Sacramento leads U.S. in homeless families sleeping outside. What must be done to help
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Six months ago, in the middle of the night, Lane’t Lynn’s friend decided she and her two children couldn’t stay with them anymore. Suddenly, they found themselves homeless.
Unable to find a shelter, they started sleeping in her car. She thought it would be temporary. It stretched on for six months. They stayed mostly in the parking lot of a Citrus Heights park that had a bathroom. They weren’t the only homeless family staying there, she said.
For four days, they stayed in a downtown Sacramento hotel with a voucher from the county’s department of human services. But it expired, and they went back to sleeping in the car.
“It’s hard,” said Lynn, 24.
Lynn, who is known by this name and requested her legal name be withheld because she fears for her welfare, was sitting on the bed of her room at America’s Best Value Inn in Sacramento last week. She was feeding her year-old son London Velavaz apple sauce while her 3-year-old daughter Kalaya Warren watched “Frozen” in pajamas.
“But I make sure my kids have what they need. We make it the best we can,” she said.
Many homeless mothers in Sacramento have a similar story.
As Sacramento rents continue to rapidly rise, affordable housing has become scarce. As a result, the region’s homeless shelters are typically full, while many people have taken to living in encampments along the American River Parkway, under freeway overpasses, and in downtown doorways.
A huge number of them are families, quietly sleeping under blankets in winter coats in cars parked in tucked away in the corners of parking lots at grocery stores, churches and parks.
In Sacramento County, about 50 percent of the 1,132 people in homeless families sleep outdoors on any given night, according to a homeless census count conducted about a year ago. According to a report released to Congress by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, no other large metropolitan area has a higher percentage of its homeless families sleeping outside.
In Santa Clara County, the second-highest percentage, 26 percent of homeless families sleep outside or in a car, the report said. In Los Angeles County, the state’s most populous, 19 percent of the 8,447 people in homeless families sleep outdoors.
If the federal report is accurate, it would represent a significant development in how the homeless population in Sacramento is perceived. If Sacramento city and county are leading the nation in the percentage of homeless families living outdoors, that could help shift the debate on allocating money for shelters, vouchers and other programs.
“It’s pretty shocking,” said Bob Erlenbusch, of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness. “This is just a huge crisis for homeless families in our community ... but our policymakers don’t seem to be doing anything about it.”
Councilwoman Angelique Ashby said the city has made progress on prioritizing homeless women and children since the January 2019 count was done, but it needs to do much more. She wants the city to give more money to nonprofits that help homeless women and kids, and spend less on large adult shelters, which cost about $10 million to open and operate for two years. She hopes the report will cause an impact.
“Sacramento has focused on a larger, tougher to serve population, but I feel over time those policies have neglected women and children,” Ashby said. “In some ways, seeing a statistic like that is important. It’s important to recognize the magnitude of the challenge.”
But first, are the numbers accurate?
The numbers in the federal report are so shocking that Sacramento city and county officials, as well as people who work with the homeless, wonder how accurate the figures may be. For one, they say, a recent change in counting methods may account for why Sacramento stands out compared to other cities that conducted their surveys differently.
Most of the homeless numbers throughout the U.S. come from on-the-ground counting by volunteers who canvass their communities looking for people who appear to be homeless, sleeping in tents, in cars, and in shelters. This process usually happens every two years.
In Sacramento, the counting methods for the January 2019 count were significantly different than the one in 2017. Last year’s count was conducted over two nights instead of one, used three times the number of volunteers, and had a special focus – finding the homeless families.
The changes may have picked up families that would’ve gone uncounted in surveys in other communities.
“For years, we’ve been hearing how families are being undercounted,” said Arturo Baiocchi, a Sacramento State researcher who helped organize the count. “I have a hard time believing the factors that increase homelessness dramatically in California don’t also affect families.”
To make sure they were counting the families in Sacramento, volunteers were trained on what to look for, such as cars with foggy windows tucked away in parking lots, Baiocchi said. They also visited service providers, such as the Loaves and Fishes Mustard Seed School, to ask families where they had slept the night before. Many said in their cars, and researchers added them into the “unsheltered families” column.
Baiocchi stands by the data that the count produced. But because volunteers in all large cities across the country don’t count families the same way, it’s not a fair comparison to other communities, he said.
“I’d say Sacramento clearly is an area where families are experiencing homelessness, but I don’t think the data and methodology are strong enough to say Sacramento has the highest proportion of unsheltered families,” Baiocchi said.
Turned away from shelters
Often when Lynn tries to get into a homeless shelter with her children, they have been turned away, she said.
Sometimes it’s because there is no room. Other times, it’s because she is not a domestic violence victim and is not struggling with addiction, criteria that could place her in shelters run by organizations whose mission is to help those populations, she said.
“There needs to be somewhere for single parents with their children to go,” Lynn said.
Last year, City Council voted to open a large shelter for women and children in Meadowview. But the decision was controversial because the shelter will be so-called “low barrier,” meaning women do not have to be sober to be admitted and can bring their dogs if they have them. Ultimately, city officials decided the shelter would be just for women.
Even if the shelter had allowed children, Lynn probably wouldn’t have taken her children there, she said.
The decision to remove kids from the plan for that shelter was the right call, said Philip Mangano, former homelessness czar for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “It’s a wildly inappropriate place to have children,” said Mangano, who’s also a member of a state homelessness task force that Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg co-chairs.
Several years ago, Mangano and other officials in San Bernardino County noticed a huge problem with families and children sleeping outdoors.
They launched a program called No Child Left Unsheltered. Police, social service workers, housing authority employees and motel owners partnered to set up a process to get homeless children indoors as soon as they found them, Mangano said. Under the program, which could be replicated in other counties, when children are found sleeping outdoors, they are immediately moved to a motel or a shelter, given services, then prioritized for permanent housing.
“The idea was to get them off the street as quickly as possible, get them out of their cars, out of parking lots and into some kind of indoor facility,” Mangano said.
It’s made a difference. Volunteers in San Bernardino counted 45 families with children sleeping outdoors last winter, according to a report. In Sacramento County, which has a significantly smaller population, volunteers counted 193 families with children sleeping outdoors.
What’s being done already?
Traditionally, providing services for families with children falls to counties, not cities.
This fiscal year, the county is on track to serve more than 415 families under the CalWORKs Housing Support Program, according to county data. The program offers homeless families rental assistance, security deposits, utility payments, moving costs, motel vouchers, credit repair, and other services. The countywide program will be funded with $3.9 million, up significantly from $1.3 million in 2014, according to county data.
“Sacramento County is committed to identifying and providing services to this highly vulnerable population,” Cynthia Cavanaugh, the county’s director of homeless initiatives, said in a statement. “We are increasing programs we know work as well as developing new programs that specifically target the unique needs of our local families.”
Lynn, who grew up in foster care, said being accepted into the CalWORKs program has given her new hope that she will soon be able to give her children a stable home.
“Now I have a step to get out of this besides just trying to do this on my own,” Lynn said of the program. “They’ll have somewhere to call home instead of being in the car, being in a hotel. She’s getting older so she’s gonna remember a lot of this ... I want her to have an outcome story.”
The program gave her a motel voucher and will help her pay for housing. But she must find the apartment and a roommate herself, which can be challenging while caring for two young children, she said.
The county also provides emergency family shelter for up to 40 families per night, up from 33 families per night in 2018, according to county data.
On the city side, the City Council in October voted to give about $1 million to two nonprofits that serve Sacramento homeless families with children – St. John’s Program For Real Change and City of Refuge.
Rachelle Ditmore, a co-founder of City of Refuge, said the funding allowed the Oak Park nonprofit to fund eight new beds, bringing the total to 14. Many of the homeless mothers the nonprofit serves have a trafficking background, Ditmore said.
“We really need spaces for women to break cycles so they can affordably live in a healthy community,” Ditmore said.
Many of the mothers the nonprofit serves are also African American and young, Ditmore said. Of the homeless parents sleeping outside counted in Sacramento over two nights in January 2019, 55 percent were black. 42 percent were 34 or younger.
“I think what we are seeing is the realities of systemic poverty that has really kept people trapped,” Ditmore said.
Rising rents, homelessness
In 2018, Steinberg directed the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency to set aside more than 1,000 of its Housing Choice Vouchers, formerly called Section 8 vouchers, for the homeless.
Even with a voucher, Sacramento residents have a difficult time finding housing. Many landlords do not accept the vouchers, even though that’s now illegal. Many of the units have become more expensive than the vouchers will pay for.
To address those issues, Steinberg said he wants local officials to start a fund to help entice landlords to rent to voucher holders instead of tenants who have cash in hand. The fund would provide landlords money to fix damages, should they occur, pay for security deposits, and cash to cover the period while a unit sits empty waiting for it to be inspected and for a voucher holder to move in.
In addition, it’s no secret Sacramento needs much more affordable housing. According to a city analysis, in a recent five-year span, the city issued nearly 8,000 building permits to construct units for renters with moderate or higher incomes, but only 210 permits for extreme or very low-income tenants.
To that end, the city is using Measure U sales tax money to launch a $100 million affordable housing trust fund, which will offer “gap financing” in the form of loans or subsidies to help finalize budgets for projects that will be built by private developers.
In Sacramento County, the typical apartment rent soared 45 percent, adjusting for inflation, in the last seven years. That has also contributed to the rise in homeless families, experts say.
“Sacramento has had some of the highest rent increases in the country,” said Shahera Hyatt, director of the California Homeless Youth Project. “People are being priced out of their homes, and if there’s not a safety net waiting on the other side, people will end up being unsheltered.”
To help, the council last year passed a rent control ordinance that caps the amount landlords can increase rent prices each year and prohibits them from evicting tenants without cause.
Steinberg points to that ordinance and the new housing trust fund as two important preventative measures the city has taken.
“One of our key strategies must also be to prevent families from losing their housing in the first place,” Steinberg said in a statement. “We must, of course, do more at all levels of government, and I’m confident that working together we will.”
This story was changed Feb. 7 to clarify the identity of Lane’t Lynn.
This story was originally published February 6, 2020 at 5:10 AM with the headline "Sacramento leads U.S. in homeless families sleeping outside. What must be done to help."
