Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg has 30 days to start resolving the city’s homeless crisis or face a lawsuit, District Attorney Thien Ho warned this week. The crisis endangers both the housed and unhoused, Ho said, and the mayor must act.
Sacramento’s homeless population has increased by 250 percent since 2017, and the city has reached its breaking point, Ho said in a letter to Steinberg. Residents are stuck between “compassion and chaos.”
“My office invited the community to complete a survey regarding 16 encampments located throughout the city. We have received over 1600 responses in a matter of days. Many of the responses were disturbing and appalling,” Ho said in the letter. “Residents reported they were assaulted at gunpoint by an unhoused individual; a girls’ soccer game was postponed because of hypodermic needles on the field; a homeowner was diagnosed with PTSD due to the constant harassment and break-ins by unhoused people living in an encampment across the street from her home; children have had to walk through human feces and urine to get to school.”
Ho said that elected officials chastised citizens for “seeking help and directed them to ‘be thankful’ for being housed.” Some individuals called 311 for assistance, and were told to stop calling.
The DA’s office will use public nuisance laws to press criminal charges if the city doesn’t comply with its demands in 30 days. Ho asked the city to clear homeless encampments, issue a daytime camping ban, and conduct an audit that will detail how much money the city has spent to address homelessness, among other things, in his letter.
Steinberg said that the DA’s letter “deflects responsibility, takes credit for programs the city initiated, lacks basic understanding of existing shelter management systems and funding structures, and includes a series of demands that would cripple the city financially,” to which Ho responded that the crisis has only “been made worse by local decisions and indecisions.”
One-third of the nation’s homeless population live in California, and Sacramento houses more homeless people than San Francisco. Encampments are “everywhere,” said Bob Erlenbusch, the executive director of a homeless advocacy group.
Sheriff Jim Cooper said that criminal activity in homeless camps resemble “the wild west.” His office tracked 300 arrests and 400 sexual assaults in homeless camps over the last seven months. Four-hundred-twenty homeless women were physically abused and 400 were raped in camps, a number the sheriff said doesn’t account for many unreported cases.
The DA isn’t the only official to challenge Steinberg’s handling of homelessness: a Sacramento judge appealed to the mayor in June, asking police to help stop the public sex acts, assaults, open fires, defecation, and nudity he said happens in front of city courthouses daily.