Gavin Newsom is giving Sacramento 350 tiny homes for unhoused residents. Here’s what we know

Gov. Gavin Newsom is gifting Sacramento 350 new tiny homes for unhoused residents and is opening up the state fairgrounds to hold at least some of them.

The homes are part of an effort by the governor to help local officials move more people out of encampments and into housing by standing up 1,200 new units across California, his administration announced Thursday.

In addition to Sacramento, Los Angeles will receive 500 units, San Diego County 150 and San Jose 200.

“We need to focus more energy and precision on addressing encampments,” Newsom said at a Thursday afternoon press conference at Cal Expo. “There’s no humanity. People are dying on our watch.”

Mayor Darrell Steinberg praised Newsom for opening the 350-acre Cal Expo campus as a location to shelter homeless people on a longer-term basis. Aside from serving as a shelter location for a few days during the January storm, Cal Expo has not served this purpose since the Great Recession.

“Obviously we are very appreciative of the governor’s proposal because it helps us move forward in a very significant way,” Steinberg said. “We have been calling for a long time for Cal Expo to be a place where we can site tiny homes and other strategies to address this crisis and it has been tough. I love the State Fair ... but if we’re honest about it, it is underutilized and we have a crisis. It’s a public facility so we need to use it.”

Acknowledging the magnitude of California’s homeless crisis, Newsom called the new units a “strategy” — “not a solution” to the issue. The program will represent only a small fraction of the units needed to get everyone off California streets. Sacramento has more than 6,000 homeless people sleeping outdoors, according to the latest homeless count.

Newsom said the program could be expandedif it proves successful for reducing encampments in the four cities. The homes are expected to be delivered by the fall and cost a total of about $30 million, which will be covered by existing state funding, Newsom said.

New homes aim to help cities reach homeless reduction goals

The governor’s announcement is aimed at helping the four cities reach their goals of getting people off of the streets and into homes. Last November, Newsom temporarily withheld $1 billion in funding for local homeless initiatives because of what he saw as a lack of aggressive plans from cities and counties.

He released the funding a month later with the understanding that localities would work to improve their goals.

Initial plans submitted to the state collectively aimed to reduce homelessness on California streets just 2% by 2024 — an outcome that Newsom called “unacceptable.” New local plans submitted to state officials indicate that California is now aiming to reduce homelessness by 15% by 2025, according to the Newsom administration.

Newsom said the four cities were selected based on the enthusiasm of those local leaders and because those cities had already identified potential sites to place the units.

Sacramento plans to give the first spots in the new housing units to the hundreds of people camping under the overpasses along the W-X corridor, in order to clean up that area, Steinberg said. The city cannot move people now because there are no available shelter beds to offer them, he said.

“The main things missing are beds,” Steinberg said. “We’re up to 1,100 beds a night but we are full. And so if we’re going to make real progress that’s visible and tangible corridor by corridor, we need more beds.”

A 2018 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit bars governments from prosecuting people for sleeping on public property when there are no shelter beds available.

The city and county have a combined 2,300 shelter beds and spaces, all of which are typically full. There are nearly 9,300 homeless people in Sacramento, most of whom sleep outdoors.

Sacramento’s Cal Expo long floated for homeless housing

The Cal Expo campus has long been floated as a potential site for the homeless. The campus is near the American River Parkway, close to the hundreds of people camping along the river bank, damaging the levees in some areas.

In 2019, the City Council voted to approve a 100-bed shelter at Cal Expo, but after months went by without approval by the Cal Expo board, the city withdrew the proposal.

Newsom signed a bill in 2021 to clear the way for state and county officials to open a large homeless shelter at Cal Expo’s so-called Lot Z, but it never happened.

Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, who authored that bill, commended the governor for helping local officials set up more emergency housing units rather than waiting for costly, permanent housing to be built.

“We need to focus on emergency housing now, which includes shelters, safe parking lots and tiny home villages like this,” McCarty said. “I think this is spot on and needed immediately across California — and right here in Sacramento.”

Bob Erlenbusch of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness praised Newsom for opening the small homes but said he should also open several of the mostly-vacant buildings on the campus.

“Given the scale of the homeless crisis not only in Sacramento but the state of California, it’s a little shocking that the proposal by the governor for Sacramento is so incredibly modest,” Erlenbusch said. “It is a little shocking that they’re not taking the same approach to empty buildings at Cal Expo, which have a lot bigger impact at getting our unhoused neighbors off the street.”

In addition to the new units from the state, Erlenbusch said officials should open the nearly 100 tiny homes and trailers that have been sitting vacant in a city lot since summer 2021. At least two unhoused people have died of hypothermia this winter, he pointed out.

“We have people dying on the streets from hypothermia and tiny homes are sitting in storage,” Erlenbusch said. “That’s shameful.”

Under the governor’s plan, state funding will cover the costs of purchasing, delivering and installing the small homes across the state. Local governments will then own the units and be in charge of paying to operate the new sites.