Gov. Newsom wants a homeless village at Cal Expo but here is why it isn’t working | Opinion

Gov. Gavin Newsom visited Cal Expo in March to announce that a village of “small homes” for unhoused people was coming to the fair site. Then earlier this month, Newsom announced that there would be 350 new homes in all for homeless people in Sacramento, including some at Cal Expo.

But the state, Cal Expo, the city of Sacramento and Sacramento County appear nowhere close to getting a homeless village up and running at the state fairgrounds. Newsom’s grand plan is stuck in a political stalemate because businesses and neighbors near the fairgrounds don’t want homeless people living near them. This type of stalemate plays out all over Sacramento and California. Businesses and residents rail at public leaders to get homeless people off the streets, but they don’t want shelters, villages, or safe grounds anywhere near them.

The Cal Expo standoff is a perfect distillation of homeless politics.

Opinion

There is the governor, who has presided over an explosion of the homeless crisis during his six years in office and is trying to show he is doing something. But there is also the governor-appointed Cal Expo Board of Directors, and it does not want to decide without direction where to locate a small home village on its property until somebody actually makes a proposal. And nobody has.

It is the county, the government provider of local social services, that is the logical candidate to step forward. But it has not because county politicians are like all politicians in California. They are acutely sensitive to constituents who aggressively object to housing homeless people near them even as those same constituents criticize politicians for “doing nothing” about the homeless crisis.

These contradictory emotions produce what we are seeing now at Cal Expo.

The local member of the Board of Supervisors, Rich Desmond, has heard an earful from nearby businesses opposed to Cal Expo sites adjacent to heavily traveled Ethan Way, sites that have the water, power and sewage to make small homes happen. Desmond has previously suggested that the small home site be hidden from public view, literally behind some horse barns, on a Cal Expo site known as Lot Z.

But that site, according to Cal Expo, has no infrastructure. And it is in a designated flood zone.

So when the Governor on Oct. 10 declared that Cal Expo has been selected as a small home village for the homeless, it raised the question: Selected by whom? Certainly not the county. Nor does the city of Sacramento appear to have any appetite for operating any additional homeless shelter facilities.

It takes a lot of money to convert any site into such a village. Who provides the start-up funds and the long-term operating funds? What is the county’s plan to provide any necessary mental health and drug dependency services? What is Cal Expo’s long-term responsibility, if any?

Cal Expo is a landscape filled with questions and no answers.

Miraculously, the politics for erecting small homes for the homeless is possible if the site does not have affluent nearby businesses, such as in south Sacramento along Stockton Boulevard. There, the county has stepped forward to operate a village of 175 of the governor’s small homes at a future health and wellness campus. That leaves 175 small homes that need to find a home somewhere.

It is perfectly understandable at 30,000 feet for Newsom to advance small homes on state land at Cal Expo as part of his planned statewide investment of $179.7 million to create 13,710 of these new small homes at sites throughout the state. But unless the state is prepared to step in and operate a small village on its land with its money, nothing at Cal Expo is on the path to actually happening.

What’s important is for these small homes to rescue hundreds of people from lives on the streets as soon as possible. Perhaps the battle over Cal Expo can be waged between the state and the county at another time with another idea. The county has a potential site for these 175 small homes along Watt Avenue.

Desmond is not a supervisor who is running from the homeless issue as he listens to constituents who understandably want solutions someplace else. Earlier in October, for example, he showed up near downtown for the opening of a new county-run homeless resource center. He got a deserved shout-out from Mayor Darrell Steinberg for being part of the celebration.

Desmond’s attendance was in stark contrast to Supervisor Phil Serna, who didn’t show up and blamed a calendar malfunction for missing a milestone event that should have been a priority for him.

It was Desmond who was genuinely excited about how the new county facility, which will provide desperately needed services for hundreds of nearby homeless residents, would change Sacramento for the better. “I’m happy to witness the transformative impact that this site is going to have in this community,” he said.

This is a modest but telling example of the political kinship necessary to make progress among our local governments. It only happens happens with communication. When a governor declares something is about to happen at Cal Expo, and the local governments are not lined up, the entire exercise is a mirage.

Sacramento’s leaders need to find common ground. The region needs to accelerate the construction of affordable housing, housing along transit corridors and transitional housing for the homeless. It’s time to prepare to get hundreds of homeless residents out of their tents and into small homes as a transition to a better future