.

The court’s recent decision in Grant’s Pass v. Johnson has made it easier than ever before to shuffle the nation’s homeless around like a giant shell game playing with human lives. It has opened the door for local governments to declare that it is illegal to lay down in public spaces.

In addition, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest publicity stunt was to declare California cities and counties can no longer expect state funding if they suffer homeless encampments to exist. Newsom made this point clear during a well-documented trip to a Los Angeles encampment, trash bag in hand as he helped to clean it out.

Neither of these actions bodes a promising future for the state’s 181,000 homeless, who have very little access to support systems that somehow need billions of taxpayer dollars in funding.

We don’t expect the city of Sacramento to solve the crisis of homelessness all by itself. To give credit where credit is due, the city has certainly stepped into a void left by the much better-funded (but absentee) county of Sacramento.

However, this Editorial Board moved against our better judgment to trust City Manager Howard Chan and the Sacramento City Council last year when they told us there would soon be a Safe Ground in every district. We gave them the benefit of the doubt when they kept that process secret, knowing that whatever site was chosen would face a mountain of opposition.

A divided City Council last August delegated to Chan the authority to establish new homeless encampments in the city. Since then, the city has created one and disbanded two. Talk of Safe Ground sites in every council district has disappeared. So has the idea of a map to tell homeless people where it is safe to sleep without being swept out by police. The one site identified along Roseville Road in District 2 cannot possibly accommodate the city’s thousands of homeless.

This is not progress, it is stagnation.

With the Camp Resolution experiment resulting in failure and acrimony, compassionate alternatives are in short supply. Sacramento police kept the media away on Monday, alleging it was a crime scene and crossing their tape would result in arrest.

We wonder how many homeless Sacramentans have died in the city’s drawn-out timeframe, waiting for help that never came? We wonder how many former residents of Camp Resolution will suffer medical and mental trauma from the city’s sweep on Monday.

Camp Resolution, once such a great hope for our city and perhaps a new way of homeless management, is now nothing but a failed experiment — with plenty of blame to go around.

This story was originally published August 27, 2024 at 5:00 AM.