A year ago, Sacramento City Councilman Jeff Harris announced a controversial idea – the city should open 49 cabins for homeless women and children at a North Sacramento lot across from Garden Valley Elementary School.
The project was on a city-owned vacant dirt lot, where several homeless people were already camping in tents. But neighbors and parents loudly opposed it, creating a new neighborhood association specifically to fight it and gathering more than 1,700 signatures. Feeling the heat, Harris eventually dropped it.
Mayor Darrell Steinberg announced a plan Monday that he hopes will make it much harder for so-called “not in my backyard” campaigns to kill potential homeless projects.
“All people care about is that the problem gets better, but the NIMBY problem is very real,” Steinberg said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee.
Instead of every project requiring individual council approval, opening proposals up to a litany of criticism, Steinberg wants the council to adopt a “master plan” – essentially a map marking potential properties across the city. If the council approves the map, staff could open large shelters, tiny homes and “Safe Ground” lots for car and tent camping on the sites anytime, as funding becomes available.
The announcement comes two years after Steinberg issued a challenge to every council member to find sites for at least 100 shelter beds in each of their districts. As a result of that call, a large shelter opened in the Capitol Park Hotel downtown, which closed in October; a womens’ shelter opened in Meadowview, and a shelter is set to open under the W-X freeway this summer.
But at least half a dozen other projects that council members publicly proposed never came to fruition.
“Two years later, despite the best of intentions, most of these plans have not materialized,” Steinberg said.
While opening shelters will be easier after the map is approved, getting the council to approve the map, which Steinberg said he wants to happen in the first few months of 2021, will likely be a difficult task.
In October, when the city posted a map of potential sites for homeless tiny homes and parking lots, council members complained it was inaccurate and too concentrated in certain districts, while homeless activists complained there were too few sites.
Steinberg pulled the item from the council meeting agenda and said it would come back in “a few weeks.” The ordinance highlighted the parcels in the hopes that private property owners would volunteer their sites, but did not offer city funding.
“My epiphany was that it did not go far enough,” Steinberg said. “It suggested the traditional city way of doing things, which is to enable others to establish these Safe Grounds, but it didn’t proactively suggest that we are going to be full partners.”
Barriers for homeless shelters
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, which is causing the city to lose more than $92 million in expected revenue, the city still has money for homeless shelters, and expects to receive more from the state and federal government, Steinberg said.
While the “master plan” might help shelters open that were killed purely by neighborhood opposition, such as the one across from Garden Valley Elementary, it will not help with all shelter sites. Council members proposed tent-like shelters on Regional Transit and Cal Expo property, but they did not win approval from those entities’ boards. Even with a “master plan,” shelters on land owned by those entities would still need board approval.
With the state fair canceled, Harris thinks there’s an opportunity for city officials to convince Gov. Gavin Newsom to allow the city to use the indoor facilities at Cal Expo to shelter hundreds.
“This is a good time to hit up Newsom and say, ‘Look, make this site available to us,’” Harris said.
There are three hotels in the county sheltering the homeless from the coronavirus under a Newsom program called Project Roomkey, but it’s unclear how long they will be able to stay open.
While Steinberg prefers to open shelters indoors – whether in semi-permanent tent-like structures such as the facility in Meadowview or existing structures – the “master plan” will also include Safe Ground sites for people to safely camp in vehicles and tents, he said.
Councilwoman-elect Katie Valenzuela said she thinks safe tent and car encampments will be best for her district. She has already heard from several private land owners offering their properties, she said.
“I’m partial to that because I know we could scale it really quickly and I just want people to be as safe as possible on all fronts,” said Valenzuela, who will be sworn into the seat representing the central city and Land Park on Dec. 15.
She also wants to see if the city can get approval to use state parking lots while most state workers are working from home, she said.
Earlier this year, activists opened a Safe Ground encampment in Valenzuela’s district in the Alkali Flat neighborhood. About a dozen homeless individuals are living there in uniform tents set up on the fenced-in lot, along with toilets, showers and access to clean drinking water.
Steinberg has said he supports Safe Grounds, though he would prefer they have tiny home-type structures instead of tents. But finding properties for even a handful of tiny homes is difficult, council members say.
Ten of the structures have been sitting unused in a city lot since the summer, as Councilman Steve Hansen has been searching for a place to put them in the central city. A new council ordinance (like the one pulled from the agenda in October) is also needed in order to open them, Hansen has said.
NIMBY opposition
Councilman Eric Guerra wanted to place a handful of tiny homes on a portion of the vacant former San Juan Motel site on Stockton Boulevard, across the street from a large encampment of more than 75 people. But the neighbors and business owners bristled at the idea, and now it’s no longer available.
“I think there’s still a lot of fear in locating these sites,” said Guerra, who supports the “master plan” idea.
The city should open tiny homes or a safe parking lot at the former Lumberjack site, owned by Regional Transit with an option already in place to sell it to the city, Harris said. But that’s on Arden Way, in the district of Councilman-Elect Sean Loloee, who did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Bob Erlenbusch, of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, said he supports the “master plan” idea.
“I think by doing it this way, everybody’s gotta be on record,” Erlenbusch said. “You’re going to vote a master plan up or down, and if it passes, you gotta do it. No excuses.”
Erlenbusch urged the city to bring in formerly homeless people and activists into the planning process.
The first public council workshop on the topic will be held in early January, Steinberg said, with other district meetings and public input opportunities to come.
Steinberg does not have a goal for a number of beds he wants to see opened, but said he wants it to be in the thousands.
A count in January 2019 found that on any given night, there are about 5,570 homeless people in Sacramento County, most of whom were in the city and sleeping outdoors. A database estimates that 3,790 people in Sacramento County escaped homelessness in the first six months of the year, but nearly just as many became homeless.
“As I start a second term here, we got one more shot to take the foundation we built over the last couple years and launch a more comprehensive effort,” Steinberg said. “Once the council approves the plan, it will represent a citywide buy in to address this in a much more sustained and successful way.”
Theresa Clift covers Sacramento City Hall. Before joining The Bee in 2018, she covered local government at newspapers in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. She grew up in Michigan and graduated from Central Michigan University.
