As Sacramento summer heat approaches, unhoused people, housing advocates call for support

The temperature already felt like the wrong side of 80 degrees when Sacramento Homeless Union president Crystal Sanchez gathered with residents of the Camp Resolution community and others Tuesday morning. 

They presented an update on how the encampment has grown in the past five weeks since signing a lease with the city, and residents said they need water. Almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, in the middle of the press conference, water arrived, with community members hauling multi-packs of bottled water into the camp.

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“The community comes out here and they help us,” Sanchez said. 

While water is a crucial need, it’s not the only one. The camp’s agreement with the city stipulates that the lessee, Camp Resolution, is responsible for both arranging and paying for its own utilities. Though the safe ground can park 33 trailers — with the city providing a majority of those — Sanchez said without an electric grid, they’re just “beautiful hot boxes.”

“Last year, we went around with an infrared [temperature] gun, [and] those things get to 180 degrees without air conditioner — they have everything set up in these trailers, but we don't have power,” she said. “So we can't use the fridge, we can't use the air conditioning.”

The camp now has an 8-battery solar station, a trailer which offers power to over 20 people, and will soon have another one thanks to a community donation from Sean Murphy of Town and Country Contractors.

Crystal Sanchez, who is the liaison between the city of Sacramento and Camp Resolution, talks about the solar station on May 16, 2023.Janelle Salanga / CapRadio

“If it was a small business owner, mom-and-pop businesses can help, imagine what the big guys can do to bring dignity, human dignity to these people,” said organizer Herman Barahona from the Sacramento Environmental Justice Coalition.

But there are 50 people in the camp, and Barahona called the trailers “first-aid kits”: They provide enough energy to run fans, to charge phones, but not enough to reliably run a refrigerator.

Camp Resolution isn’t the only community facing difficulty: Unhoused encampments in the area face the imminent threat of sweeps, given county bans on camping near critical infrastructure. Sacramento’s Measure O, passed last year, criminalizes unhoused people for refusing available shelter space, saddling them with a misdemeanor — though the city must create thousands of occupancies before the policy can go into effect. With shelters often full on any given night, potential sweeps could dislodge unhoused people from areas with shade as temperatures rise.

John Kraintz, who founded Safe Ground Sacramento, said his own experience in shelters felt “like being arrested” because “you’ve got somebody looking after you all the time in there.”

“A lot of people that are out here on the streets are elderly, they're trying to live off that Social Security check,” he added. “Just sweeping people, it's not helping anything, it moves them from one place to another, and then they have to be swept again. Because it's not — there's no end point. There's no place ultimately for people to go.”

Last week, a longstanding encampment on Bannon Island, whose population was primarily seniors, was cleared after a storm flooded the community in February. Residents received notice of intended clearing shortly after the flood, but were not given a specific date. 

The Sacramento skyline is visible from the Bannon Island camp in Sacramento, Calif. Thursday, Jan. 27, 2022.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

Of the roughly 30 people in the community, only two were placed directly into shelter or housing on the day the island was cleared, said Ken Casparis, spokesperson for the county park rangers. Twelve were placed on a shelter waitlist. 

At Tuesday’s press conference, the Sacramento Homeless Union called for an end to sweeps. 

“How can the city simultaneously brag — which they have, and justifiably — that they've helped create this encampment [Camp Resolution] with everything it represents, and at the same time, continue this policy of pushing people from one place to another, all the time increasing the risk of harm to these people state created danger?” asked lawyer Anthony Prince.

A sign mounted on Camp Resolution's fence on May 16, 2023, protests encampment clearings, also known as sweeps.Janelle Salanga / CapRadio

Last summer, the union sued the city successfully over clearing homeless encampments on over 90-degree days, securing protections for almost two months across August and September. Prince said the union would be open to doing the same this year. 

Both the city and county say enforcement actions on encampments are made on a case-by-case basis.

“The City of Sacramento remains committed to providing support to its most vulnerable residents while also enforcing its laws and ordinances,” said city spokesperson Katharine Weir-Ebster. “This commitment is underscored by both the new City/County partnership as well as the City’s willingness to explore new and innovative ways to address the homelessness crisis with a variety of community partners.”

She’s referencing the Homeless Services Partnership Agreement, agreed to in December. It committed the county to opening up 600 shelter beds and mandated the creation of city-county outreach teams to visit encampments and support their needs.

As for the county, spokesperson Janna Haynes said via email, it “isn’t engaged in mass sweeps or camp clean-up outside of what is needed for safety and/or very specific infrastructure needs.” 

When it comes to resources, Sacramento county partners with community nonprofit Safer Alternatives Thru Networking and Education (SANE) year-round to distribute water.

“That provides more than 18,000 gallons of water a month,” Haynes said. As for the city of Sacramento, Department of Community Outreach workers and park rangers, among others, work to provide water to encampments. 

The county decides to offer motel vouchers to unhoused residents when the National Weather Service’s heat risk index is red and nighttime low temperatures are more than 70 degrees for two or more consecutive days.

It opens cooling centers based on a combination of factors, including daytime temperatures of 100 degrees, night temperatures, duration of extreme heat and more. 

But those cooling centers typically have low rates of use. Last summer, even the most-used center during a mid-August heat wave averaged 14 people per day, and one center reported they saw 3 people at most. 

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That’s in some part due to accessibility: While SacRT often provides free transportation to the centers when open, getting to bus stops and even hearing about which cooling locations are open isn’t always intuitive. Water distributions from volunteers, then, become crucial in helping communities persist through the heat. 

There are also community-run cooling stations, run by Sacramentans who work with nonprofit Alchemist CDC to provide shade, cool air and water to anyone who needs them. 

While the stations will begin to be set up next month, Alchemist CDC director Sam Greenlee says he’s looking forward to seeing some of the old stations come back and recruiting new folks to run additional locations.

“A lot of residents here really do care about ensuring our most vulnerable neighbors get the respite they need from the heat,” Greenlee said via email. “[And] our social services have major gaps and failures for there to be a need for these pop-up cooling stations at all.”