Aug 4

Aug 4 Just what is Sacramento's comprehensive plan to address homelessness? Learn more here

Breaking News, Getting people off the street, Keeping people housed

Sacramento (Aug. 4, 2021) Mayor Darrell Steinberg Wednesday released the City’s Comprehensive Siting Plan to Address Homelessness, the product of more than six months of intensive outreach and work by the Mayor’s Office, City Councilmembers and City staff.

Read the Comprehensive Plan here

The plan, which goes to the City Council for a vote on Aug. 10, identifies strategies and sites to get more than 9,000 people off the streets annually when implemented.

Twenty properties, 15 of them publicly owned, are designated as priority sites for transitional housing, congregate shelters, tiny home communities, and organized campgrounds. Each of the temporary housing options will offer services designed to help people find permanent housing and exit homelessness. In addition to specific sites, the plan identifies programmatic solutions that include motel conversions, increased housing voucher usage, scattered site housing and a larger campus whose location will be determined later in 2021.

The siting plan is paired with a financing framework expected to total about $100 million over two years, most of it from new state and federal resources, including the 2021 state budget and the federal American Rescue Plan Act.

This design from members of the Urban Land Institute and American Institute of Architects in Sacramento depicts an organized supportive camping community with spaces to gather, built-in shade structures, a dining tent, showers and restrooms.

The resolution going to Council on Aug. 10 with the master plan directs the City to build the housing options using design and architectural recommendations from the Urban Land Institute. The plan also describes the need to establish a good neighbor policy or set of community agreements to ensure the safety of residents, neighbors and providers. These agreements will contain specific standards for operations, security, cleanliness, and community involvement. The plan’s appendix includes a template for future use and three existing good neighbor policy documents.

While Mayor Darrell Steinberg conceived of the plan, Councilmembers were tasked with identifying sites in their individual districts and vetting them with the community in a series of meetings, presentations, and workshops.

“I am so proud of the City Council for their commitment of time and resources since January to evaluate every possible site for safe parking, Safe Ground, temporary shelter and transitional housing,” Mayor Steinberg said. “Members pored over maps, drove their districts, toured sites, and met with property owners and agencies in control of the sites. Their exhaustive outreach to the community was unprecedented, even during a pandemic, and created a better plan with a realistic chance for progress.”

City staff also worked with the Mayor’s office to identify surplus City properties and other publicly-owned sites that would be suitable. The plan includes the intent to create a larger “campus” model that could serve 350 people with a site in the city limits to be identified later in 2021 following approvals by city partners.

The goal of the master plan is to avoid the site-by-site battles that slow down the response to the crisis of homelessness in Sacramento. With a single up-or-down vote, the Council will authorize an inventory of sites with enough capacity to match the scope of the problem.