To: City Council Colleagues

From: Mayor Darrell Steinberg

Date: Dec. 6, 2020

Dear Colleagues:

As we begin preparing for a new year, I am writing to inform you of my intent to engage my colleagues, staff and the community to bring to the City Council an enhanced and streamlined approach to the city and region’s homeless crisis. I will propose that instead of making site-by-site decisions about where to locate, fund, and operate our multiple responses to homelessness, we instead vote up or down on a single master siting, programmatic and operational plan. The plan must include specific implementation timelines consistent with available and anticipated resources.

The City’s tiny home community in north Sacramento for transition-age youth i

The potential for an already crippling problem to get even worse must compel us to act with greater urgency and a commitment to eliminating the many obstacles that currently limit progress.

This master plan will be modeled after the nation’s base closure commission effort in the 1990s. It will be comprehensive enough to shelter and house thousands of unsheltered Sacramentans, and to prevent thousands more from becoming homeless.

The suffering of people living outdoors is the primary reason we must act with greater urgency. But having a comprehensive plan that creates the capacity for thousands to come indoors also means we’ll have greater legal standing to prevent unregulated and widespread camping on sidewalks in front of businesses, under freeways and in parks. Homeless housing sites included in the plan will be designed to improve conditions in the surrounding neighborhood with a “good neighbor” mitigation zone and particular focus on housing those already experiencing homelessness in the vicinity.

We are not starting from zero; far from it. Just in the past year and a half, working with our partners at the county and Sacramento Steps Forward, we have collectively helped more than 5,000 unsheltered people obtain longer-term housing. During my first term we enrolled 2,140 people in our Whole Person Care program and placed nearly 900 of those enrollees in permanent housing or transitional housing. Working with Sacramento County, we brought more than 1,300 people indoors to motel rooms during the Covid-19 pandemic. We dedicated $4 million to emergency rental assistance.

My efforts as past chair of the California Big City Mayors have brought more than $21 million for homelessness solutions directly to our city through HEAP, HHAP and the CARES Act. We have and operated sizable new shelters downtown and in Meadowview and created 40 units of scattered site housing. We set aside 450 federal housing choice vouchers specifically for those experiencing homelessness.

However, the problem has grown worse. The Covid-19 pandemic has been a major cause of the increase, but there is another clear reason we haven’t made more progress: Each siting decision, for a shelter, permanent supportive housing, tiny home project, converted motel, and sanctioned campground creates an individual controversy every time we try to move forward.

As a result, our approach to siting shelters or other housing options for those living outdoors is too slow. Our pace, combined with the increased numbers of people becoming homeless, has made it difficult to achieve progress on the scale needed to meet the magnitude of the challenge we face.

Once again, we do not have to start with a blank slate. City staff has produced a map showing 1,798 potential shelter or encampment sites at least 500 feet away from a sensitive use or a residence. We have received numerous offers and proposals for tiny and modular home projects. We must be ready to pursue them with the ready and appropriate partners.

Working with City Manager Howard Chan, I will organize bi-weekly full council workshops to develop the comprehensive plan. Together, we will prepare detailed agendas that tackle each element of the master plan: siting, operations, finance and prevention.

I will ask the Council and staff to work with community leaders to identify appropriate and available sites for the diversity of shelter, housing, and safe camping options. I will also ask the Council to pair the sites with a comprehensive financing, operations and construction strategy.

Our identified sites should not be limited to the city. We must continue the positive momentum and partnership built with Sacramento County during Project Roomkey. We will reach out to seek their partnership on this common challenge.

I will propose that we hold multiple workshops on siting, district by district; on identifying programmatic partners and the requirements for startup and operations; on financing; and on elevating our Office of Community Response to lead more consistent outreach to people experiencing homelessness. An additional workshop should focus on the potential of a large campus model like Haven for Hope.

Sites could be publicly or privately owned by willing partners. Facilities could include -- but are not limited to -- structured tent encampments, congregate bridge shelters, tiny home villages, manufactured housing and permanent supportive housing. They could be operated by the City or by non-profit organizations, faith-based groups, or other groups – subject to regulations to ensure health and safety for residents.

The master plan must include an expansion of our $4 million-rental assistance program, approved on Sept. 22. Preventing homelessness is less expensive, more humane, and as or more important than helping people who are unsheltered come inside.

Interior of the City’s new shelter for women in Meadowview shortly before it opened

I will ask the Council to vote up or down on a comprehensive master plan within the first months of 2021. Once the plan is approved, it will represent the City’s will to address this crisis in a much more sustained and successful way.

Once the Council approves the plan, no individual site consistent with the master plan will need any further city approval. As described above, the plan will go beyond siting. It will also provide the city manager with the funding and operational authority to move forward on each project without further council review or approval.

The wisdom of this approach is illustrated by the nation’s experience with military base closures. Between 1988 and 2005, Congress voted up or down on closing large numbers of military bases, rather than voting one base at a time. The comprehensive plans were prepared and recommended by an independent base closure commission.

Absent this comprehensive process, each member of Congress would have been able to exert political pressure to prevent the closure of a base in their district – even if that closure would improve the efficiency of the armed forces and save money for the U.S. Treasury.

Sacramento’s master siting plan to address homelessness, once approved, would clearly spell out the Council’s priorities and allow the City staff to execute them without constantly coming back for votes on individual sites or spending decisions.

This fundamental shift would not replace or slow down anything we are currently doing.

We will continue to press on with our current, $58-million package of homeless mitigation efforts, including the W-X and Meadowview Navigation Centers, the Emergency Bridge Housing complex currently serving transition-age youth in north Sacramento, and the creation of sanctioned tiny home encampments around the city. They can be folded into our overall master plan. With full councilmember input on sites, we must immediately consider the Safe Ground ordinance brought forward last month by City staff.

We have no choice but to adopt a strategy with greater scope. Sacramento Steps Forward, the non-profit that leads the county’s efforts on homelessness, reported there were 5,123 people experiencing homelessness in Sacramento County on June 30—the majority of them in the City of Sacramento. That number was roughly unchanged over six months despite the fact that 1,606 people had been placed in more permanent housing during that same period.

In December 2018, I challenged each of my colleagues to come up with 100 shelter beds in their districts. Two years later, despite the best of intentions, most of those plans have not materialized. We can unquestionably do more – as we learned through Project Roomkey over the past six months.

We owe it to our community and our City staff to not send mixed signals on the importance of aggressive action. We need to make it clear that addressing homelessness is our top priority.

Huddling each night under bridges or along sidewalks causes immense suffering for the unhoused and inflicts unacceptable impacts on the communities with a concentration of encampments. We must produce a comprehensive roadmap to create new shelters, transitional housing and permanent housing, and then systematically execute that plan.

I will agendize the first workshop in the first full week of January.

I look forward to a breakthrough year together.

Sincerely,

Mayor Darrell Steinberg