Homelessness in Sacramento: the issue of our time. It can either divide us to bring us together.

Sacramento is at an inflection point as we struggle with the humanitarian crisis of unsheltered homelessness on our streets, sidewalks, underpasses, and other areas not suitable for human habitation. At times, it feels as though there are competing factions fighting over who has the right solutions — is it more enforcement or more housing? Compassion or “tough love”?

What solutions seem most favorable tend to correlate with whether someone believes the issue is at its core related to substance use, mental health, and criminal activity, or if it’s primarily a function of societal conditions, economics, and the housing market.

In short, is homelessness the product of the individual or the system?

Like any complex problem, it’s useful to break it into parts. Sometimes, it’s even helpful to think of it in a different context. For example, what if the problem we were solving for was “food-lessness”?

Certainly, a subset of the population needing food would have mental health diagnoses, and some would have issues with substance abuse, and still others might have lost jobs or even committed crimes — but, what connects them all is the lack of access to food.

So, how do you solve the problem? You connect people with food, and once they are fed, you also provide other services depending on their needs.

Just last month, the University of California, San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI) released the largest representative study of homelessness in the United States since the 1990s. This research, like most studying the issue, pointed to the lack of affordable and low-income housing as a primary driver.

As you might imagine, the issue of house-lessness starts and ends with housing.

Like food-lessness, there are compounding factors. For example, you’re much more likely to be housing insecure if you’re poor, suffering from a mental and/or physical illness, or have a substance use disorder. Most of those studied were in poverty prior to becoming homeless (making on average $950 per month), rent-burdened (spending more 30% or more of their income on housing), and lacked a basic safety net should anything go wrong.

And, of course, things do go wrong.

One of many similar stories I’ve heard in the course of doing this work illustrates perfectly how easy it is to slip into homelessness, and how hard it can be to get out of it. This person was working a low-wage job without healthcare, owned an aging vehicle, and was struggling to afford rental increases each year. Unexpectedly, they were diagnosed with an illness that required surgery — something they couldn’t afford. After putting it off for some time, they were rushed to the hospital for an emergency operation.

This saved their life but left insurmountable medical debt. This person then fell behind on rent and was evicted. They slept in their car until it broke down, then they were fired for no longer having reliable transportation. Finally, their car was towed for being parked too long while inoperable and now this individual lives in a tent.

With an eviction on their record, it’s near impossible to find an apartment — even if you were hired for a job, saved up for the down payment, and could afford the rent. Jobs are hard to come by when you don’t have a reliable place to shower, a place to charge your phone so an employer can contact you, and an address to send documents. The reality of living outside is the elements are harsh and living under the constant fear of being moved or having your possessions stolen is even harsher. Many resort to drugs or alcohol to cope.

This is one person’s story, but it is also the story of so many in Sacramento.

That is why a Housing First approach, which stipulates that a person experiencing homelessness “must first be able to access a decent, safe place to live, that does not limit length of stay, before stabilizing, improving health, reducing harmful behaviors, or increasing income”, is often pointed to as the right path forward. And this approach has had some success. As you can imagine, having a roof over your head and a relative sense of safety exponentially increases your ability to find work, improve your health, and find suitable long-term housing.

The problem with this approach is that we are in a housing crisis, especially housing that is affordable for low-income individuals — a group that has been growing rapidly along with wealth inequality.

Many Sacramentans struggle under the weight of poverty, lack of healthcare, and little to no savings for emergencies. Despite record low unemployment rates, a greater number of those jobs are low-wage, and those wages have stagnated over decades. This has been even more of a challenge as inflation has driven up the cost of essentials like groceries and gas.

These compounding factors are impacting more people than ever in our City. One element of the homelessness crisis that has not been discussed a great deal is the scale of the problem. For every one person that exists homelessness in Sacramento, three enter.

If you’re wondering why it seems like there are so many more tents on sidewalks, streets, and overpasses, it’s because there are — by a scale unseen since the “Hoovervilles” that existed here during the Great Depression. People sleep there because our shelter beds are full every night and housing waitlists can be years long. A recent example of the scale of the need is the Marisol Village community in the River District. The project boasted an impressive 427 units at its grand opening just last month, and nearly 10,000 people applied.

As a city, we are unequipped to deal with this astronomical rise alone.

Build on top of that the extreme rise of housing costs in our city and it’s no wonder why we’ve landed where we are. Our lowest wage workers are often paying more than 30% of their income to keep a roof over their head, while low vacancy rates can make it difficult to find housing at all. Additionally, Sacramento has seen an alarming wave of evictions since the beginning of 2023, many believe to be the remnants of pandemic-era rental assistance that has run out.

Many unsheltered residents are refugees of disinvestment, inequality, and the housing crisis, with no safety net to catch them. That is why the need to build more affordable housing has been a key issue on the minds of policy makers — but how did we get here?

The answer is complicated and would require another essay to describe in detail, but in short, federal and state disinvestment into housing has left a heavy burden on local governments. This includes a Nixon Administration moratorium on federal public housing programs in the 1990’s and the end of redevelopment in California as way to balance the budget during difficult economic times.

What has been left over is a complicated patchwork of funding sources to build affordable housing that take years to piece together and a flawed voucher system that relies on recruiting landlords that are willing to rent to low-income individuals. We know this system is not working as evidenced by the severe and persistent lack of affordable housing in our city, and as a result, Sacramento falls thousands of units short each year of what is needed for our current residents and future growth.

Of course, another way to ensure there is enough housing is to build at all levels (not just affordable).

Some believe that if we build significantly more housing of all types, more quickly, that will reduce the cost of older housing stock and create “naturally affordable” units in our city. Doing this has been a challenge across California as cities struggle to produce enough housing to meet demand. Local zoning requirements and building codes can create significant barriers or make it too expensive to build more housing, including height restrictions, parking requirements, and even outright bans on density or multifamily housing.

We must employ many different solutions at once to ebb the flow of people cycling into homelessness, continue getting people into needed services, and most importantly, into housing.

So, you might be thinking: “what about crime and open drug use?” I will never deny the very serious issues that can come along with tent encampments: open drug use as children walk by, sex trafficking, assault, harassment, threats, and theft. I’ve personally seen these things, and I have felt unsafe at times.

These experiences are real and harmful.

Serious crimes should always be enforced. There is no room for violence, coercion, threats, or any other behavior like this in our City. We also know that the most vulnerable among us are more susceptible to experiencing homelessness and are far more likely to be preyed upon by those who seek to take advantage: dealers, traffickers, and abusers.

This is why the conversation about enforcement must nuanced. If our focus is primarily on violations that occur as a result of survival, such as blocked sidewalks, improper storage of belongings, and trespassing, then our outcomes will be a collection of misdemeanor offenses and fines that we know these individuals cannot pay. Eventually, people will land in jail for a culmination of unpaid fines, all at the taxpayer’s expense.

We will have created a “Debtor’s Prison” for the poor and the house-less. One that brings us no closer to getting people out of poverty, off drugs, or into mental health treatment — and actually makes it more difficult for them to obtain employment and housing.

I understand that not everyone will be persuaded by an argument of compassion. People are frustrated and fed up, which is why it’s important to note that not warehousing the poor in our jails is also the most cost-effective option for taxpayers. Our current policies are enormously expensive.

Encampments are moved from street to street and neighborhood to neighborhood because we cannot build shelter and housing fast enough. Local governments sign multi-million-dollar contracts with companies to dispose of trash and sanitize. In fact, we don’t even have a complete sense of what is being spent, but we do know almost none of it physically moves a person from the street and into housing.

What has happened in the public discourse over the last several years is the dehumanization of real people. The narrative has become “us vs them”, despite research showing that the vast majority of people living on the streets are from here. They are Sacramentans — our neighbors, friends, family members, co-workers, and classmates.

The problem is both complex and simple.

People are house-less. There are a lot of reasons why each individual ended up that way, meaning we will need to employ a myriad of solutions all at once. We must be preventative and keep people from entering homelessness while triaging resources to those experiencing it based on what is needed.

And most importantly: we will always fail if we work in siloes.

We must work together in a coordinated and deliberate way, which is why I support the creation of formal body that requires officials from all over the region to create a strategic action plan, share resources, and produce measurable results. This legislation introduced by Assemblymember Kevin McCarty is essential and should be supported.

Right now, the City is also having an important conversation on how and where to produce more shelter. We need the community to step up and support these locations once identified because without these resources, people will continue to live in areas not meant for habitation.

We also must fight to bring back federal and state investments into housing production. Legislation to create state social housing shows promise and should be explored. We should also look internally at how the City can ease the process of building, including streamlining permitting, reducing fees, and requiring affordable units to be included in projects over a certain size. A local housing funding measure and changes to the real estate transfer tax are creative ways our City could raise the money needed.

Lastly, while we build capacity, we must find an interim solution for camping. When people are asked to move, they are not told where to go because there is nowhere an individual can legally camp at night when all shelter spaces are full. They are left guessing and caught in an endless loop. While it is an uncomfortable conversation, it is worthwhile because our De facto policy is what we see every single day on City streets.

This cannot continue.

No matter the path forward that we decide upon, we must always remember that at the core of this debate are real human beings. Sometimes this can be lost when discussing big picture policies, but we can’t let that happen to the most vulnerable men, women, and yes, children, that live outside in Sacramento.