As COVID-19 intensifies Sacramento’s homeless crisis, leaders must act with urgency
For decades, Sacramento’s leaders and citizens have watched as homelessness in our city has spiraled out of control.
Despite years of talk and promises, Sacramento in 2021 remains a city where human beings regularly freeze to death on our streets because they have no other place to go. It’s a place where tent cities line certain streets and where unhoused people must eke out a precarious existence by sheltering in doorways, stairwells and bushes.
Will 2021 be the year when Sacramento finally addresses its crisis of homelessness? Or is it time for Sacramentans to give up and settle for a reality in which an increasing number of people will be forced to live in filth on the streets because they can no longer afford shelter? We’ll know the answer after today’s Sacramento City Council meeting.
Today, the council will vote on whether to move forward with a “master plan” to allow the city to locate new shelters and housing for the homeless — “essentially a map marking public and private properties across the city where thousands of homeless can be sheltered or housed,” according to The Sacramento Bee’s Theresa Clift.
The master plan approach would provide the city with a clear strategy for addressing homelessness on a citywide scale. It would also allow city leaders to overcome NIMBYism — opposition from those “not in my back yard” types who tend to stand in the way of all possible progress.
“Once the council approves the map, staff could open large shelters, tiny homes and ‘Safe Ground’ lots for car and tent camping on the sites anytime,” wrote Clift. “It eliminates the need to approve — and debate — each site individually.”
This is crucial because selfish and short-sighted opposition to homeless housing has been a key factor in making the problem worse. To his credit, Mayor Darrell Steinberg has tried to push citywide solutions but has met resistance from fellow members of the city council who lack the guts to stand up to pressure. As a result, solutions get stalled, the problem gets worse and people continue to die in the streets.
If the city council approves the master plan idea tonight, it will kick off a six-month planning phase in which city leaders will engage the community and identify locations where housing solutions can be sited. The council would need to approve the final plan in June.
A comprehensive master plan is the only way Sacramento is going to be able to address the crisis of homelessness. Leaving the problem up to individual council districts — or to Sacramento County, which long ago abdicated its duty to address the issue — hasn’t worked.
The homeless solutions master plan deserves the full support of the City Council, as does the mayor’s plan for a $100 million affordable housing bond. The council was slated to approve the first $50 million of the housing bond last year, but the economic uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic delayed it. Unfortunately, the economic devastation of the pandemic has only worsened the city’s crisis of housing and homelessness.
Tonight, the council will vote on a proposal to “stress test” whether the city can still afford to issue the bonds, which will be funded in part by Measure U revenues. We urge the council to support this step.
The pandemic, and the looming wave of evictions it is expected to create, will only intensify Sacramento’s housing crisis. Mayor Steinberg has done a lot of work to identify these real and actionable solutions. They deserve the council’s full support.