Why is Sacramento failing to make a dent in homelessness? We learned the answer this week

The possibility that the Sacramento City Council may alter a homelessness ballot measure because county politicians refuse to pursue a parallel initiative encapsulates the failure of the two largest governments in the region to address a crisis that keeps getting worse.

Apparently, county leaders would rather pursue an anti-camping ordinance that essentially enables homeless sweeps without any requirement to increase the amount of shelter — something the city measure at least theoretically does. Council members are now considering a change that would require the county to approve a similar policy before the city measure can take effect.

The result may be another wasted year or longer as the region’s homelessness crisis intensifies, public frustration builds and desperation grows among the unhoused population in the capital of the wealthiest and supposedly most progressive state in the nation.

Sacramento symbolizes the total failure of California communities to account for and manage the cause of unsheltered homelessness: the lack of shelter and housing. Capital leaders, like those in other major California cities, have never been able to muster the collective political will to deal with our debilitating shortage of both. Instead, they inevitably end up supporting gimmicks rather than the hard and expensive work required to move unhoused people off our streets, alleys, parks and vacant lots and into shelter and housing.

Frankly, looking to special-interest-backed ballot measures rather than legislative solutions from elected officials was never likely to succeed. But the past few years have been marked by nothing more than false starts and heated debates that dwelled on the symptoms of homelessness. Our leaders’ approach to the problem has been a constant letdown and a gross misuse of public faith and resources.

But if we’re being honest about homelessness, and we often aren’t, the public has played a role in our failure to address the crisis. When politicians such as Mayor Darrell Steinberg and council members Jay Schenirer and Katie Valenzuela have tried to garner community support for emergency shelters, they have faced intense and even hostile resistance from the community.

There has been little political reward for trying to do the right thing, and a great deal of risk for those who try. Steinberg is blamed by some business leaders for the growth of Sacramento’s unhoused population, a preposterous notion given the complexity of the issue and the failure of other elected officials in the county and surrounding areas to do anything about it. In the absence of sufficient shelter and housing, anti-camping laws and other enforcement measures might mollify the public, but they won’t solve the problem.

It’s a vicious circle with plenty of blame to go around. Supervisors Phil Serna, Patrick Kennedy, Sue Frost, Don Notolli and Rich Desmond head the list of those responsible for the current paralysis in the face of the crisis. So does the business community, which has gone from using its influence to obstruct action to pushing dubious ballot initiatives that simply take a more circuitous route to the next crackdown.

Sacramento is not alone in that regard. Across California, local governments remain fixated on the visible effects of homelessness rather than their shared responsibility in alleviating the multimillion-unit deficit of housing and shelter, which is the primary cause. The broader response to the 2019 Martin v. Boise ruling, which banned homeless sweeps when shelter is unavailable, has been a wave of more narrowly tailored anti-camping laws across the state. Los Angeles is expected to broaden its anti-camping laws as thousands of people who were housed during the pandemic are sent back to the streets. Closer to home, officials in Elk Grove and Placer County have enacted similar bans this year. Sacramento County is now finalizing its own.

Such ostensible efforts to clean up our public spaces will not work until governments accept their responsibility to address the shortage of housing and shelter. That will take political will and courage, not half-baked ballot measures and bureaucratic infighting.

This story was originally published August 4, 2022 at 5:00 AM.