Sacramento officials announced the opening of a new site with temporary shelter for homeless residents Friday, five months after giving City Manager Howard Chan authority to choose new locations without approval from City Council.
When it opens next week, the 7.5 acre “shelter-and-service” campus located at 3900 Roseville Road in north Sacramento will feature 60 sleeping cabins, sometimes called tiny homes, and 40 trailers. Altogether, it can house up to 240 people.
Permanent plumbing and showers are already set up at the site, and the city plans to equip each housing unit with heating and cooling.
Several buildings on the campus will also serve as space for service providers — like behavioral health specialists — to provide support to residents.
“Though we're setting reasonable expectations here, there's the potential down the line for expansion,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said at a press conference Friday. “Trailers and sleeping cabins are much better than tents. People should not be living in tents. As a last resort, maybe, in an organized way, and that's what we've done.”
The council gave Chan the authority to designate new safe ground sites on his one in a 5-4 vote this past August in order to open homeless shelters more quickly. At the time, Steinberg said he hoped the first site could be picked within weeks.
Council members Karina Talamantes, Mai Vang, Sean Loloee and Lisa Kaplan opposed the plan when it was proposed. They said they feared the Safe Grounds, which include sanctioned homeless camping and parking sites, would be heavily concentrated in low-income neighborhoods in north and south Sacramento.
The city announced its plans to open the campus just one day after Loloee resigned. The council member recently pleaded not guilty to federal charges of falsifying immigration documents, fraudulently obtaining COVID-19 relief funds and withholding overtime wages related to his Viva Supermarket businesses.
City Council member Eric Guerra said the August decision also directed the city manager to find additional sites to build housing for people experiencing homelessness.
“So this isn't the last one,” Guerra said on Friday. “It allows us to continue to find other locations and use the resources that are coming in from the state and federal government.”
Chan said his team considered around 900 sites, and eliminated ones that didn’t have access to utilities or had overlapping state or federal control. He said the August decision sped up the process of approving and eventually constructing the site.
“We have other sites that we've identified that I'm not sharing just yet, that we have complete site control as well,” he said Friday. “And so, provided we have more or additional resources come in, or if we get full here, then we would look at activating additional sites. Again, provided resources are coming because you know, we have budget concerns as well and it's limited.”
The campus is located in Loloee’s former district and close to the city-county border. The site is a former city-owned corporation yard that was being occupied by the Air National Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers, but it “became available after the lease expired,” city officials said in a release Friday.
It’s also just under 5 miles away from a future county-run safe parking program on Watt Avenue in North Highlands. County officials announced last year the parking site would open in January and offer sanctioned spaces to up to 30 people at a time. County officials added they will run the parking program while they continue to design a larger “Safe Stay community” on site.
City Council member Eric Guerra speaks at the site of a new "shelter and services" campus for homeless residents in north Sacramento Jan. 5, 2024, as Mayor Darrell Steinberg, City Manager Howard Chan and Council member Katie Valenzuela look on.Manola Secaira/CapRadio
The new site is unrelated to the 350 tiny homes promised to the city by Governor Gavin Newsom. Half of those are planned for a location on Stockton Boulevard in south Sacramento, while the city and county have asked for the rest to be placed on the Watt Avenue safe parking program location after initially looking at Cal Expo.
The city also said it would close the safe camping site at Miller Park, which was briefly closed due to flooding last January.
“This is an exciting moment — a slightly bittersweet moment — because we are passing the baton from Miller Park to this new, bigger site,” said Council member Katie Valenzuela, who represents the district in which Miller Park is located. “I always said I wanted to keep Miller Park open until something bigger and better was available, and that's where we're standing.”
Valenzuela added that the campus’s ability to provide structures with electricity and plumbing is something “that we just simply can’t provide at Miller Park.”
“I continue my call to the county and the state and the federal government to continue opening up more resources for cities like Sacramento who are doing everything we can to open up properties and provide the resources necessary to deal with this crisis,” she said Friday.
The number of people experiencing homelessness in Sacramento County reached a record 9,300 people in 2022, up 67% from three years earlier, according to the 2022 Homeless Point-In-Time Count. The next point-in-time count takes place later this month.
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