Mayor Kevin McCarty pushes tired, ineffective homeless policies | Opinion

Today, the Sacramento City Council will vote yet again on whether to expand its harmful and longstanding policy of fining and arresting people experiencing homelessness.

In Mayor Kevin McCarty’s first proposed homelessness policy, the city would fine people up to $25,000 and incarcerate them for up to a year for sitting or lying down in front of Sacramento City Hall between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. It would also displace dozens of unhoused Sacramentans who sleep in front of city hall due to the city’s shortage of shelter beds or other safe and legal alternatives.

McCarty suggests that these policies are a common-sense approach to solving homelessness. As advocates for unhoused people with over 30 years of experience, we can assure you that the mayor’s proposal is anything but.

Common sense would have us look at our past efforts to solve homelessness and evaluate whether they were successful. A review of available data since 2009 demonstrates that Sacramento — like many cities prioritizing policing over policy that addresses the root causes of homelessness — has only made its homelessness crisis worse. In 2009, Sacramento had 2,800 people experiencing homelessness. In 2024, the number ballooned to 6,615, and experts suggest that is a significant undercount (though the 2024 number did indicate a decrease from 9,728 individuals counted in 2022).

Our fidelity to fines and arrests is so counter-productive that the National Homelessness Law Center lists Sacramento as one of the five most punitive cities in the country.

The reason fines and arrests have failed is simple to understand: Criminal fines divert unhoused people’s limited resources away from rent payments and security deposits. Even when they can secure housing and employment, they may fall back into homelessness because their wages are garnished to satisfy the fine. A conviction that leads to incarceration results in a criminal record that makes it all but impossible to secure a housing placement or a lease.

Moreover, upon release from jail, unhoused people are rarely provided resources to transition from a carceral setting to shelter or housing. According to the Department of Community Response’s own data, citations and arrests have increased six-fold in the city between January and June over the same time period last year. All the while, thousands continue to languish on shelter and housing waitlists.

The ongoing removal of encampments across Sacramento doesn’t always result in criminal convictions, but the threats, arrests and evictions create another series of problems. Short term jail stays, forced displacements and the destruction of personal property and survival gear dismantle any semblance of progress and stability people have been able to establish toward getting back on their feet. These policies undermine the already difficult work of housing navigators, case managers, street medicine teams and other survival-based, outreach service providers.

The law students or outreach workers we collaborate with regularly lose contact with clients either because they can no longer locate them or because the city threw out their phones, along with other personal property. Furthermore, these experiences erode people’s mental and physical health in significant ways and diminish the trust they have with service providers, who already struggle to establish trusting relationships with their clients.

Common sense solutions to homelessness are well-established: We must help more people exit homelessness by expanding access to rental subsidies and removing barriers to their use. We must prevent more people from falling into homelessness by expanding tenant protections and investing in eviction defense. And we must expand our health care infrastructure and vocational supports, as well as raise the minimum wage to ensure that people can maintain steady employment and their incomes keep pace with the rising costs of housing. In fact, no one knows this better than Sacramento’s unhoused community: When surveyed, they overwhelmingly report that affordable housing would end their homelessness.

After 30 years, Sacramento can conclusively say that fines, arrests and forced displacements do no work and do not address the root causes of homelessness. They simply divert critical resources away from solutions that work. Mayor after mayor has supported these policies because, on the surface, they reduce visible homelessness. However, reducing visible homelessness isn’t a solution. It is an optical illusion posing as progress.

Whether this city council reverses course will soon be determined. And one thing is clear: Common sense dictates that they should.

Niki Jones is executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness. Ron Hochbaum is an associate clinical professor of law at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law where he teaches poverty law.

This story was originally published July 29, 2025 at 10:17 AM.