Sacramento’s X Street homeless shelter opened two years ago this fall, serving the W-X corridor south of downtown, home to one of the city’s largest concentrations of illegal encampments.
From the very start, the shelter’s goal was clear: Get people off the streets and connect them with housing. But a review of city data shows that while the shelter is making progress, it’s fallen short of its housing targets.
“It is our goal to serve 200 people in our first year. It is our goal to get the majority of those people housed,” Amani Sawires, the former chief operating officer of Volunteers of America, which runs the shelter, told CapRadio in September 2021.
“Some people aren’t going to be ready, and we will have planted a seed and they’ll go do something else, but the seed will be planted. And I consider that a success,” Sawires added at the time.
Two years later, the shelter at X and 28th streets has served far more people per year than Sawires expected, but it has not met the goal of getting a majority of them housed.
Instead, it’s connected about 35% of its 793 guests to some form of housing over the first two years, according to data tracked by the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency, or SHRA. The vast majority of guests are either still waiting for housing or left the shelter without getting connected to it.
The 35% re-housing figure is closer to SHRA’s initial goal of moving 40% of guests to housing. During the shelter’s first year, it linked about one quarter of its guests to housing.
Overall, the data for the first two years show 281 shelter guests had received housing as of late October:
- The majority of those, or 55%, received permanent housing
- Another 34% got either temporary or transitional places to live
- The remaining 11% were placed in institutions, from jails and prisons to psychiatric hospitals and substance use treatment centers
The shelter is officially called the X Street Navigation Center due to its focus on ‘navigating’ people to housing. It has 100 beds and is nearly full on most nights.
The X Street shelter in Sacramento, Calif., Friday, Oct. 27 , 2023Andrew Nixon/CapRadio
City officials along with advocates for Sacramento’s unhoused community say staff at the X Street shelter are doing their best to connect guests with safe, stable places to live. They added, however, that the path to housing can be long and winding, given the health and financial hurdles unhoused residents face.
“There are just so many different factors and so many challenges, and I think we're very, very proud of the number that have actually been housed, whether it's temporary housing, transitional housing, permanent housing,” Sarah O’Daniel, SHRA’s director of homeless innovations, said in an interview last month.
Overcoming hurdles to housing
Unhoused residents face numerous barriers to housing even once they’ve sought shelter. More than three-quarters of the people who entered the X Street center reported having a disability, according to the housing authority. More than half had a mental health disorder and 30% were addicted to drugs or alcohol.
Meanwhile, 40% needed help securing ID and social security cards, disability paperwork and other documents needed to apply for housing and benefits. Nearly half had no income.
“Somebody didn't become homeless overnight. And so coming in, [they are] not going to be housed again overnight. It's a process,” added Christie Holderegger, president and CEO of Volunteers of America’s local chapter, which operates several shelters across the Sacramento region.
Case managers work with guests at the shelter to find treatment and to sign them up for ID cards, disability income and other public benefits so that they can eventually apply for and pay for their own housing.
Waiting for a place to call home
But even for unhoused residents who have income and documents in order, the process can take months.
Stephanie Hoffman has been at the X Street shelter with her dog U Nique since July. Before that, she spent more than a decade living unhoused on the American River. She said she receives Supplemental Security Income, a federal benefit for people with disabilities, and is also on a housing waitlist.
Stephane Hoffman by the kennel at the X Street shelter in Sacramento, Calif., Friday, Oct. 27, 2023.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio
Visiting her dog at the shelter’s kennel, Hoffman says she hopes “tomorrow I get a call for a place, an ideal place. … I’ve been trying to get into housing for a long time.”
Once settled, Hoffman would like to open a nonprofit that cares for animals left behind when unhoused people no longer can.
“Homeless dogs, like [when] people go to jail, they go to the hospital, they die and there’s all these homeless dogs that are left,” she explained. “That’s what my big dream would be.”
The housing ideal “should be 100%”
One local homeless advocate said the X Street shelter is performing “exactly the same” as the average of all of Sacramento’s homelessness intervention programs when it comes to permanent housing placements. X Street has connected about 19% of its guests to permanent housing.
“Eighteen percent seems to be sort of the mark for a program's ability to place people into permanent housing,” said Bob Erlenbush, who heads the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness.
Adriene Moncrief works in the kitchen at the X Street shelter in Sacramento, Calif., Friday, Oct. 27, 2023.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio
Overall, the X Street shelter has connected a slightly higher share of guests to housing (35%) compared with the Meadowview shelter for women (31.5%), which opened in 2020. Meadowview, however, has linked a larger share of people to permanent housing at 23.6%.
Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homeless and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco, said it’s difficult to determine the average rate at which shelters connect people with housing across California.
“Of course, the ideal should be 100%,” Kushel wrote in an email. “Otherwise, we are simply sending people back to unsheltered homelessness.”
Housing shortage complicates path
While getting help at local shelters can improve someone’s housing prospects, there’s still a formidable barrier: the Sacramento region just doesn’t have enough affordable housing.
“It’s just a fact,” said City Council member Caity Maple. “For the number of people that are living unsheltered on our streets, we do not have a correlating number of housing units that are low-income, affordable or targeted to these populations.”
A report published in May by the nonprofit California Housing Partnership found Sacramento County has a shortfall of nearly 60,000 affordable homes for its lowest-income renters.
Maple lives two blocks from the X Street shelter and represents the neighborhood.
Encampments lined the W-X corridor near Sacramento's X Street homeless shelter south of downtown in September. The city cleared most of the illegal camps last month.Chris Nichols / CapRadioLate this summer, she spoke out about the dozens of homeless camps that had formed right outside the facility, saying the city had “broken its promise to the community” to keep the area clear of unlawful camps.
Last month, the city removed those camps. The majority of people living in them accepted shelter at sites around the city, including Sacramento’s sanctioned campsite at Miller Park, said Amanda Bayard, the X Street shelter’s director.
Those at the shelter have at least one more year at the facility to turn their lives around. That’s because the Sacramento City Council in September agreed to spend $4.6 million to keep it open for a third year.
Contact CapRadio news reporter Chris Nichols at [email protected]
