Homelessness Can’t Be Cut Big-Time? Don’t Tell Sacramento.

Most mayors’ stump speeches and policy platforms include a pledge to build more affordable housing and reduce the number of the unhoused. Care for the common good, including alleviating the suffering of living outdoors, is a just cause. But aligning the services, constituencies and resources is a seemingly intractable challenge with few hopeful results.

In Sacramento, California, however, the latest point-in-time survey of those in shelters and on the street, conducted in January, tells the story of a dramatic reduction in the number of unhoused residents in the city and county: Since 2022, overall homelessness has decreased by 29 percent and the number of people sleeping outdoors has fallen by 41 percent.

“There’s a lot of political posturing around homelessness, but in the end it’s the old-fashioned work that matters,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg told me. “When I started as mayor, we were funding and operating less than 100 beds a night. We now operate 1,350 beds a night. Between the city and county, we’ve gotten 25,000-plus people off the streets since 2017, from unsheltered status to housed. We’ve made a commitment.”

Collaboration and commitment are what worked in this county of 1.5 million residents with a central city of just over 500,000. Under a 2022 agreement, the city and county formed a new partnership with nonprofit groups to implement a strategic plan that combines building housing capacity with an aggressive outreach to people in need. 

“It’s a dual strategy,” Steinberg said. “We now have a legally binding partnership agreement with our county where nothing is perfect but we’re working better together than ever before. Combine that with enforcing our critical infrastructure, sidewalk and private-property laws.”

The city and county officials agreed to both shared and individual-jurisdiction responsibilities, including:

Shared Responsibilities

• Create 10 new encampment engagement teams, staffed by the city and county, to provide intensive outreach, assessment, navigation, service delivery and housing to as many people as possible in encampments within the city limits.
• Focus efforts to provide services and housing through a Coordinated Access System — a new one-stop access point — to streamline city and county outreach.

City Roles

• Dispatch the engagement teams with immediate offers for city services — everything from solid-waste removal to code enforcement to public safety protocols.

• Identify locations for safe parking, shelters, motel conversions and permanent supportive housing.

• Designate funding for continued investment in temporary and permanent housing with innovative partnerships and resources such as the city’s Housing Trust Fund.
  
  

County Roles

• Embed county mental health staff with the engagement teams to provide on-the-spot behavioral assessments and help get people into the appropriate mental health or substance abuse treatment programs.
• Write and enforce so-called “5150 holds,” which under state law allow judges to involuntarily commit people experiencing a crisis to outpatient drug and mental health treatment.
• Build and fund new Community Outreach Recovery Empowerment behavioral health centers within the city limits.
• Commit to creating 200 new shelter beds within a year and 200 more within three years. 

In addition to collaboration, caring for Sacramento’s unhoused has also required commitment of significant financial resources. Since 2019, the city and county have taken in approximately $120 million in state Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention grants. Nearly 97 percent of that money has gone to support emergency beds for the homeless: The city and county have increased the number of emergency beds by 84 percent, while the number of individuals now in permanent housing has increased by 30 percent.

It’s still early in the partnership, but the returns are more than just promising. The January 2024 point-in-time count found that the number of people without housing had fallen to 3,944, down from 6,664 two years previously. Overall, the number living either without shelter or living in shelters or temporary housing fell to 6,615, down from 9,278. 

Local officials aren’t quite ready to take a victory lap. Steinberg points out that it’s not enough to get people off the street — that it’s also essential to help prevent people from losing their homes. “It not only needs to be sustainable, it needs to get even better, because there are still too many people on the streets,” Steinberg said. “And it’s going to take even greater collaboration, even more resources, even greater commitment.”

Not everyone is sold on the results reported by the city and county. “These numbers are incredibly difficult to believe and further highlight the trust issues with local government that our guests have consistently expressed over our many years of service,” the nonprofit group Loaves and Fishes, one of the region’s largest nonprofit homeless-services providers, told the Los Angeles Times in a statement. “All campus programs have reported serving more guests daily than last year.”

Loaves and Fishes said it saw a 6.4 percent increase in the number of homeless people seeking services from 2022 to 2023, including a 21 percent increase in meals served, and the organization’s director said she expected the numbers to grow through this year.

Steinberg praised Loaves and Fishes for its “long and storied history of helping unsheltered people,” but he defended the numbers reported from the point-in-time survey. “No one questioned the methodology when the numbers went up.”

What can’t be dismissed is the effort behind the numbers. It’s taken millions of dollars along with firm, long-standing commitment from city and county leaders and workers, nonprofit groups and just about everyone in the community. It also reflects the kind of careful strategic planning that we at Funkhouser & Associates have advocated for — and worked on — for years. There’s still much more to do, as Steinberg himself acknowledges.

Other local governments can take a close look at Sacramento’s bold experiment and try their own versions of collaboration. By forging partnerships across jurisdictional boundaries, harnessing and aligning efforts, and committing the necessary resources from government, nonprofits and other partners, cities and counties across America may find room to innovate and reduce the human suffering associated with the lack of safe and affordable housing.

We’ll be monitoring Sacramento’s approach in the months and years ahead. In the meantime, Funkhouser & Associates is well placed to help you develop your version of Sacramento’s approach through thoughtful collaboration, commitment, and doing the necessary work.