A new Sacramento council confronts homelessness. Can Mayor McCarty deliver? | Opinion
Kevin McCarty ran for mayor on a promise of changing the course of homelessness in Sacramento, a pledge that will start to take shape at Tuesday’s City Council meeting. McCarty and eight council members will comment on the current state of homelessness on Sacramento streets and provide direction to city staff on how to mitigate the desperation homeless people feel and the exasperation of residents tired of dealing with it.
There have been rumblings in the city that, after years of spending millions on the issue, more people in Sacramento want to see more results.
The numbers tell part of the story: The latest estimates say there are about 3,000 Sacramentans who are homeless and without a place to live on any given night. The luckier ones — unhoused residents at one of 18 shelter locations in the city — can access 1,375 beds that the city has available.
This shelter network has dramatically grown in response to the explosion in homelessness in recent years, funded mostly with state money. But now we’re at a crossroads. This city’s approach to sheltering, some with larger institutional settings with open sleeping quarters, others with individual “mini” homes, has existed long enough to examine its effectiveness. And we also have a governor in Gavin Newsom who is increasingly frustrated at the lack of local progress and is signaling that the state has only so much money to address this problem.
The coming homeless era is one of trying to do more with less. But how? Bee opinion writers Robin Epley, LeBron Hill and Tom Philp share their thoughts.
Can Sacramento do more for less money?
Philp: I spent some time recently touring some shelter sites with the mayor and he posed this question: For $10,000, we can get a homeless Sacramentan off the streets and into a mini-home/cottage that doesn’t have electricity or water, but is near shared dining halls and other facilities that have both. For about $100,000, we can put that same homeless soul into that same cottage with both water and power. Yet with only so much money to address this problem, what is the right approach?
Hill: I wouldn’t be opposed to that idea. Maybe the city could look into a homeless campus that has one center with all the amenities, like electricity, water and food, and surrounding it are cottages close by. It could be less money than a campus with cottages that have individual amenities. It’s important to remember that the unhoused community is just looking for a place to call home, and if we can provide that to them — however it may look — they will come.
Epley: Just throwing out a wild thought, but the city could always take a little bit of money away from their brute squad, also known as the Sacramento Police Department. The PD’s budget has inflated to an all-time-high of more than $225 million and continues to rise with every new fiscal year. (Who am I kidding though? We all know that number’s only going to go up.)
The county finally agrees to a meeting
Hill: Recently, Councilmember Eric Guerra sent a letter to Sacramento County Board of Supervisors Chair Phil Serna requesting a joint homelessness meeting with the city and county. Serna accepted the invitation, to my surprise. In the past, the county hasn’t exactly played ball concerning the topic of homelessness. A prime example is a few years ago when our now mayor, then Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, sponsored a bill that would’ve created a joint powers authority on homelessness. It was co-sponsored by Councilmember Caity Maple. It failed mainly due to a lack of support from the county, but now they seem willing to meet with city leaders to discuss the potential effects of the Trump administration. Funny how the one thing that will bring these two entities together is Trump.
Philp: This exchange of letters between two political allies, Serna and Guerra, is beyond contrived and insulting to McCarty, who has been seeking this same meeting for no good reason.
Epley: It has been interesting to recently see the newest county supervisor, District 4’s Rosario Rodriguez, bring this up to her colleagues in public — with about as little success as the rest of us. I don’t fully agree with her thoughts on how to solve homelessness, but I think most of us can agree that whatever the county is doing right now isn’t working. Rodriguez’s fellow supervisors, Patrick Kennedy and Serna, lambasted her on the dais for questioning their productivity. But she wasn’t wrong.
Hill: I think the county is actually doing a good job with their response. We have an estimated 6,000 unhoused people in the area. The county wants to bring their total bed count to more than 1,500, and total emergency housing is currently at 3,380 beds. I think they are doing the best with what they have and they are willing to grow.
New shelters, but where?
Philp: During the mayoral campaign, we heard a lot from McCarty about where Sacramento shouldn’t house homeless people. This council has basically ducked this subject for years. You can’t manage homelessness without giving these residents safe places to live. The council delegated these decisions to the city manager back in August of 2023, with anemic results. McCarty’s going to have to do better.
Epley: I have little faith that he will. I think he’s trying to sound like he has big, bold plans — with no facts to back it up.
Hill: I don’t believe that this issue is dependent upon McCarty. It takes every council member, county supervisor and leader in this community. They have to be willing to collaborate to get the results that common people want.
This story was originally published April 28, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
