Sacramento Mayor Steinberg: Let’s keep ‘triage’ homeless shelters open year-round

Next Tuesday night might represent the most important vote the Sacramento City Council will take on homelessness over the next four years.

I am asking the council to commit to keeping overnight shelters open year-round, regardless of the weather. This decision may seem small compared with some of our votes on multi-million dollar shelters, service programs and housing projects. It is not.

Four weeks ago, following a terrible winter storm, we decided to no longer follow longstanding rules that require the opening of emergency shelters only when the temperature is 32 degrees or colder. On Tuesday, we will decide whether to eliminate the weather criteria permanently.

Tuesday’s vote is a statement of our larger intent. It signifies our commitment to maintaining a continuum of care that starts with walk-in shelter and ends with permanent housing. It signifies that we will follow through and, by summer, adopt a homeless master siting plan that designates places around the city for longer-term shelter, tiny homes, permanent housing and safe camping and parking.

As we craft this master plan, and conduct the intense outreach the community deserves, we need warm, safe spaces now where people can seek short-term refuge without navigating the often complex homeless intake system.

Our current shelter beds in the city and county number about 1,200. The estimated number of people living unsheltered in Sacramento County is at least five times that number.

If we are serious about housing our unsheltered neighbors, we will commit to dramatically reducing that gap. We cannot afford to shutter available public and private facilities at night when the population of people living outdoors is growing despite all our efforts.

Simply put, if we do not show the will to bring more people indoors even temporarily in much greater numbers, what will happen when we are confronted with the much harder decisions to site longer-term shelters, treatment facilities and housing projects as essential parts of a city-wide master plan?

Over the past four weeks, at least 80 people have used our warming centers each night they have been open. We have designated a library, a garage and a church for overnight respite. There are hundreds of underused public and private spaces where we could expand this effort.

Critics who say that such short-term, walk-in shelter is ineffective for people with disabling mental health and substance abuse illnesses miss the point. Short-term shelter is not an end, but, in many cases, it is the essential beginning to help people get the mental health and other services they need. By getting people indoors, however briefly, we can more easily connect them with services that will start them on their journey to a more stable life and, hopefully, a permanent roof over their heads.

The warming centers should be renamed. We must commit on Tuesday to year-round triage centers. They can be a place where our newly hired city social work outreach teams, operating out of the Department of Community Response, can convince some of those who are hardest to reach to come indoors, taking their first step toward stability.

We can work with Sacramento County, which provides mental health and substance abuse resources in partnership with quality, non-profit providers. The county demonstrated exemplary leadership during the pandemic by housing more than 1,000 people in motel rooms through Project Roomkey. We need the same urgency in a post-COVID Sacramento.

Going big on bed and service expansion is the only way we can provide relief not only to those living outdoors but to the neighborhoods and businesses that feel the burden of massive tent encampments.

The federal courts have made it clear through Martin vs. Boise that cities can’t move tent encampments unless they have available alternatives for the people affected. There is no magic place for the city to send people to get them out of the doorways of downtown businesses, out from under the freeways or off the riverbanks.

I do not believe that living on the streets is a civil right. I believe government at all levels should be required to provide the roofs, beds, spaces and services to meet the need. Thereafter, the city can properly prohibit people from camping, especially adjacent to neighborhoods and key business corridors.

The only way to provide relief to the unhoused, and to our community at large, is to provide roofs, beds and services faster and on a greater scale than ever before. Year-round triage centers are the best way to start. Neither the courts nor our constituents will settle for less. It is never the wrong temperature to bring people indoors.