How California’s rigid progressive politics hurt a successful Sacramento homeless program

In 1985, on the steps of St. John’s Lutheran Church on L Street in downtown Sacramento, 20 women and their children would take refuge nightly on the church steps. These women and children had no shelter for a variety of reasons, ranging from poverty to fleeing abuse.

The St. John’s congregation acted on the convictions of their faith and moved the women and children from their church steps to a shelter, where warm beds and hot food were provided.

More than 25 years later, St. John’s Program for Real Change is one of the most significant nonprofit programs in the Sacramento region, having served 30,000 women and their children.

Roughly 75% of the people served by St. John’s transition from the program into stable permanent housing. Ninety-six percent who complete vocational training leave with a non-subsidized job.

Success is built on creating stable family units by reuniting homeless women with their children, who are often removed from their care by Child Protective Services.

The community responded by donating over $1 million last year to support this program.

One only needs to listen to the personal stories of the women who have transformed their lives at St. John’s to appreciate the power of the program. They recite testimonies of lives transformed and of lives free of addiction and abuse. These are women breaking the cycle of poverty and homelessness.

St. John’s is the success every community wants.

So it may be no surprise to exasperated Californians, frustrated by little apparent benefit from our high taxes, that when a successful program like St. John’s asked the state for some of the billions in taxpayer dollars it spends on homelessness this year they were told, “No.”

Why? Because the people who run the state have a so-called “housing first” policy that will not fund shelter programs like St. John’s because it requires sobriety of its clients. Why sobriety? Because it’s usually a court-mandated condition of mothers being reunified with their children and because it keeps kids safe.

Sounds crazy, right? St. John’s thought so too, so the program sought a narrow legislative solution to allow for state funding since it’s simply adhering to court orders that require sobriety of mothers.

Assemblyman Carlos Villapudua, a Stockton Democrat, introduced Assembly Bill 2623 to allow for state housing money to go to a provider, like St. John’s, where the clients are under a no-alcohol-or-drugs court order as a condition of reunification with their children. That sounds like a sensible solution, right?

But sensibility seems to be a foreign concept to the rigid progressive ideologues who run the California Assembly.

The Assembly Housing Committee wouldn’t even allow the bill to be heard. Think about that: The Democratic chair of the Housing Committee, Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), won’t even let her Democratic colleague present the bill and seek a vote. It was California’s version of representative government in action.

Aside from the obvious outrage, this tale should also trigger an alarm that the people running this state are prostrate before the idol of progressive fundamentalism, which prevents them from sensibly governing. People could be left in the street to die as a result.

In California, we have no competition of ideas since most legislators are immune from meaningful electoral threats. Meanwhile, the state is losing control of its streets to homelessness and ignoring the needs and safety of homeless children.

This won’t change in California until citizens get mad. If this story makes you mad, make a phone call today to your assemblymember and state senator. Demand that they insist on AB 2623 being heard and passed.

Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that St. John’s Lutheran Church sought a legislative solution to seek state funding for the non-profit, St John’s Program for Real Change. The non-profit, not the church, sought the legislative solution.

This story was originally published April 27, 2022 at 5:00 AM.