Sacramento homeless, C St. near/around Stanford Park. (Photo: sacra.org)
Useless, Clueless City Officials Destroying Sacramento with Homeless Crisis
‘It’s very frustrating, I feel the city is running me out of business’
By Katy Grimes, October 5, 2023 8:24 am
In early September we reported on a national study which found that Sacramento placed second only behind Baltimore for the dirtiest cities in America. With 39,186 complaints per 100k population; the Sacramento zip code of 95818 had 48,864 complaints per 100k population – my zip code.
Shortly after we published the article, Jesa David, M.A., Media and Communications Specialist, Department of Public Works, Recycling & Solid Waste Division, from the City of Sacramento sent an email unhappy with our article, claiming the “study paints a highly inaccurate picture of residents’ complaints,” and the city “encourages all our customers to call 311.” I responded that we merely reported on the study outcome, noting that I am a longtime resident of the city.
As we just reported this week, “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 filth, crime and 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 length of time Darrell Steinberg has been Mayor.
Thursday the Sacramento Bee reported that on September 20th (the day after District Attorney Thien Ho filed a lawsuit against the city for its failure to uphold many laws pertaining to the crimes by homeless), the city cleared a homeless encampment in a vacant lot near the Alder Grove Apartments, a low-income housing area. “But just two weeks later, a new encampment with tents, loose mattresses and RVs has sprung up, taking up half of 1st Avenue, which dead ends into the apartment complex. The camp — and the myriad problems associated with it — has merely moved from a vacant lot to the sidewalk and street.”
Neighbors in the Upper Land Park neighborhood adjacent to the Alder Grove Apartments, are fed up with the lackluster results and lack of follow up, ongoing crime, theft, open drug use and sales, public sex acts, loose dogs, filth, foul odors, and that the homeless aren’t getting necessary services.
As we reported, Sacramento, once a sleepy middle class “cowtown,” has turned in to a big filthy dirty city, with homeless vagrants living on the streets – residential streets, under freeway off-ramps, in public parks, along the two rivers – wherever they are allowed to squat by Mayor Darrell Steinberg, the Sacramento City Council and Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, Gov. Newsom and state lawmakers. This rests squarely on politicians who want the plethora of federal and state homeless funding, but don’t spend it to help get the drug addicted and mentally ill vagrants off the streets. Instead the billions spent have been funneled into dubious non-profit organizations and non-governmental organizations, often paying out big salaries, as the Globe has reported for many years. This model is not at all prioritizing eradicating the homeless plague but in growing it so the funding spigot remains on.
Residents of Upper Land Park want the camp moved to a homeless shelter location. Lee Archie, a local landlord has lost two commercial tenants who moved out of his 1st Avenue buildings “because of problems associated with the original encampment. Archie said with the new encampment ‘the situation has worsened,’” the Bee reported.
“Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela, who represents the area, told The Bee the fact that homeless people are just shifting from a vacant lot to the adjacent sidewalk and street is why she voted against the enhanced enforcement measure. ‘We should be holding ourselves to a higher standard in terms of resolution,’ Valenzuela said, ‘really finding people a place to go, so that we don’t just move people, frankly, from one non-compliant location to another.’”
And there is the problem – the councilwoman is clueless. She is useless. She says nothing but her mouth is moving. She could care less. She’s unqualified to be in public office. But it’s the best job she’s ever had in her brief adulthood. And Mayor Steinberg is a career politician who has failed up.
While city residents make calls (as instructed) to 311 to report open drug use, sidewalks and private property blocked by tents and homeless garbage, harassment, violence and other crimes, their calls go unanswered, or they are told to stop calling 311. Residents even report fires set by homeless.
DA Ho described the treatment by the city as “egregious” and “willful neglect,” and said residents are being treated like second class citizens.
This is why the District Attorney and Attorney Ognian Gavrilov had to file lawsuits against the city, to force city officials to uphold the laws they are ignoring. Ho and Gavrilov say they have more than 400 witnesses for the trial and plan to depose Mayor Steinberg.
So what did the city do after the tents and camps were moved across the street after their last sweep? “Last week the city dispatched Ben Worrall, social services manager for the city’s Department of Community Response.”
I’m sure the neighbors were grateful after the Social Services Manager told them, “T’here are priorities all over the city and there are encampments all over the city. We will have more teams in the field and our rapid response teams will get out here as soon as they can.'”
Tell that to the local landlord who reports:
“’The street is partially blocked with cars without license plates… the smells are terrible,’ said Archie, who says he has called the city multiple times to complain. ‘It’s very frustrating, I feel the city is running me out of business.’”
They are.
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City of Sacramento, Sacramento County, and the State of California owe a huge debt of gratitude to Katy Grimes for her work in exposing what is really going on with the homeless-vagrant situation. Katy Grimes, the California Globe, contributing writer Edward Ring (“The Homeless Industrial Complex”), and others, completely ripped the mask off this politician-non-profit-housing-developer charade in 2019, dragging into the sunlight what had been hidden in the dark. This information had the effect of shocking the public who were then forced to acknowledge that government and quasi-governmental entities in CA were hauling in $$billions$$ on the backs of the tortured souls on our city streets and they had NO INTENTION of solving the problem, but only growing it. With that enormous money-making, slush fund stake, the politicians, most non-profits (homeless advocates), and housing developers were not then and are not now going to give up their precious cash cow easily, which is probably the understatement of the decade.
Very anxious to see what D.A. Ho and private Attorney Ognian Gavrilov’s lawsuit will expose from their questioning under oath of the political principals and how that will proceed. Sure seems as though the two of them working as a team will produce results and we can only hope those results will roll out as quickly as possible. But I sincerely hope that, even if the two attorneys don’t say so publicly, they both have a full working knowledge of what the lawsuit respondents have to gain and want to desperately hold on to in this matter. I think this knowledge will motivate them to be as tough and relentless as possible in pursuing the lawsuit with everything they have. Which is absolutely necessary in going after a greedy and immovable adversary such as this one.
Sadly there is absolutely nothing that can be done short of eliminate human beings. The homeless are homeless pursuant to the destruction of the private sector employment base; these numbers will continue to grow until the cities literally collapse due to the abandonment of same by those escaping the crime a depravity sure to ensue.
The only workable answer soon to be proposed by out failed government is an increase in taxes to facilitate encampments for those who are loathed; then can their isolation “away” others be invoked legally.
Cali being accelerated for impact against the brick wall of destruction by Newsom and the balance of the failed elected officials who by the way possess dominion over us and our holdings..
AND Sacramento an example of what is occurring at every major city in California.
Apparently eliminating human beings is exactly what has been happening on the streets:
“Death Rates Among L.A. County Homeless Population Continues to Increase, Latest Report Shows”
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/death-rates-among-los-angeles-county-homeless-population-continues-to-increase-latest-report-shows/
This is probably not part of our “leadership’s” plan, because if numbers of street people dramatically decrease from dying off what happens to their Golden Goose of Homeless Industrial Complex funding? They might start to panic. Unfortunately we’ve become very cynical in response to this govt game. So what do they do? It appears one thing they do is have their lefty media friends (above) run sob stories in the press so the mayors and city councils can tap into public sympathy for the thousandth time to keep funding in place or increase it. Yeah, right, throwing money at this has worked out so well, hasn’t it?
This crisis is not due to lack of a clue. These officials are following orders from the NWO cabal that is bent on destroying the world. I have little doubt many of them are actually paid to wreak destruction on their city.
All of this manufactured drama is leading to one inevitable conclusion. They will burn it all down before we ever have the chance to bring them to justice. Prepare accordingly.
Katy, while you’re not in the ink on paper business keep on buying “barrels of ink” and spreading it all over this issue. The comments that have been made about this issue so far have been spot on, but they point us back to the simple solution for most of what ails this state and that is we have to retake this state back and return it to the people so that it can be ran in a commonsense fashion. Both parties share in the blame of letting the voters down in this State and letting things deteriorate to the mess that we find ourselves in now. Nothing short of a radical change in how this state is managed will bring about the change that we desire.
If you want more homelessness, vote for Katie Valenzuela in 2024. She’s done nothing about the homeless drug-addicted people on our streets. Isn’t she the councilwomen who believes you can’t move homeless people unless there’s a place to move them to? Yeah, it’s called jail and mandatory rehabilitation. East Sacramento, you can have her!
When the economy took a downturn in 2008/2009, there were legit homeless people, families, etc. Now, most of the people on the street are criminals and/or drug addicts. Let’s stop talking about voluntary services and non-profits that don’t work. All these services do is attract more homeless people.
Sacramento natives are fed up with Democrat Mayor Steinberg and the Democrats on the Sacramento City Council along with the Democrats on the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors who have all abdicated their responsibility for dealing with Sacramento’s ever increasing homeless problem. Democrats have controlled the City of Sacramento and Sacramento County for years and they have allowed the homeless issue to reach crisis proportions. They’re all useless as Katy mentioned and it seems like they’re destroying Sacramento intentionally. Maybe establishing homeless camps in front of the residence of Mayor Steinberg and the residences of Democrat Council members and the Democrats on the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors might motivate them to take action? If the obnoxious Democrat City Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela thinks that the homeless camps be should be “self-governing,” then City Manager Chan should grant her wish and make sure that the homeless camp in front of Katie Valenzuela’s residence will be self governing with no law enforcement interference!