Sacramento could ‘go big’ on attacking homelessness. So far, the city’s plan is too small

In January, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg presented the City Council with what he described as a “comprehensive” proposal to address homelessness. It’s called the “City Master Siting, Operations, Programmatic and Financing Plan to Address Homelessness.” Each council member was challenged to identify potential sites for short-term shelter, medium-term housing and permanent housing.

As it turned out, and as many advocates feared, this process went well in some districts and was fairly non-existent in others. In fact, 75% of the proposed 47 sites are in just two districts.

To be fair, proposed sites are not the same as the proposed number of homeless people served, and several council members who did not propose many sites did propose about 1,000 homeless people served.

This is clearly far short of an “equitable” distribution of proposed sites and of the proposed number of our unhoused neighbors that were promised in the early stages of the Homeless Master Planning process.

This outcome was exactly what the homeless and housing advocates feared, so in March we began working on our own plan, “The Community Homeless Master Plan.” The plan, developed by 16 local community-based organizations, was presented to the City Council and on May 18 at the invitation of the mayor.

Of course, siting is a significant component, and once the City Council adopts the Homeless Master Plan — scheduled for a vote on July 20 — the next steps will be to vet those sites to make sure they are viable. However, we urge the City to start vetting those sites now, since winter is only six months away and we cannot leave our unhoused neighbors to die out in the cold another season.

The plan needs to go beyond siting and do what the original title states: address operational and programmatic components, which only our Community Plan does:

▪ Call for racial equity: the plan must address systemic racism by designing programs, hiring staff and tracking outcomes that rectify systemic racism embedded in current homeless policies and programs. In our community, Black and Indigenous people experiencing homelessness are over-represented by a factor of four compared to their percentage in the general population.

▪ A City-County Partnership Agreement: The city’s best laid plans are doomed if the county does not partner to provide needed services.

▪ The plan must include all people experiencing homelessness, including children, transitional age youth, members of the LGBTQ community, families, single adults and a growing population of seniors.

▪ The programs must be accessible to people with physical, mental and developmental disabilities.

▪ A homeless prevention component to prepare our community to prevent homelessness once the moratorium on evictions expires.

▪ Good Neighbor policies that embrace the principles of respect, inclusion, health and safety that apply to unhoused and housed people.

▪ Independent Ombudsperson to investigate complaints from homeless people and seek solutions.

▪ Affordable housing: Reinstate the inclusionary zoning ordinance in the city and county and fund the affordable housing trust fund to $100 million annually.

▪ Finally, when the county health order is lifted on June 15, we can not return to a law enforcement policy that criminalizes our unhoused neighbors. This will undermine the master plan and break the trust that has been built up over the last several months.

We have a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to create a plan to end and prevent homelessness in our community with infusions of hundreds of millions in state and federal funds. We cannot squander this opportunity by not being bold, comprehensive and expeditious in our plans. This approach gives new meaning to “go big to go home.”