As Sacramento heads into the colder months with a new mayor and top executive, the city has been charting a new course to address one of the city’s most contentious questions – how to approach the issue of homelessness.
Last month, the city council voted to go ahead with a number of new initiatives to get people into shelter. Those include a safe camping site, a safe parking site, a couple permanent supportive housing complexes and four tiny home villages focused mainly on housing elderly residents with a total of 160 units.
CapRadio’s Local Government Reporter Riley Palmer recently spoke with Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty on the city’s tiny home approach, and the social services Sacramento plans to include in each community.
They also discussed the concerns about the potential criminalization of Sacramento’s unhoused, as well as other changes to city government this year.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you give me a summary of where the city is going in terms of its approach to homelessness and what you are trying to achieve?
We need to enforce the law. We can’t have urban camping. We can’t allow encampments in our neighborhoods, in front of businesses. On the flip side, we need to step it up and open up more places where people can go.
We have less money from the federal government, less money from the state. And even our city coffers are a little bit tight these days.
We’re gonna have tents in an area where people can camp. It will be structured, more than the failed experiment of Camp Resolution last year. But the big, big thing we’re doing differently is just really stepping up on these tiny homes.
That’s something that I really came to the conclusion of as being mayor, but also being an assembly member, is the status quo of these housing options, which were the permanent supportive housing of $500,000 or more per unit. It just wasn’t gonna work. We were gonna be able to help 5% to 10% of the homeless population.
We can serve five to 10 times more people than the traditional response with this plan that we put in motion.
In terms of the logistics, when is the first village in the plan going to be built? What are the first steps to enacting this plan?
We have to go through the building permit process and like any other development, we have to follow the rules.
The tiny homes have been ordered. They’re $10,000 to $15,000 per tiny home. We have to spend about an additional $70,000 per unit on infrastructure, utilities, getting them hooked up to the power grid to make sure there’s heat and air in them, and in the coming months, we hope to have our first one up and running. We don’t have a solid date just yet. I think by the end of 2025 would be a stretch.
I think that the safe camping one, we’re looking at opening that one this year.
I’ve noticed that there’s been a bit of conversation in certain regions– I’m thinking of Natomas in particular– over where the sites should be. Some residents disagree with the proposed placement at 3111 Arena Boulevard. What do you have to say to those who might not necessarily agree with the locations of the chosen sites?
I’ve talked to people in the city when I was knocking on doors and they said, “Solve the homelessness.” And I said, “Where do you want me to put them?” [[Residents said]] “put them in those vacant lots in South Sacramento, put them up north, put them somewhere else.”
They all want them to go somewhere else, but they’re sleeping in all of our parks and all of our creek beds. So I think we all need to answer the call. We have city owned parcels throughout the communities across Sacramento, and we need to look at dispersing some of these sites everywhere.
In terms of the tiny home villages, one thing the community hasn’t completely agreed on is the council’s decision to charge residents 30% of their income. And you’ve said at meetings that the program is voluntary and not everyone needs to participate. What then is the alternative for people who decide the tiny home option is not their speed?
Well, if you’re in a shelter right now, and you get on the list for housing for the homeless, when you get called, you know what they tell you to do? Pay 30%. Literally all the other homeless programs that get people out of the shelters, they have to pay 30%. This is the same equation. So this is essentially a housing option that’s voluntary.
We think this will be coveted, it’s focusing on seniors. Pretty much every senior that we’ve come across in the shelters, our city officials say they have eligible income for SSI, Social Security or something. If they don’t, we can get them signed up. So we think that this is something that will be sought after and successful.
The city is gearing towards these more cost-effective ideas, while also relying less on state and federal dollars. That being said, the quality of life in these environments could potentially make or break their success. How does the city plan to ensure safety and dignity in these sites and what safeguards are in place to ensure these sites will get access to services?
The big picture is I don’t think we can afford this permanent housing. This permanent housing is 600 [thousand] or more per door. That’s like buying a house in Elk Grove or Natomas or even parts of Sacramento.
We can’t afford that, so we need to do more of this interim housing– and it’s not perfect. It’s not probably the house that you and I are gonna go home [to] tonight, but they’re housing with a door, a lock, places to secure your belongings and the opportunity to have a pet. So it’s way better than sleeping in a tent on the American River Parkway.
At all these locations, there will be a variety of services. I know some of the advocates are saying that they like the more structured, permanent supportive housing with wraparound services. But I did the math, and if we did that it would take us literally a hundred years to get everybody indoors.
Those solutions are literally between $500,000 and $700,000 per person. Based upon our budget for homelessness, which as you noted earlier, is declining, we just don’t have the resources to do that.
I’ve just come to the conclusion along with our council that we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We’re gonna step it up. Serve as many people as we can and give them some dignity.
In Sacramento there’s been more enforcement getting people off the streets, such as the policy you laid out banning camping outside of City Hall, while also outlining efforts to grow emergency housing and transitional housing. Are you concerned that enforcement may begin to outpace the city’s capacity to shelter people?
No, I think that you need to do two things. The public was loud and clear. They don’t wanna have urban camping in our neighborhoods. They want some order.
I’m part of the Big City Mayor’s Association across California. Every mayor is doing the same thing. I think we reached a tipping point where cities, where we can’t just have this camping everywhere. It can’t just be a way of life.
The Supreme Court ruled that cities can enforce no camping. Cities, up and down California, even liberal cities like LA and Oakland, San Francisco and Berkeley, they’ve all turned the corner. We’re enforcing no camping and I think bringing some common sense to the situation.
But the flip side, as I said earlier, we need to step it up and open more places where people can go. We have had some success. We had a point-in-time [count] that [showed] our homeless population went down by 30% from roughly 2022 to 2023. In addition, in the past 12 months since I’ve been mayor and the final few months of Mayor Steinberg, we’ve opened roughly 500 more beds for people to go.
Are you concerned about finding the balance between getting people off the streets and into interim housing and versus criminalizing living on the streets?
Of course. There’s always a balance, and I don’t know about any criminalizing for being homeless.
There’s a consequence for breaking the law but being homeless traditionally isn’t something that people are arrested for. It’s underlying crimes that they’re involved with. But we need to have some balance. We need to have some common sense.
Some people want all one direction, some people want all the other direction. If I went and queried everybody in Sacramento to solve homelessness, 80% say it’s the top issue. If I asked for their solutions, they’d be vastly different.
So what do we do as elected leaders? We bring balance, common sense, listen to both sides and try to make things better. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. I’m super proud.
New city management, budget outlook
Sacramento will have a new city manager, Maraskeisha Smith, come January. I know that the terms of Smith’s proposed contract includes a $399,000 annual salary, which would place her salary among the highest in the state. The city was also criticized for paying the previous city manager, Howard Chan what many thought was too much. What would you like to explain to people about the pay or maybe information they may not be privy to that would help them understand the figure?
That’s kind of comparable pay to city managers, superintendents of school districts throughout the city, throughout the state. In order to get the best you have to pay market salaries.
We’re a top 10 city where we have to make sure that we have a compensation package that’s fair to other jurisdictions, and we’re able to get the top talent. We’re excited about our new city manager, Maraskeshia Smith. She’s a distinguished public servant.
There’s been some conversations surrounding what the city manager is walking into, so I’m wondering how conversations have been going surrounding the city’s budget deficit? If staff or program cuts become part of the conversation, is that something you support in order to get us back in the black?
We are gonna have to make some, some tough choices. This year we eliminated some positions. We didn’t have any actual people laid off, no one lost their job. But we can’t say that in the future.
But the one thing that we’re talking about, which I’m talking with our new city manager about, is growing our economy.
This weekend we had over 100,000 people go to the Aftershock Festival. It brought in $30,000,000 plus to the local economy. How do we bring more stuff like that, which not only is fun for people in Sacramento but also brings in more money to our coffers?
I’m looking not just at cutting, but growing the economy, growing the budget. That’s ultimately how you’re gonna have a more sustainable, economic future.
Riley Palmer covers local government and the city of Sacramento at large for CapRadio. CapRadio is a partner of The Intersection and CVJC.