Sacramento leaders have a moral obligation to help the homeless. Here’s what we’re doing

For the last few months, Sacramento leaders of government and health care have quietly been laying the groundwork for a campus that would bring comprehensive services and housing to people experiencing homelessness.

The proposed “care” campus, like Haven for Hope in Texas or a scaled-up version of our region’s Mather Community Campus, would connect the region’s most vulnerable population to an array of customized services, providing substance abuse and mental illness treatment, transitional supportive housing and even job training. These services are already available in Sacramento, but they aren’t effectively coordinated. We allow too many people to fall through the cracks of a complex bureaucracy and land back on the street.

“I’m convinced we can do this,” Dr. David Lubarsky, CEO of UC Davis Health, recently told me. “We’re not starting from scratch. We’re talking about bringing together existing programs. The money is there, too. It’s about spending it the right way.”

The care campus could be built using newly-available state dollars for cities to address homelessness. It could be sustained by redirecting existing state, local and federal funding. My City Council colleagues and I have partnered with the region’s leading providers of health care and social services to identify potential sites and funding. This isn’t a pipe dream. The cost of the status quo – which includes emergency room visits and incarceration – is immense, and can be refocused.

Homelessness in Sacramento County has grown by 19 percent over the past two years, and the numbers are increasing. But the Sacramento City Council has made strategic investments in comprehensive solutions. We’re tackling the immediate public health crisis as we make long-term plans for more housing.

Residents can expect noticeable improvements with each passing month. We must resist calls to abandon our approach before it’s given a chance to succeed. We also need new tools like Laura’s Law and a specific focus on the crisis of methamphetamine addiction by reinvigorating successful programs, like Drug Courts that divert people from prison into mandatory treatment.

To address immediate needs, we’re bringing new public restrooms to parks in the central city at Chavez Plaza and several other locations. We’ve also partnered with Downtown Streets Team to provide job training to homeless residents who help clean up trash and illegal dumping in the Broadway corridor and other parts of the city. Our downtown triage shelter at Capitol Park Hotel, with 219 homeless guests to date, was the first of multiple comprehensive centers that will make hundreds of beds available this year around the city.

We also enacted significant renter protections that keep at-risk families in their homes. Last year, I led the passage of the Tenant Protection and Relief Act to stop unfair rent hikes and eliminate unjust evictions. We are also leveraging Measure U funds to build all types of affordable housing in the city and fund intervention programs to help keep families housed. If Sacramento continues to build housing for every income level, people will stop getting pushed out of their homes and affordability will stabilize.

I’ve thrown myself into this issue because I recognize our city is at a tipping point. Our work on homelessness over the next few years will define our legacy but, more importantly, our ability to alleviate the suffering on our streets and reduce the impacts on our neighborhoods will be the true measure of success.

As someone who experienced homelessness as a child, I understand the imperative to restore safety, dignity and opportunity to every resident. Ninety-three percent of Sacramento’s homeless population is originally from this region. We share a moral obligation to move thousands of our community members off the street and into safe and sustainable housing.