200 beds for 5,000 homeless people: Were promises made by Sacramento and the county pointless?

As a humanitarian crisis spiraled on Sacramento’s streets, city and county officials celebrated a “groundbreaking” homelessness agreement that went into effect one year ago.

Through a binding contract, both the city and the county accepted certain obligations as they collaborated to address homelessness concentrated within the city of Sacramento.

One year later, the city and county have met or almost met the majority of the time-bound goals laid out in the agreement. Among other achievements, the local government bodies have created 200 more shelter beds, created cross-departmental teams and established a framework for cooperation buttressed by a schedule of mandated interagency meetings. In a written statement this winter, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg called it “a foundational change” and lauded “the progress we’ve made.”

On Wednesday, he reiterated he is “very happy with the progress, “ but also stressed “there is a long way to go.”

Experts who were asked by The Sacramento Bee to review the contract’s promises and outcomes had a different view. They contend the partnership’s goals are mostly superficial — and the results have been ineffectual.

Achieving the stated goals, they said, has done little to help the thousands of unsheltered homeless people in Sacramento. They noted, for example, that the agreement contained language about bringing on more outreach workers and mental health services, but no tangible goals to create more housing.

Increased outreach and behavioral health services included in the agreement were positive developments, said Jamie Chang, a UC Berkeley professor who studies homelessness, but they amounted to a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.

“Without housing being a priority,” Chang said, “a lot of these other factors — including multidisciplinary teams, behavioral health, these Full Service Partnerships, improved health care — all of that is going to continue to be challenged by people’s living circumstances if they’re remaining unsheltered.”

Looking at the agreement, she added, “There’s almost no housing included in this.”

Ryan Finnigan, the associate research director for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, agreed with her assessment: “Any plan to address homelessness is incomplete if it doesn’t think all the way through that pathway into permanent housing. Until folks are able to access stable, safe, permanent housing, homelessness isn’t resolved.”

In the contract, the city and county agreed to “work aggressively to meet the permanent supportive and affordable housing needs” that are laid out in a different plan, the Local Homelessness Action Plan. That goal — to “work aggressively” — is impossible to quantify.

The Bee sent a detailed description of the experts’ views to the city and the county, requesting a comment for this story. In response, city spokesman Tim Swanson sent a short written statement. He said the collaboration between the city and the county had led to “improved outcomes,” and pointed to the language in the contract about working aggressively to support the goals of a separate plan.

“The permanent housing component of the regional strategy is contained in the Local Homeless Action Plan, which the partnership explicitly supports,” Swanson wrote. “The partnership is one piece of a larger strategy and should not be viewed in isolation from the other work to address homelessness.”

The sole measurable item related to housing in the partnership agreement stipulated only that the city and county had to finalize an affordable housing plan. They adopted the plan in October, 90 days late.

“What was the phrasing?” Finnigan asked. “‘They are going to come up with a plan for producing affordable housing?’” He laughed.

And although that City-County Affordable Housing Plan contains a “target” to develop and fund 2,000 permanent housing units by the end of 2027, the plan is not nearly enough, said a Sacramento State professor who studies homelessness.

“The housing plan is a planning document, not a plan — it estimates costs, it talks about gaps, but there’s no plan there,” said Ethan Evans, a professor at the university’s School of Social Work and a previous executive director of the Sacramento Housing Alliance. “There’s no, ‘Here’s how the housing market conditions can be influenced in Sacramento.’”

Additionally, the partnership agreement does not contain any language limiting encampment evictions, which have continued unabated. That’s in spite of their questionable legality under a federal ruling in Martin v. Boise, which said criminalizing homeless people for surviving outside when there’s nowhere else for them to go violates the Constitution. Though sweeps have been demanded through Measure O by local business owners, such law enforcement actions, Chang said, are likely undermining the city and county’s response to the homelessness crisis.

“What you’re doing is you’re effectively just displacing this individual,” she said. “And oftentimes, it’s not just displacement, right? Folks are actually dispossessed of their property.”

Sweeps, the professor said, “are not just counterproductive; they’re actively harmful.”

Crystal Sanchez, president of the Sacramento Homeless Union, agreed. “Continuing sweeps of unhoused people can create a sense of fear among homeless individuals, making them less likely to participate in services,” she said. “Especially when the same people initiating sweeps are the ones out making connections to provide services.”

Ultimately, Evans said, sweeps are a futile response to homelessness.

“There is tremendous pressure to clean up the streets,” Evans said. “But what we see over and over is that it’s more a shuffling of where people are.”

The clumsy logic of sweeps has borne out in recent flip-flops over a safe stay parking lot whose intended beneficiaries the county appears to have completely lost track of.

In a sweep in June, the city evicted dozens of people living on Roseville Road, even though the county had just applied for a state grant to set up a safe parking lot for those very same people, in coordination with the city.

The people had been evicted, but Sacramento County Department of Homeless Services and Housing Director Emily Halcon incorrectly said at a public meeting on Nov. 7 that people were living on the road “currently.” Halcon told The Bee on Dec. 8 that the parking site was still set to open “in early 2024.”

Seven weeks later, a county spokeswoman, Janna Haynes, said the site would not open because “the current situation shows a significant reduction in the need.” The 200 people who lived in the area, however, are almost certainly still homeless — just somewhere else.

At the last federally-mandated homeless count in 2022, 9,278 homeless people lived in Sacramento County. The largest share of unsheltered people — more than 5,000 — slept within city limits. Most of those people are locals who slipped through the cracks in the California capital region: The survey found that the majority lost their last permanent housing in Sacramento, Yolo, Placer or El Dorado counties.

“We know what the solution is,” Chang said. “People need housing, and we need housing to be affordable or maybe even free for some people.”

But no such solution is written into the partnership agreement.

Across Sacramento County, 2,408 people moved into permanent housing from shelters in 2023, which was 662 more people than in 2022. Still, the problem appears to be worsening: County officials have said that for every one person who exits homelessness, three more people become homeless.

At least 2,800 people were evicted by Sheriff’s lock outs last year, according to records The Bee obtained from a California Public Records Act request. That does not count the thousands more who left after receiving the initial eviction notice. The number will likely increase in the future if the city lets its Tenant Protection Program expire at the end of the year.

And the consequences of failing to address the crisis are dire and, in some cases, deadly. The Bee reported Wednesday that at least 227 people died homeless in Sacramento last year, including one person who succumbed to frostbite and two who were crushed by trees falling onto their tents. The youngest person to die without a home in 2023 was Sophia Garst. She was 4 days old.

What did the city and county promise to do on shelter?

The city and county of Sacramento made many promises in the contract, though not all of them would have direct or tangible outcomes for people living on the streets. For example, the signers agreed to hold public meetings every six months. The bodies haven’t upheld that: The second day of public meetings is scheduled for February, one month late by the most generous interpretation of the contract, and nine months after the most recent public meeting.

In following up on the partnership one year later, The Bee has focused on the more concrete, action-oriented elements of the contract.

The most measurable parts of the pact deal with shelter beds: Within a year, the county agreed to open at least 200 new beds within county limits. The county has opened tiny homes containing 125 beds in south Sacramento, as well as 10 new beds at an existing Salvation Army shelter. The week of Dec. 18, the county opened 56 beds in cabins in south Sacramento. Those cabins brought the total to 191 new beds.

Chang said she was not impressed with the partnership’s resolution to stand up 200 new shelter beds in a year, however, considering the size of the unsheltered homeless population. As of Jan. 16, the city reported that there were 2,436 individuals wait-listed for shelter, along with an additional 659 families with children.

“I’m happy for those folks, those individuals who were able to access those (200) beds,” Chang said. “But in terms of the net impact to the population, to reducing homelessness, to the public health impact of homelessness, it would be miniscule. We need to scale these interventions to match the need. And I’m not seeing that at all.”

At the last count in 2022, the county had a shortfall of more than 6,000 beds compared to its overall homeless population.

The partnership agreement contains two more concrete items related to shelter beds.

The county has agreed to operate a new shelter on a “shovel-ready site” provided by the city. That item had no deadline.

The city has already provided such a site: the Wellspace campus on Stockton Boulevard, which will fit 175 beds. Those tiny homes, which have not opened in time for this winter’s cold overnight temperatures, may open in the summer.

The county has another deadline under the agreement to open at least 200 more beds — bringing the total new beds it opened under the contract to at least 400 — by the end of January 2027. The Stockton Boulevard cabins would count toward that goal.

In the first year of the partnership, however, the agreement only led to slightly less than 200 new beds.

“I mean,” Evans said, “it’s 200 spaces for 6,000. Do the percentage.”

It’s 3%.

If you only count the 5,000 unsheltered people in city limits, that figure jumps — to 4%.

More services, but experts ask: Are they bridges to nowhere?

The county agreed to open a new Community Outreach Recovery Empowerment center to serve behavioral health clients in the downtown core within nine months if an appropriate site were identified. That center had its ribbon cutting Oct. 5, a few weeks before the deadline.

Evans said increased mental health services are a good thing. Still, he said, this is just an outpatient treatment center, operating during normal business hours Monday through Friday.

“You know, if somebody says, ‘Hey, I want to get sober — like, right now,’ if they can’t catch that window, it’s gone,” Evans said. Inpatient treatment centers typically have significant waitlists. “That’s one of the challenges around alcohol and drug abuse, is that those windows open and close very quickly. And, you know, walk-in centers are a good start. ... We should applaud expansions to behavioral health access. And to bring it into the city is important. There’s clearly folks in the city who need access to treatment or medication management and other services that the center may be able to provide.”

Chang said that homeless people’s mental health and substance use issues are unlikely to be resolved while they remain unhoused, struggling just to survive.

In the agreement, the county also said it would continue funding the existing Crisis Receiving for Behavioral Health program in downtown Sacramento, formerly called the Substance Use Respite and Engagement center. The center helps substance users with sobering and detox and can facilitate direct transfers into inpatient treatment facilities. WellSpace Health said the facility has 22 beds.

Under the partnership agreement, the county said it would provide 10 mental health workers who could perform behavioral health assessments in the field and help people access the mental health and substance use care they need. County spokeswoman Samantha Mott said the county has provided 13 such workers, more than fulfilling the terms of the agreement.

But these outreach workers have been directing people into an already overburdened mental health system.

The partnership agreement has one notable element that makes access to additional resources easier. The county agreed to bring on 15 new homeless engagement workers who are focused on getting eligible unhoused people enrolled in CalAIM (as of Jan. 2, there were 14 such workers). CalAIM is a Medi-Cal program that takes a global approach to “health care coverage.” The program covers some housing costs for enrollees, as well as paying for other social drivers of health such as caregiver respite services and medically indicated meal service. Local managed care plans are funding a total of 20 CalAIM positions in the county, 15 of which are slated for the city of Sacramento.

Outreach, but where is it going?

The city and county agreed to “operate multidisciplinary teams that will visit 20 encampments per month.” City spokesman Tim Swanson said that these teams are visiting “at least 20 encampments per month.”

Sanchez of the Sacramento Homeless Union said that a visit from an outreach worker rarely translates to a same-day transport to a permanent home or even a shelter bed.

“We have seen nothing but enforcement without adequate shelter,” she said. “We have seen county and city teams being deployed with no real-time resources, only bus passes, ID vouchers, some assessments and directions to call the overburdened 211 system. No real-time shelter.”

The increased outreach does appear to be having some effect, though not a particularly large one given the overall homeless population. In 2022, 1,746 people in the county went into permanent housing, whereas in 2023, just over 2,400 people went into permanent housing, an increase of 662 people. Mayor Steinberg noted these additional 662 placements as “a 38% increase in placements from shelter to permanent housing.”

In recent years, the city and county have directed more money than ever before toward building new subsidized affordable apartments with services. Earlier this month, 226 new units of affordable housing opened downtown in former run-down hotels. The city and the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency kicked in nearly $28 million toward those projects.

But with the city now facing a $50 million deficit for the fiscal year that starts July 1, there is not much more local money available for such projects.

To help with that, Steinberg wants city officials to place a measure on a future ballot to raise the sales tax countywide to fund more affordable housing — an idea he tabled for this year.

In the meantime, Steinberg said as the result of the agreement, county and city leaders are working together to find state and private money, and to address the crisis better than ever before.

“I think the partnership agreement is the vital foundation to the progress we are making and to the progress that will be made in the future,” Steinberg said Wednesday. “I’m really very happy with the progress, while recognizing there is a long way to go. What the city and county are now doing ... is they’re building muscle. It’s a different culture. They’re working together. There’s a lot more collaboration. There’s a lot less defensiveness.”

Many of those discussions take place out of the view of the public, in closed door meetings with just enough council members and supervisors to avoid violating the state’s open meeting law, the Brown Act.

But despite the progress in improving city and county communication, the two government agencies still operate largely in silos.

When the city earlier this month announced it would open a tiny homes and trailers for 240 people on Roseville Road, near the city-county border, county leaders did not know the location beforehand, county spokeswoman Haynes said.

Where is the homelessness prevention?

In terms of preventing homelessness, the partnership agreement references “the emergency caused by the rapid increase in persons experiencing homelessness” but says almost nothing about prevention.

As it lays out agreed-upon facts, the agreement notes that the county provides “prevention and re-housing resources.” The agreement also mentions that CalAIM, the state Medi-Cal program, includes “housing tenancy and sustaining services.” The agreement contains nothing about eviction prevention, tenants rights’ attorneys, rent caps or funding to supplement existing rental assistance programs.

“If we’re only investing in shelter, and we’re not doing the permanent housing piece, and we’re not doing the prevention piece,” Finnigan said, “then we’re gonna wind up needing to just build shelter after shelter after shelter to accommodate all the folks who are pushed into homelessness by unaffordable housing, and all the folks whose pathway into permanent housing is blocked by the housing just not being there.”

Chang said the lack of language around prevention was a serious mistake. The city and county, she said, should be using “a wide range of strategies, like stronger eviction protections for tenants ... and creating programs that allow seniors, for example, to age within their homes to keep their housing.”

“Prevention,” she said, “is vital.”

“I don’t understand,” Evans said, “why there isn’t a City Council member at every meeting of the (Sacramento Association of Realtors) asking their members to work with the city for homeless placement. ... Why couldn’t 10% of all the vacant units be committed by those members of the realtors’ association to a partnership with the city and county for rehousing placements?”

He said a similar program had worked well in Hamburg, Germany.

Agreement gestures at forced mental health treatment

Full Service Partnerships, also referred to as FSPs, are administered by counties under the state Mental Health Services Act — Steinberg’s signature bill when he served in the State Assembly. The program centralizes services for people with severe mental illness diagnoses, helping them with a range of needs including housing, employment, education and health.

The county agreed to add FSP slots if the program reached full capacity. Over 2023, the county added 360 slots to this program, said Haynes, and the program can serve 2,751 people. While that fulfills the agreement, not all slots in the program are being used. On Jan. 24, county spokeswoman Samantha Mott said that 410 spaces were open.

This component of the agreement has sparked the most criticism from Steinberg, partly because FSPs are one of the few ways to get homeless people into housing that’s funded by the federal government. During an August council meeting, after the city cleared 30 people in a midtown encampment, Steinberg criticized the county for only enrolling one of them in an FSP.

Ryan Quist, the county’s behavioral health services director, told The Bee afterward that many homeless people do not meet the criteria for an FSP because they are not experiencing psychosis — a severe mental health crisis typically suffered by those diagnosed with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

“The perception is that an FSP is the silver bullet for people who are homeless,” Quist said. “But our ultimate goal is matching people to the right level of care.”

Separate from Full Service Partnerships, the city-county agreement included an item about “involuntary behavioral health treatment or diversion programs” for eligible people with severe behavioral health problems. For a temporary involuntary psychiatric hold lasting up to 72 hours, often called a 5150, the person being held must be a danger to their self, a danger to others or, alternately, they must be unable to take care of themselves to an extreme level that could classify them as “gravely disabled.” For a legal mental health conservatorship in California, referred to as a Lanterman-Petris-Short or LPS conservatorship, the proposed conservatee must have a formal diagnosis and must be considered to have a grave disability.

SB 43, signed into law in October, will make it easier to force some people into treatment by expanding the definition of grave disability. However, that law has not yet been implemented in Sacramento County. Currently, a grave disability in Sacramento County means that the person cannot care for their basic needs for food, clothing or shelter. Only a tiny fraction of homeless people with mental illnesses fit the criteria, although the people who might be eligible also tend to be some of the more noticeable homeless people in their neighborhoods.

According to the city-county partnership agreement, county encampment engagement teams were meant to be “responsible for assisting with referrals and coordination” for involuntary treatment, but there was no actual metric included in the agreement. The Bee asked county spokeswoman Mott how many people had been referred into the involuntary treatment process. She said it was “rare” but did not provide a number.

Regardless, the mental health services needed to actually care for conserved and mentally ill people in the county are known to be inadequate. A grand jury report released in June said the county needed nearly 200 more psychiatric beds to meet the needs of the population. At the Dec. 12 Board of Supervisors meeting, the county’s deputy executive of social services, Chevon Kothari, said that she did not currently have the infrastructure in place to accommodate an increase in the number of conserved people that would follow SB 43 implementation.

She asked to delay implementation for two years. The board ultimately voted to delay by one year.

A live-updated online shelter bed database for an overwhelmed system

The city and county agreed to set up a live-updated shelter database, the Coordinated Access System. It’s up and running, though not yet complete. The government bodies agreed that all emergency shelter beds would be integrated into the coordinated access system within 60 days “to the extent possible,” a target that was essentially impossible to miss. Kim Winters of Sacramento Steps Forward sent The Bee the organization’s December progress report, which shows that 1,360 beds throughout the county had been integrated into the Coordinated Access System. An additional 365 beds were slated for integration over the next few months, which would bring the total to 1,725 beds.

This means that it’s easier to refer homeless people into the shelter system. But it doesn’t do anything to alleviate the problem of the shelter waitlist, which still runs into the thousands.

“A great way to put this into perspective is, they’ve centralized their services through 211,” Evans said. “And if you call 211 today and say, ‘I’m not housed,’ they will say, ‘Well, give us your name and some information, and we’ll put you on a shelter waiting list.’

“That waiting list is between one and four weeks long.”

The ‘Planning and Accountability’ plan has no actual goals except for holding meetings

The city and the county wrote into the partnership agreement that they would “identify the metrics and measuring tools that will be used to evaluate outcomes and impact on a system level, including a performance management plan.”

The Bee submitted a Public Records Act request for that performance management plan. The document that The Bee received, titled “Collaboration Protocol for City-County partnership agreement on homelessness,” has a section for “Planning and Accountability.” That section lays out the “metrics (that) will be used to evaluate the outcomes and impact of the Partnership Agreement” in a subsection titled “Performance Management Plan.”

However, while the performance management plan does contain concrete, measurable indicators, such as “total grant funding received from city and county collaborative grant applications,” there is no language in any part of the performance management plan as to the actual milestones that will constitute a success.

For example, the plan does not say exactly what amount of grant funding would be considered a success, just that the amount of grant funding would be used to evaluate impact.

And, in contrast with what all three experts said was the most important goal in addressing homelessness, none of the items in the performance management plan are explicitly tied to permanent housing.

Although the planning and accountability section of the protocol has no measurable goals for anything that would directly address homelessness, it sets very specific requirements about one thing: The frequency of interagency meetings.

Four separate interagency meetings must occur monthly for the collaboration to be considered a success.

Sanchez of the Sacramento Homeless Union said those meetings were taking place without transparency or real accountability, and that the whole apparatus for helping unhoused people was entwined with a futile campaign of encampment evictions.

“They can continue to have these interagency meetings,” she said, “but they are only recycling people on the streets.”

That approach, which Evans referred to as “shuffling,” appeared to play out with an encampment Jan. 18. City spokesman Swanson confirmed to The Bee that last Thursday, the city towed 25 vehicles that belonged to homeless people from Harris Avenue in Del Paso Heights.

Only two people living on Harris accepted the city’s offer for temporary shelter. The rest were left without their makeshift homes.

On the same day that the city towed those shelters away, the county announced that it would be so cold and rainy over the weekend that the emergency weather respite center would open.

And so, starting on Friday at 4 p.m., the people who’d just lost their vehicle homes to the city impound were welcome to spend the next 64 hours warming up in a cot inside a gymnasium.