Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho has filed a civil lawsuit against the city of Sacramento over its failure to adequately address the homeless crisis.
“The community is at a breaking point,” Ho said in a press conference where other Sacramento residents claimed inaction by the city to their complaints.
If you think San Francisco is bad, Sacramento’s homeless population has grown by 250% in the last seven years, higher than San Francisco’s.
Sacramento has become nearly unlivable, and Ho wants the city to “enforce its ordinances regarding unlawful camping, storage, and sidewalk obstructions,” according to a report by KCRA.
“City Hall allows camping on City Hall property at night, but they don’t allow it during the day. I ask the city to extend the same protection they give to themselves to the rest of us,” he said.
The DA’s demands include requiring the city attorney’s office to prosecute codes and ordinances outside of his office’s jurisdiction, providing four additional city attorneys, creating more temporary emergency shelter and camping spaces, access to real-time data regarding shelter beds and a citywide daytime camping ban, among other things.
Steinberg had responded to that letter by saying it “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.”
The suit refers to Sacramento’s “Third-World squalor” and that residents are forced to endure threats of violence. This is not unlike what law-abiding residents are forced to endure in other cities in California.
Related: Hundreds in San Francisco Rally to Lift Injunction Against Sweeps of Homeless Encampments
But city officials call the prosecutor’s suit a political act driven by “local business interests and an opportunistic prosecutor who was elected to office less than a year ago,” reports the New York Times.
Lawyers and activists representing homeless people say the state has failed to provide enough housing for its most desperate residents, and that many working people have been forced to sleep in tents or in their vehicles because they cannot find affordable places to live.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) and some other state leaders blame federal judges who have ruled that until cities build enough affordable housing to house the homeless, the “unhoused” will be able to sleep outside.
“It’s just gone too far,” Newsom said in a Sacramento forum held last week by Politico. “People’s lives are at risk. It’s unacceptable, what’s happening on streets and sidewalks. Compassion is not stepping over people on the streets.”
The governor has ramped up his criticism of federal judges who have ruled that homeless people have a right to camp if cities fail to house them. In 2018, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that cities could not clear people from the streets unless they offer adequate alternative shelter. Since then, a growing body of federal case law has made it exceptionally difficult for municipalities in the nine Western states overseen by the circuit, from Arizona to Hawaii, to enforce laws regulating public camping.
Newsom just can’t make the psychic connection between the state’s and municipalities’ idiotic housing policies and the housing shortage. The hoops that developers have to jump through to get housing approved — especially onerous environmental requirements — and the strong “not-in-my-backyard” sentiment of residents relating to low-income housing make constructing “affordable” housing very difficult.
Until the political leaders in California wake up and start looking for market solutions to a market problem, the homeless crisis will persist.
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