July 24, 2023
Gabby Trejo, Executive Director
Ending homelessness is both a moral and a practical imperative and is the single biggest challenge our community faces. Sacramento Area Congregations Together (Sacramento ACT), the region’s largest multi-faith social justice organization, believes that our shared faith traditions require us to work to end this travesty.
But we can only do this by working together, by harnessing the expertise and energy of all sectors of the community, and by finding ways to overcome our differences. This has always been the impetus of Sacramento ACT’s work on homelessness and housing, and we have long called for a collaborative, comprehensive approach.
Sacramento ACT congregations and its many members strive to make Sacramento a better place for all its residents. We believe that every person has a fundamental right to safe, dignified, appropriate and affordable housing. We also believe that in addressing the current crisis, we must honor the dignity and worth and legal rights of all, housed and unhoused.
Now is a time for leadership at all levels and within all jurisdictions to address this crisis in all of its humanitarian, environmental, health, and public safety dimensions. This requires leadership that is committed to collaboration and communication, is willing to set aside political ambitions, and to seek common ground and compromise.
For this reason, the prospect of one arm of our elected government “investigating” and perhaps suing or prosecuting another is disturbing, to say the least. Recent news coverage suggests that instead of keeping their eyes on real solutions that help unhoused people and the community at large, we are in danger of becoming a circular firing squad. We can and must simply do better than this.
It is tempting to respond to the various political games that trigger our emotional reactions. But as these proliferate, we at Sacramento ACT know it’s time to bring the focus back to what will actually help people and the community at large.
Over the past two years, working together and with community partners, the City and the County of Sacramento have made significant progress toward collaborative solutions to our homelessness crisis. Sacramento Steps Forward has started developing a comprehensive plan to end homelessness in our region. Although this problem—40 years in the making—has recently grown faster than we can address it, progress is being made. New shelter and safe stay communities are opening and affordable housing development has accelerated.
Sacramento ACT applauds and supports these efforts. At the same time, we continue to call for greater investment and much more urgency in creating affordable housing and providing the services needed to help people retain or regain housing. There is no single solution to homelessness, but it is clear that we must meet both the immediate survival needs of our unhoused neighbors and increase the supply of temporary and permanent housing.
This is a time when local governments must ramp up their collaborative work and refuse to be deflected. We call upon the DA and the Sheriff to become more involved in this collaboration. Our law enforcement and criminal justice professionals have important and unique roles to play in keeping all of us safe. They must be “at the table” in developing the Local Homeless Action Plan and other strategies to end this crisis.
While it might be well intentioned, a “law enforcement only” approach to addressing homelessness is doomed to fail because it does not address the fundamental underlying cause of homelessness: the collision of sky-high housing costs with poverty, low wages, drug addiction and mental illness. Without housing alternatives, enforcement actions and sweeps are legally fraught, create only temporary respites for neighborhoods, and dramatically increase the chaos and misery in which unhoused people live.
The people of Sacramento ACT despair at seeing families living in cars, motor homes and motel rooms; we are heartbroken to see obviously mentally ill individuals suffering on our streets in 100+ degree heat; we deplore the accumulation of trash that accompanies street living without sanitation services. We all should be deeply troubled by the human toll that homelessness takes on those experiencing it.
The crisis of homelessness has defied solutions for so long because there is no quick fix. Our message to our law enforcement and criminal justice leadership is just as clear. Set aside political differences and become part of the team. To all of our leaders we say: build trust, act with greater urgency, and keep at it.
