Sacramento’s homeless people have to live somewhere. Why not in empty city lots? | Opinion
Sacramento mayoral candidates Kevin McCarty and Flo Cofer may agree that homelessness is one of the city’s top issues this election, but it’s clear only one of them has been paying attention to what has — and hasn’t — been working so far.
A propagandistic flier showed up at my home earlier this week, complete with poorly photoshopped tents and trash over an otherwise pristine playground, claiming that progressive candidate Cofer has an “Extreme Agenda” to use public parks as homeless shelter sites.
It’s a blatant scare tactic funded by McCarty supporters.
But it begs questions that voters must answer: Is the status quo working in Sacramento? And does McCarty offer anything new besides demonizing Cofer?
‘Pre-parks’ are viable solution
Cofer’s not suggesting that we displace children from their swingsets and slides to house homeless people. There are locations the city owns that are little more than dirt lots, which Cofer describes as vacant parklands that are basically empty lots, or, as she has called them, “pre-parks.”
“There are 244 parks listed on our city’s website and among them, some of them don’t exist yet,” Cofer said at a debate in September. “We need to be willing to look at any available parcels that exist, including some that are pre-parks.”
“We do not have the money currently, especially with our deficit, to be building some of those new parks,” Cofer said. “So why not in the interim use vacant parcels that are planned parks for some time in the distant not-so-soon future to set up safe rest villages?”
McCarty would like voters to think he has a better plan than Cofer, but actually, he’s just repeating mistakes the city and current mayor Darrell Steinberg have already made. Even though the flier didn’t come from McCarty’s campaign, it’s a position he certainly agrees with.
“City parks are places for recreation. They were created (as) places where people could go and relax, bring their families, enjoy recreational activities, enjoy Mother Nature,” he said. “That’s their purpose, not for homeless camps. I think it’s pretty clear those were the intended purposes.”
Where exactly does McCarty want homeless people to go?
The problem with McCarty’s ideas
When asked, McCarty rattled off a list of sites he suggested would be better than using city parks, including two city-owned former corporation yards, a vacant site in the south city’s District 8, and a parking lot at Cal Expo.
Except there’s a big problem: Most of those sites have already been tried — and they don’t work.
Of the two corporation yards McCarty suggested as viable shelter sites, one is at Colfax Street and Arden Way, where another homeless camp called Camp Resolution was recently closed.
The Camp Resolution shelter idea is now dead because the City Council declared the site surplus city land at its last meeting, setting the groundwork for a non-profit to perhaps build affordable housing, based on council comments.
But there was no talk at all of a shelter rising from the rubble.
The other corporation yard is at the intersection of Eleanor and Traction avenues . It was included in a council plan for possible shelter sites in 2021, but — along with every other one of the 19 sites identified in that report — it was never opened.
Cal Expo has repeatedly rejected the city’s numerous inquiries into placing a temporary homeless shelter in a back parking lot — something McCarty should be well aware of because he sits on the board. He should also be well aware that the site proposed is a designated flood zone.
Back in March of 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom stood in front of Cal Expo and promised 350 new tiny homes to Sacramento County, some of which would be placed at the county’s fairgrounds, but that plan also fizzled out with no success. Cal Expo’s governing board doesn’t want a shelter for the homeless on their site, they’ve been pretty clear.
And the vacant site in District 8? City Councilwoman Mai Vang has repeatedly said that the site in her district is not viable as a homeless shelter because roadways and utilities will not be built there for several years. To do so would cost somewhere between $2-3 million to build. That’s money that could be better spent on a site that already has water and power, she told me.
That location didn’t even make the Sacramento City Manager’s final list of viable sites when he went searching for them last year, yet McCarty has repeatedly mentioned it as a possible shelter location at public events.
This city has to try some new ideas. With a budget deficit of more than $77 million that will greatly hinder its ability to open any new sites, the city council cannot continue to sit on its hands while thousands of Sacramentans sit on the waiting list for just 1,300 shelter beds.
Sacramento needs new ideas
Cofer’s idea to use underutilized city parks is worth exploring if only because: Why not?
Though a federally-mandated count of homeless people in the county earlier this year suggested the number of homeless people has gone down, the percentage of unsheltered homeless people congregated in the city of Sacramento went up.
I’m not suggesting that we put homeless people to sleep on playground slides and neither is Cofer. But if there are large spaces owned by the city, why can’t they be considered for the unhoused Sacramentans who desperately need the space and some stability without being swept?
McCarty has suggested that if even a mere 10 housed Sacramentans are enjoying a city-owned space — even if it’s full of dirt and rocks — their enjoyment takes precedence over the hundreds of Sacramentans who could be using that space as stable, safe lodging. That argument reeks of classism.
The solution to homelessness is not going to be a comfortable one. It will touch all of us and will take compromise. Candidates who have the bravery to try new ideas should be praised, not attacked. But making Sacramento afraid of Cofer is all McCarty seems to have up his sleeve.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this column had a quote that was transcribed incorrectly. Kevin McCarty was referring to homeless camps, not homeless kids.
This story was originally published October 28, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
