New online dashboard shows Sacramento City effort to reduce unsheltered homelessness and its impacts
DCR staff conducting outreach to an encampment.
Sacramento, CA (Dec. 20, 2023) - The City’s new Incident Management approach to addressing homelessness is demonstrating real progress in reducing the size and impact of encampments.
A new data dashboard quantifies the scope of the work city teams are doing on the streets. Since the week of Sept. 25, the dashboard shows that outreach teams referred over 1,600 people to services. City crews and contractors cleaned up more than 3.1 million pounds of trash during that period. They were able to get people to voluntarily move their belongings more than 1,500 times to comply with city ordinances requiring that sidewalks be kept clear and buffer zones be maintained around critical infrastructure and buildings.
Community and business groups report that they are seeing a visible reduction in unsheltered homelessness. The Midtown Association said earlier this month that the number of people living outdoors in Midtown has dropped 18 percent since the group started counting in July.
The most recent numbers for the week of Dec 11 2023 on the dashboard
The City’s intense effort to speed up its response to 311 complaints and achieve compliance with City ordinances comes as the City-County partnership approved a year ago is starting to produce results in terms of getting more people into shelter, housing, and behavioral health services. Under the partnership agreement, combined City-County teams, including County behavioral health workers, conduct outreach to encampments, enroll people in services, and connect them to shelter and housing. Most shelter beds have been put into a coordinated access system that can more efficiently match people with beds as they become available.
Sacramento Steps Forward, the non-profit that coordinates efforts to address homelessness in Sacramento County, reported earlier that month that the number of people placed in permanent housing from temporary shelter in Sacramento City and County increased 38 percent in 2023 from 2022. The total number of people placed in shelter or permanent housing through street outreach rose 55 percent.
City of Sacramento staff provide regular updates on the work of the Incident Management Teams at the end of each Sacramento City Council meetings. The Sacramento City Express publishes them weekly as well.
