Sacramento Homeless, Miller Park. (Photo: Art Taylor)
Sacramento Homeless Crisis has Caused ‘Erosion of Every Day Life;’ City is ‘Collapsing into Chaos’
Photos show homeless vagrant population allowed to camp, roam, harass unrestrained
By Katy Grimes, October 3, 2023 8:35 am
Sacramento’s homeless drug-addicted, mentally-ill, criminal vagrant population have clearly shown they can’t govern or take care of themselves. They have been allowed to camp, squat and roam unrestrained in the Sacramento region. They are disrupting daily business life in Sacramento’s downtown, as well as the residential neighborhoods in and around the city. And city officials and the mayor have done little to prevent and stop this.
This daily harassment led Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho to file a lawsuit against the City of Sacramento in September for failing to abate the homeless crisis in the Capitol city. DA Ho said Sacramento’s homeless crisis has exploded by more than 250% in just 7 years.
The DA’s lawsuit was filed in tandem with a civil lawsuit by Attorney Ognian Gavrilov, on behalf of Sacramento business owners and city residents, to “allow the people to have a voice.” The two lawsuits will now be consolidated because they are “nearly identical.”
Both Da Ho and Attorney Gavrilov said the city has created a public nuisance by allowing homeless camps to spread into residential neighborhoods, and for failing to clear sidewalks and areas around public buildings.
Following DA Ho’s lawsuit announcement, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg accused the District Attorney of politicizing the homeless issue. DA Ho told the Globe that his lawsuit isn’t personal or political. “Public safety is my only concern,” Ho said. “I can’t raise taxes or assign housing to be built,” DA Ho said. And he reiterated that public safety is his purview as District Attorney.
Both attorneys said they intend to take their lawsuits to trial and depose Sacramento city officials and Mayor Darrell Steinberg. However, they just sent a demand letter to City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood and wrote that her plan to represent the city in both lawsuits is “alarming and outrageous,” because she is “a material witness in both actions,” The Sacramento Bee reported.
Ho described the city as collapsing into chaos and said Sacramento’s homeless crisis has become an “erosion of every day life.”
Gavrilov said Sacramento Mayor Steinberg is trying to politicize something that is not a political issue, and calls this “The Steinberg Decree.”
“He’s making human tragedy and human suffering a political issue,” Gavrilov said. He added that there are “other real good council members who can show us they will do the right thing. They are with us for a solution, and not going to want a ‘perfect’ solution.”
Sacramento is dying, Attorney Gavrilov’s lawsuit says:
“Darrell Steinberg, the City’s Mayor, is the executioner. The failure to address the ubiquitous spread of homelessness throughout the City is Steinberg’s poison.”
“The Steinberg Decree has transformed this once bucolic tree-lined city into a rotting cesspool of decay and despair. Far from exuding the prestige which accompanies being the nerve center of a massive global economy, the streets and neighborhoods of Sacramento resemble the urban decay that blight the world’s poorest developing nations.”
“Since Steinberg took office in 2016, the City’s homeless population has increased more than 250 percent. This unprecedented surge in homelessness is the direct result of a mayoral decree (the “Steinberg Decree”) which prohibits police and other City officials from clearing dangerous homeless encampments that clutter the sidewalks and pollute local neighborhoods.”
Photos show that Gavrilov and Ho are right about the impending death of Sacramento – drug addicted, mentally ill homeless vagrants are everywhere:
The Sacramento Homeless Union claims the lawsuits overstate the homeless problem. They obviously support the homeless living on the streets, being fed and clothed through the compassion of strangers.
“Oppressive measures” have held the homeless back. They want their “self-governed” camps.
The Homeless Union announced on Facebook they plan to file to intervene in DA Ho’s lawsuit against the City of Sacramento:
The Homeless Union attorney filed a State Bar Association complaint against Sacramento DA Ho:
Prior to his lawsuit, DA Ho received an email from the City Attorney telling him that the Sacramento Police Department is not issuing citations for unlawful camping, unlawful storage or obstruction of sidewalks or any code violations for homeless encampments.
The City Attorney goes on to say “our data indicates we receive zero citations and reports for prosecution; we can’t prosecute these cases if they aren’t sent to us.’”
The DA says “800 Sac PD officers, and there is not a single citation of these ordinance violations?”
“There are 37 city attorneys and not a single prosecution?”
More evidence of homeless living in parks:
We are living in an alternate universe:
The Homeless Union held a fundraiser bike ride over the weekend “for Wood Street residents displaced by Caltrans and the City of Oakland! Please donate and share — link in bio! In-kind donations of bikes, food and supplies are needed! Unhoused resident organizers and community advocates will be meeting with our state legislators and Governor Newsom at the California State Capitol to call for stare funding of permanent affordable housing for unhoused people, services for people living outside in autonomous communities, and an end to mass evictions, property destruction, displacement and death on the streets!”
This is why DA Ho’s and Attorney Gavrilov’s lawsuits are so important.
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Our waterways have also been inundated with trash. River City Waterway Alliance, an all volunteer group, will have pulled one-million pounds of trash this year from Sacramento’s rivers and creeks. See the videos at: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC7ys8UMQ5GpL7kvIAZIRtoQ
And also on Facebook.
The persistence of this problem in Sacramento is a very strong argument for getting rid of EVERY elected official in Sacramento government with any tenure (including Katie Valenzuela and Mai Vang) and replacing them with people who can and will really fix the problem. The major impediment to fixing things now is the sheer stretch of the numbers – which those in office/power have let grow and grow and grow.
Our elected are NOT looking out for us.
There’s no incentive for the homeless to get off the streets, and many don’t want to. 99% of them are drug-addicted and as a result, have mental issues. Some say Proposition 47, that took effect in 2014/2015, created the increase in homelessness by basically decriminalizing theft. I’ve been inside Target, usually at night, and the homeless are all over the store, stealing items off the shelves. Then they go into the nearby neighborhoods and steal anything that’s not locked down. Not to mention all the homelessness and car camping that goes on in the parks. I appreciate DA Ho’s efforts and hope it will work out.
How will the people accept the solution without the manufactured problem?
Of course from my perch as a former resident of California, I don’t really care what they do, as their pronouncements in years past about “solving the homeless problem” or other so called lip service got people elected.
My years there saw the legalization of “recreational drugs”, and no follow up with counseling for addicts.
Even the casinos have Gambling 800 numbers for addicts!
The State passed initiatives to incarcerate criminals, but those have been largely nullified. Three strikes, anyone?
Gangs now control large counties in California, and there are not enough soldiers (law enforcement officers) to make a dent in it.
There are thousands of “social workers” who do not help anyone in crisis, and that is because of several factors:
Most of the passed out addicts on the streets are never approached by a helpful, knowledgeable social worker who enables that person to have professional help, or housing, or jobs.
The social workers sit in offices waiting for people to walk in, and those are pretty well swamped.
If a person is addicted they should be transported to a place to be treated, long term, to also learn skills and job skills to make them self sufficient.
If a person is homeless and has no skills to work, they should be incarcerated and placed in that supportive environment by helping the guards…
The prison population has been reduced as crime statistics have been lowered, by changing metrics and merely thinking ex convicts can be responsible , caring, productive human beings.
Again, the infrastructure to facilitate that fantasy is nonexistent, just like mental illness treatment.
So, the comedy continues, and I am sad my old colleagues and friends are still there.
I propose a radical approach:
Get everyone who is passed out evaluated medically and if they are not dying, fingerprint them and blood test them. Then do that for everyone in a tent or RV claiming to be homeless.
We have a large area of the state that are pretty barren, so let’s start herding them there..
the old interment camps are still around, aren’t they?
But as a citizen now not living in California, I don’t care. And your elected officials don’t either, no matter what they say. Until they give the indigent a room in their houses, and the keys to the spare car, it is just comic relief.
Sorry to be so long…
This is an important lawsuit. Politicians allowed this to happen. The problem we have in California is there are no consequences for criminal and anti-societal actions at every level- not for theft, murder, carjacking, drug dealing, or political failure like in the case and f these local politicians. An obedient press fails to cover the daily outrage. Meanwhile politicians funnel billions to “solutions” that only increase the wealth of their allies.
But Newsom’s presidential aspirations will shine a light on all his failures- including homelessness and squalor on his own doorstep.
How the H the homelessness solved without high paying jobs to support the inflated real estate valuations? Or, is the co-intent to sink RE prices also??
Newsom’s plan in concert with Biden and the DC mongers is to destroy America and the most populous states in unison.
I was born in Sac and raised in the North Area. Cruised K Street. Went to concerts at the Memorial Auditorium. Was called a ‘Cow Town’ but a great place to grow up. I live about 30 minutes from downtown Sac. I haven’t been to Sac in at least 10 years. Don’t want to see the destruction caused by the politicians. Funny how the politicians create the problem then pay their ‘friends’ to ‘fix’ the problem. Lots of $ is being made off the homeless crises so why fix it.
What ‘Steinberger fails to realize since he is a career politican suckling on the largess of the taxpayer’s teat and has never owned nor ran a business, is ignoring the zombie hordes of homeless costs money. For examle, SCMHTC is inundated with homeless zombies asking for admission or free food which diverts resources from their core mission, they employ full-time security to keep emloyees safe from the lawlessness downtown from dusk until dawn, and no amount of pixie dust, LaPhonza “Buttlerisms” or Gavin Old “Newsomisms” is going to change that. If the City employees 37 attorneys to do nothing about it, sounds like they need to start laying off attorneys or hand them a mop and a bucket to start to ‘mitigating’ the urine on the sidewalk. I do like the handwritten complaint to the State Bar though: you can always measure the quality of lawyers legal skills by penanship (not!)
Drove downtown for the first time in a long time, and stepped out of my car to the wafting smell of urine. Yup, Sacramento, you’ve come a long way, baby. This is why I haven’t been into San Francisco in many years and have no plans to do so again. I’m grateful my meeting there validated my parking, because I didn’t want to spend a single dollar supporting the city – even at the meter.
Ok. I was born in Sacramento at the Kaisar on Morse Avenue in February of 71 and grew up in Arden Oaks. In the 70’s and 80’s there was not much of a homeless problem. In 82 due to the recession by and large I saw an occasional street person. For various reasons have moved on and out but checked back and time. The homelessness is largely a downtown problem. Currently. I live in Eureka Ca. Here and in Arcata the homeless are also a big problem. Nearly all of them are wandering, drug-addicted, criminal absolute filth, yes, and mostly mentally ill too. They are worthless in themselves and make everything around them worth less. They can NOT take care of themselves, can NOT get along with other people, and can NOT relate to reality. The first thing they do when they enter a location, is to create a horrible mess, The vandalize and burn down buildings. They dope, and steal. Many of them leave hyperdermic needles around as they tend to be hard-core intravenous drug abusers. They accost people and demand food, money, and drugs from them. Frequently they assault and beat people. They smell atrocious and create an absolute racket. Very specifically, for example, I was told by a server at a local soup and sandwich shop on Myrtle Avenue in Eureka California, that every 3 days on average a bum will break out a winter. I hate these creatures. They should be rounded up and executed, shot, hanged, ground up, burned, buried, the more of them and the more quickly the better.