Mayor Steinberg suggests 'Haven for Hope' model shelter campus for Sacramento
Following is a slightly abridged text of Mayor Darrell Steinberg’s address on Jan. 21, 2020 at Sacramento’s State of the Downtown Breakfast, sponsored by the Downtown Sacramento Partnership. The mayor was followed to the stage by Dr. Drew Pinsky, who gave a keynote focusing on mental health, addiction and homelessness.
We have so many incredibly exciting things going on in our city. There is so much to celebrate, and I suppose I will save those topics for my State of the City address. For that is not the speech to give today as we welcome Dr. Drew.
For there are a few things that can prevent us from becoming the next great American city and everything we want to be. There are a few things, and certainly at the top of that list would be if we fail to address housing and homelessness, this existential crisis, with greater urgency, collaboration and action.
We will not fail. We must not fail.
We are not alone. This is in fact a California and a national problem. Small consolation, but truth is, it’s much worse in other parts of California. In fact, I would argue that while some cities have crossed that proverbial tipping point, where it’s hard to see how they can come back, although I believe they can, we have not yet hit that proverbial tipping point in Sacramento as bad as it is, and if we do the right thing, we can prevent our city from going over and make this demonstrably better.
While we collectively rightfully focus on how to end the suffering and impacts of unsheltered homelessness, an equally important commitment is to prevent people from ever becoming homeless in the first place.
This is a unique time for housing taking center stage as the budget and policy priority in California. We negotiated with the business community a fair rent stabilization ordinance, and it’s also now the law in California, that does not create any disincentive for new construction but protects lower income tenants from becoming homeless.
We will have a housing trust fund in our city amounting to over $100 million in private and public resources when we are done, and we’re committed to housing innovation to make sure that we have a range of housing prototypes that are faster to build and less expensive.
And then there’s the issue which we’ve come to talk about today: unsheltered homelessness. We have cured in this society, in this country, previously incurable diseases. Why can’t we change homelessness? What is it going to take for people to feel different, to see the streets cleaner and to know that the human misery is being addressed effectively and compassionately.
As mayor, I’ve gotten plenty of advice to not spend so much time on homelessness and housing. It’s a political loser, people say. Focus on all the good stuff, give a speech about MLS, and the waterfront. I can’t do it. I won’t do it. There’s too much suffering. There’s too many committed organizations and people who are on the front lines trying to make this better, and we actually know what to do and we have so many real opportunities not to cure this but to make this situation much better.
The issues are, of course, complicated. But sometimes we use complexity as an excuse to avoid simple truths. Let me tell you what I mean. I’ve been both a state legislative leader and now a mayor, and I know how the finger pointing goes both ways: This is a state responsibility and you can’t burden or mandate the localities to do what they can’t do. And the state says, “C’mon this is a local problem. We can’t run everything, and in fact, at the local level you know how to do it best.’
How about we just stop it, and admit that it is a state responsibility, that it is a local responsibility — and it is a community responsibility. Local control, which I respect, does not mean the state’s abdication of leadership. The state must set clear expectations and specific goals, and local government must meet those expectations but have every right to insist on the flexibility to do it their way.
We have a unique opportunity to make tremendous progress with Governor Newsom, in my view. He’s the first governor in my memory that has actually made homelessness and housing a top tier state priority. My, how I wish that had been the case with other governors, who I liked and worked with, when I was in the Legislature. It starts with admitting that we have not ever really articulated who is responsible for what at both the state and local levels, and whether anyone is actually responsible, and accountable, for achieving real results.
This might surprise you coming from me, knowing my political lineage, but it is far from just a lack of money that we suffer from around the issue of homelessness. It is a systems failure, and it is a public policy failure.
Here is a simple truth: Name another area of major public concern where everything that government does is optional or voluntary. We don’t say to our local communities, ‘Build the public schools and educate second and third graders if you choose to. It’s a mandate. We don’t say please clean polluted water, it’s a mandate. We don’t say with other vulnerable populations like the developmentally disabled or foster kids, It’s your choice if you want to care for people.
The analogy that is most resonant to me is climate change and renewable energy. We did not say to the energy producers, ‘Please volunteer to substitute out your fossil fuels with renewable energy. Please do the best you can. Report to us at regular intervals and we will comment on whether or not you are doing well enough. We didn’t say that, because climate change is a crisis. We mandated it. That renewable energy mandate in California sent a market signal that has actually created urgent change when it comes to renewable energy. We are aggressively meeting our standard like never before.
Homelessness is a crisis of epic proportion, and yet everything we do is optional and voluntary. The state does not have an obligation to meet a result. The counties don’t and the cities don’t either, and the results speak for themselves.
Governor Newsom asked me to co-chair his statewide task force on homelessness, and you know me well enough to know I was not just going to bring forward a list of safe recommendations that have been made 20 times over, about how we just need more money, if we only had more money, things would be better.
Instead, I put on my old legal hat here, and legislative hat, and we have proposed a legally enforceable mandate at all levels of government, not just local government, including the state, to be held accountable to aggressive but reasonable imperatives to bring a large number of homeless people off the street with an aggressive but reasonable period of time. And if our jurisdictions, the state, the counties and the cities, do not meet that mandate, or at least show great progress toward meeting that mandate, we would empower the courts through a public right of action, not a private right of action, to order the non-compliant jurisdiction to get the money out faster, to consolidate your resources with your neighboring jurisdiction so that you have more effect, to site what must be sited against the inevitable NIMBYism that exists in ways that make it difficult to meet the mission.
We intend to put this constitutional amendment, with the help of the governor and the Legislature, on the ballot in 2020. For it is far past time that we require what we know is compassionate and necessary in California. If it matters enough, it ought to be required, just like public education and renewable energy.
Representatives of Stantec, which sponsored the State of the Downtown.
When we do this we will send a market signal that says no more fragmentation, no more alphabet soup of programs, no more counties do one thing, cities do one thing, the state does another. A real impetus and emphasis on a regional approach and regional cooperation. Should Sacramento embrace this mandate and hold itself accountable? We should and we must, not just as a city, but as a region.
In our city, we have now had three years of raising tens of millions of dollars — city money, state money, county money and private money — amidst plenty of controversy, and we are poised to have three 100-bed service-rich shelters in our city, efficiency housing, scattered site apartments. A total of 700 new and re-purposed beds to move people off the streets. And by the way, I don’t define shelter as just a bed anymore. As you’ll hear from Dr. Drew, and you’ll know I’ve spent my adult life trying to improve the mental health system in California, every bed must be accompanied by intensive services that allow people to reclaim their dignity and their lives.
I’m optimistic, because 700 beds, with people staying an average of four to six months, before moving on to varying degrees of independence, would lead to us being able to get thousands of people a year off the streets in the city alone.
I am so glad my colleague Phil Serna is here. We are working better with the county than ever before. We’re consolidating resources. We’re actually taking that state money and working collaboratively to prevent homelessness and to rapidly rehouse people who find themselves in these tragic situations. This is quite an effort. Some might say it is a slog.
Ultimately, I believe there are three north stars for us in not just the city but our entire region. No. 1) We must be committed to housing innovation. We cannot afford $500,000 in public subsidy per unit and expect that we’re going to build the volume to house the people who are most vulnerable and fragile.
We need to stoke a Silicon Valley moment around manufactured housing, efficiency housing, tiny homes. In Sacramento we’re going to lead the way because, with our $100-million housing trust fund, we’ll pass a policy I hope in the next week and a half that says 30 percent of that money must be spent on projects that require a subsidy of not greater than $100,000. That would again send that market signal, my favorite phrase today, that we are serious about efficiency housing.
Secondly, we must address the mental health and the drug crisis, because, as Dr. Drew would say, it’s not just about housing. Sometimes mental health is separate from the drug problems, sometimes it’s chicken and egg. We especially have a serious methamphetamine problem. My colleague (Councilmember) Jeff Harris and I and (Sacramento County Supervisor) Phil Serna are all working to address it. I say we build a 100-bed meth center in the greater Sacramento region that allows our law enforcement officers and our social workers to get those who are addicted to meth into meth treatment in the Sacramento region and to begin focusing on that issue as a top tier priority.
And finally, we have learned that building 100 beds a a time is not only less efficient than it could be, though necessary, but you have to have the same' not in my backyard fight five or six times over. We all know the uncomfortable truth about this homeless problem: Everybody wants it solved, but nobody wants it solved near them.
We are not afraid and we have not been afraid to break through, and a lot people have talked about the Haven for Hope in San Antonio. Twenty three acres, and 1,000 people are getting the help they need to end homelessness. I believe with the help of our health care systems, our hospitals, that we do need to evolve to a Haven for Hope kind of approach in Sacramento. The question is, where do we site 23 acres. I’m open to ideas.
The governor himself has said he’s willing to put forward state surplus land , and in fact he’s ordered it. And I know there are a lot of ideas out there. Can we look at Mather, where they’re already doing a lot of work? Could we expand the mission? Cal Expo has asked for $2.3 million in state funding for its 300-acre campus. Could we use Cal Expo in a way that would be remote from Arden Fair and the business sectors, that would allow us to create some form of a campus on the southeast side of Cal Expo as a condition of them receiving state funding in order to continue the state fair?
We have to be open to all these ideas, and I invite you to come forward with your ideas. I say over the next 90 days we commit as a city, as a county, as a region to create a public inventory of all public surplus lands, and then we meet together in whatever form of regional governance we can and we identify the site or the sites, for a Haven for Hope kind of project in our community.
In the end, there are two tests here for us: Can we get thousand of people off the street. I think we can. The second test may be harder: Can we work in such a way, with such dispatch and urgency and collaboration, that the people actually feel the difference? That’s our true test, and I believe that we can meet it.
The great Nelson Mandela said, ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done. What isn’t possible, I ask, in this incredible place we call Sacramento. Let 2020 be the year when we all said, ‘It all seemed impossible, until we got it done.’
Thank you very much.
