Why do Sacramento County leaders keep failing in their duty to address homelessness?

Recently, by unanimous vote, the Sacramento City Council approved a new citywide strategy to address the city’s rapidly escalating homelessness crisis. Their decision came less than two months after receiving a letter from 60 members of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, a business and property owner group, stating that the homeless crisis was putting downtown’s economic future in jeopardy.

This letter called on local officials, including the city, the sheriff’s office and the district attorney, to step in to create “a safe, clean and welcoming physical environment” for downtown office workers when they return post-pandemic.

“The growth of homelessness without aggressive action is immoral,” Mayor Darrell Steinberg said at a January council meeting.

We could not agree more, and we can’t help but ask: Where in the world is the County of Sacramento in all of this?

The reality is that California’s 58 counties hold the reigns of responsibility for the delivery of local health services, including serving the homeless. To perform these duties, counties receive a significant amount of federal and state funding, with local taxpayers often making a generous contribution as well. Accordingly, counties, not cities, have the personnel and policy apparatus in place to perform these “health and human services” duties to meet their funding requirements.

The words of best-selling author Steven Covey come to mind: “If a ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

The Sacramento City Council deserves enormous credit for their urgency in addressing the homelessness crisis, filling in where Sacramento County has clearly fallen down over the last several years. However, it is time for Sacramentans to knock on the door of county officials and unrelentingly demand the county take responsibility for the homelessness crisis this community faces.

Taking a page out of the Alcoholics Anonymous bible, the first step for the county is to admit the problem has become unmanageable. Their second step should be an honest assessment and acknowledgment that the one-size-fits-all homelessness policy they adopted in 2017 — Housing First — has failed.

Supervisors adopted Housing First at the strong suggestion of staff who said the county was required to follow the federal government’s policy lead. This was not the case then, nor is it the case now.

Their vote impelled the use of the county’s general fund dollars — taxpayer dollars — to exclusively fund the Housing First approach. The testimony leading up to their ill-fated decision included the director of the Los Angeles County Homeless Initiative, who boldly encouraged the full adoption of Housing First. (His presentation has unfortunately been removed from county archives.)

Wait, Los Angeles County? Sacramento County is following the lead of a county that is home to “Skid Row,” often considered the very epicenter of homelessness? L.A. County, home to the City of Los Angeles, which recently requested that the federal government intervene in their “out of control” homeless crisis? Yes, and Sacramento County followed them down the rabbit hole.

The subsequent results speak for themselves:

▪ In Sacramento, homelessness rose by 19% since 2017, as of 2019

▪ In Los Angeles County, homelessness rose by 12% over this same period

Newly released federal data mirrors these same tragic results. The feds rolled out Housing First as their one-size-fits-all approach in 2011-2013, literally promising the approach would end homelessness in a decade. Yet homelessness rose by at least 16% across the country despite a 200% increase in spending over this period.

City councilmembers and staff have spent countless hours and have allocated tens of millions of dollars to address the homelessness crisis, including making investments in alternative approaches to Housing First. But they should not be alone in this battle. Sacramento County must take the reins and lead Sacramento out of this crisis. And how fortunate they are to have the city as such an able and willing partner in this Herculean effort.