Sacramento council to consider opening hundreds more tents at sanctioned campsites Aug. 1

The Sacramento City Council plans on Aug. 1 to consider opening hundreds more tents at sanctioned homeless campsites, in order to clear more encampments.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg wants to duplicate across the city the Wednesday sweep of a longstanding homeless encampment in the area of 28th and C streets, he said in a statement Thursday. During that sweep, unlike previous ones, the city offered every person a tent at the Miller Park Safe Ground. Fourteen people accepted, but it will soon be full.

Amid mounting pressure, in order to clear more camps, the city will need to open more safe grounds across the city, Steinberg said. He wants the council to vote on Aug. 1 to direct Manager Howard Chan to open hundreds of new Safe Ground spots as quickly as possible.

“I have proposed authorizing the City Manager to stand up hundreds of new safe camping spaces as quickly as possible,” Steinberg said in the statement. “That will be the most effective way to help more people and provide the legal, moral, and effective way to tell people where they may and may not camp.”

Steinberg did not Thursday provide potential locations for the new safe grounds. The council has previously discussed opening one at the 100-acre property the city bought from the federal government in Meadowview. But a year and a half after the city bought it for $12 million, that property still does not have roads for access and part of it is also planned for a youth sports complex.

Steinberg’s previous effort to open safe grounds on vacant lots across the city largely failed because of needed approvals from other state agencies or other complications. That effort was led by council members proposing sites, Steinberg said at a June council meeting. The mayor’s new approach is different because it would deputize Chan with selecting and opening sites.

Safe grounds, which are cheaper than indoor shelters, provide unhoused people with bathrooms, showers, drinking water, and services.

Response to DA criticism

Steinberg also Thursday responded to District Attorney Thien Ho’s announcement that he is considering criminal or civil filings against city officials over the city’s failure to clear more homeless camps.

“People are living in third-world conditions here in the state’s capital,” Ho said Tuesday. “We need to show compassion, but we also need to display courage to sometimes do things that are uncomfortable and unpopular.”

Steinberg declined to comment on Tuesday, but addressed it Thursday.

“There’s been a lot of back and forth the last few days on the crisis of unsheltered homelessness, and what the city is doing to alleviate the suffering of the unsheltered and our entire community,” Steinberg said in the statement. “I choose not to engage in the back and forth. Instead, I will continue my and the city’s focus on enforcing our private property, critical infrastructure, and sidewalk ordinances and growing the number of sanctioned shelter beds and safe camping spaces for the unsheltered population beyond the 1,100 we have already created.”

City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood’s interpretation of the 2018 Martin v. Boise 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling means the city can’t clear camps on public property without offering a place to go. The DA’s Office interprets it differently. Steinberg defended Alcala Wood’s interpretation.

“The city attorney’s interpretation is correct; the case clearly links moving people off public property to the greater availability of additional safe camping, shelter, and housing,” Steinberg, who is an attorney, said in the statement.

Ho also criticized the city for not enforcing its own ordinances, which ban camps from blocking sidewalks or threatening critical infrastructure.

The city’s Department of Community Response went out to more than 13,000 homelessness calls so far this year, including 2,300 for blocked sidewalks, according to Steinberg’s statement. The city has cleaned 6,624 cubic yards of debris, and police have made at least 30 arrests for crimes like theft, outstanding warrants or drug offenses.

“Moving encampments wholesale is a different story,” Steinberg said in the statement. “Moving people with no place for them to go just shuffles them from one part of the city to another, which is an exercise in futility that leads to more frustration.”

Bob Erlenbusch of the Sacramento Coalition to End Homelessness said any new safe ground tents should be fully in shade or have shade coverings, unlike Miller Park. Temperatures are set to hit the triple digits Thursday through Saturday, according to the National Weather Service. That was the reason some people at 29th and C declined to go to Miller Park, choosing instead to move their tents a few streets over.

“SRCEH supports additional Safe Grounds as long as it is not the case of ‘either go to this Safe Ground or go to jail,’” Erlenbusch said. “My recommendation to the city is to convene people with lived experience (in homelessness) about what qualities as well as services these Safe Grounds should have. Additionally, these locations need to coincide with the city’s ‘priority 1 encampments’ so that as encampments are cleared, the residents have a Safe Ground to move to, in an area with which they are familiar. “

The city has designated several camps as first priority, based on complaints, such as one near a city shelter along X and Alhambra streets and another one in the River District.

The city has about 1,100 shelter beds, and the county has 1,200, but there are still more than 6,000 homeless people without a shelter bed in Sacramento on any given night.