Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg. (Photo: Steve Aunan for California Globe)
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg’s Career: A Fractured Fairytale
A good riddance
By Katy Grimes, December 11, 2024 11:45 am
From the “You can’t make this %$@! up file,” outgoing Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg has posted a shameless list of his “accomplishments,” which ludicrously includes “housing and homelessness.”
Before we go any further, let’s take a short trip down memory lane. Steinberg assumed the Mayor’s office in 2016 after being termed out in the California Legislature.
As Mayor, rather than address the root causes of the explosion of drug addicted vagrants living on city streets, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg made permanent housing for the city’s homeless his focus. While to some housing sounded reasonable, but Steinberg authorized the renovation of an old downtown SRO hotel to provide 250 square foot apartments that cost more than $445,000 per unit.
He authorized building tiny homes and studio apartments, provided RV trailers, renovated hotels and motels, and gave over parks and parking lots to homeless.
This is odd because before he left the Legislature, he formed and funded The Steinberg Institute which claims as its mission:
“Transforming California’s mental health and substance use care systems through education, advocacy, accountability, and inspired leadership.
We are an independent, nonprofit public policy institute dedicated to advancing sound public policy and inspiring leadership on issues of mental health and substance use.”
And just last week the Sacramento County Coroner announced the in 5 years spanning 1/1/2019 to 12/31/2024, 1,243 homeless drug addicted vagrants died in Sacramento City and County. Most – nearly all – died from serious drug use of Fentanyl and Methamphetamine. There were many, many violent deaths – blunt force trauma, gunshots, stabbings, hangings, even drownings, undoubtedly related to drugs. And the Mayor knew this while he continued to prioritize expensive housing rather than treatment.
In 2019, the Globe reported:
“Fresh from the State Legislature, in 2016, as Sacramento’s new Mayor, former State Senator Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), announced his plans for making homelessness in Sacramento his priority, through more spending. Gov. Newsom recently announced the formation of the Homeless and Supportive Housing Advisory Task Force and its co-chairs Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg and Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, two city leaders from cities ravaged by homelessness, filth, and disease.
Mayor Steinberg is putting his hopes on the Capitol Park Hotel which was used for decades as housing for low-income disabled adults. The city is kicking them out, and renovating the hotel for $23 million. Steinberg says it will have 180 beds for homeless by August.
These are the drug addicts and mentally ill who refuse the city services. To call them “homeless” is an insult to those that are truly down on their luck. They are vagrants, criminals, druggies, and junkies who have chosen this lifestyle.”
And it only got worse from there.
In 2022, Steinberg announced that the City of Sacramento would open a temporary safe camping site “for people experiencing homelessness” in a small section of the “Peninsula” parking lot at Miller Park.
“People experiencing homelessness.”
“Miller Park will be used as a transitional site for the 10 remaining guests at W/X, as well as a low-barrier site providing an entry point into the system for people currently living in nearby encampments,” the Mayor’s announcement says.
He called them “Guests.”
Calling the city’s 11,000 squatting homeless “guests,” as if they were invited to live on Sacramento streets is offensive to nearly everyone, including the homeless who need help, not flowery language.
“The new 60-tent site will accommodate approximately 80 unhoused residents who remain in the Southside Park and central downtown areas.”
“Unhoused residents.”
There is no mention of the “guests’” physical, mental and spiritual conditions.
The Globe has reported on Sacramento’s perpetually growing homeless population for several years, despite Mayor Steinberg spending hundreds of millions of dollars on it. What was 5,000 homeless on Sacramento streets in 2020 grew to more than 11,000 in 2022… that we know of.
Hundreds of Million$ of taxpayer dollars have been spent by Steinberg, only to significantly grow the homeless drug addict population in Sacramento. They still live in parks, on boulevards, they pitch tents in front of businesses, and use sidewalks as a public toilet. And some of them are living in taxpayer funded motels, hotels, and renovated apartments.
Only a zero-tolerance set of policies could have eradicated the homeless from the city.
Read what Steinberg published about himself, likely breaking his shoulder while patting himself on the back:
8 Years of Transformative Leadership: Mayor Steinberg Delivers Results for Sacramento.
Darrell Steinberg has been one of the most effective mayors in the history of Sacramento. He has dramatically scaled up the city’s response to the crisis of unsheltered homelessness, secured tens of millions of dollars for neighborhood economic development, and delivered new civic amenities while providing steady leadership during the pandemic and social upheaval of the past eight years. Here is a list of his accomplishments:
Homelessness and housing
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Increased the city’s inventory of emergency shelter beds from less than 100 to 1,350, including two congregate sprung shelters, two tiny home campuses (a third will come online soon), the Emergency Outreach and Engagement Center and the master leasing of 350 motel rooms.
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Obtained a commitment by Gov. Newsom to supply and install 175 tiny homes at a health care campus being built by Wellspace Health on Stockton Boulevard. The campus is scheduled ot open in October 2024.
Steinberg also “Secured $7 million in state funding to train young people for government and non-profit jobs.” Now there’s a waste of $7 million.
Steinberg used “$30 million in federal Covid relief funding to bolster the creative economy with grants to artists, arts and culture organizations and tourism.” I’d like to see an audit of that $30 million.
And in the face of “woke” and DEI collapsing across the country, Steinberg “established a standing Racial Equity Committee” on the city council.
Broken Human Beings
A compassionate and merciful Mayor would never authorize broken human beings in dire need of help to live on the streets in disease-laden filth. But renovated hotel rooms and studio apartments aren’t the answer. Treatment is.
Steinberg’s low-barrier shelters and campgrounds have always just been a part of a callous mole game, which pop up every few months in different locations. “Low-barrier” means no rules or accountability for the homeless residing there: they openly buy and sell drugs, use the drugs, store stolen property from nearby neighborhoods, and vomit, defecate and urinate wherever and whenever they feel the need.
In 2022, Mayor Steinberg announced the city was awarded another $23.9 million state Homekey grant to convert the downtown Capitol hotel into housing for homelessness vagrants. The City and the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency also planned to turn a Best Western hotel into a 92-unit homeless apartment complex with bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchenettes.
The Globe noted that $23.9 million is quadruple the annual budget of many effective local programs helping homeless men and women turn their lives around.
In 2022, the county point-in-time brief reported that the City of Sacramento spends an estimated $33 million a year for shelter and other services. Sacramento County allocated $50 million on homelessness.
The 2024 Point-in-Time Count brief reported, “the majority of people experiencing homelessness during the 2024 PIT Count are located within the City of Sacramento.”
Steinberg counts “coordinating with the state” and “setting aside $41 Million” as accomplishments. And he takes credit for Sacramento home owners building mother-in-law quarters onto their homes:
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Coordinated with the state and county to dedicate $44 million from the Mental Health Services Act, which the mayor authored, to provide mental health treatment to people experiencing homelessness.
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Set aside $41 million in federal Covid stimulus funding for affordable housing. Embraced creative construction and financial models to expand the supply of affordable units, including the waiver of city impact fees for affordable construction. Under Mayor Steinberg’s leadership, the city has built far more affordable units per capita than Oakland, San Jose, San Diego, Fresno, San Francisco and Long Beach. Last year alone the city permitted 1,267 units of low-and very-low-income units.
- The number of permits issued for accessory dwelling units jumped 32 percent in 2022 after soaring 124 percent in 2021.
Steinberg was nothing more than a cash machine pass-through from the state to the city.
The Globe hopes he decides to retire rather than inflict more of his “Transformative Leadership” on the people of California.
A good riddance.
- ‘Jobs are Down and Workers are Suffering’ While Gov. Newsom Touts Job Increases - December 11, 2024
- Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg’s Career: A Fractured Fairytale - December 11, 2024
- California Exodus: Golden State Tops US Moving Migration Report - December 10, 2024
Well, it’s no secret, is it, that Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg is and has long been a puffed-up, delusional, ineffective, incompetent, lying, self-congratulatory horse’s ass, and for those qualities he has distinguished himself, even amongst his fellow CA politicians, who also happen to be crooked, money-grubbing, and power-mad.
This is another epic piece from Katy Grimes and once again we see how handy the CA Globe archives have become, in that they allow us to look back FIVE AND A HALF YEARS AGO to see that in May of 2019 we had made a breakthrough of sorts in figuring out what the heck was going on with the homeless vagrant situation in CA’s big cities and certain people seemed to be getting rich from it. It was then that Katy Grimes and other Globe contributors put out article after article and readers began to catch on to the ugly story beneath the “virtuous” one peddled to the public. Ed Ring wrote his iconic “Homeless Industrial Complex” policy piece at that time. By the way, it seems to me that in reading comments here and listening to call-in radio I hear Ed Ring’s title constantly; in other words, everybody and his brother in California knows what’s going on here —— except, of course, the “who me?” politicians and bureaucrats and sketchy non-profit organizations, who have conveniently feigned ignorance all along.
In one of Katy’s articles from 2019 she reported $1 BILLION had been spent. In five years plus these crooked politicians have upped it to (at least) $24 BILLION. And NO ONE knows where the money went, the situation has only grown worse, the “leadership” remains unconcerned with the further spiral of California into hell hole status over these past many years. Their public statements are always about “addressing and solving the homeless crisis,” which has now become “the crisis of the unhoused,” until out here in citizen-land their proclamations (Newsom, Steinberg, Garcetti, Karen Bass, and the rest of ’em) would strike us as comedy —- that is, if they weren’t so grating, annoying, and damaging. And oh yeah, murderous.
Because it’s looking like these people are CHEERING for the overdoses, death, filth, disease, blight, hopelessness, amongst the miserable drug-addled souls on the street. The citizenry isn’t cheering. They CLEARLY want something done. NOW. And always have, judging by the stacks and stacks of their hard-earned money they are willing to pour into it.
By handling this problem the exact-wrong way, the bad-guy politicians and their friends have engaged in criminal neglect or even outright murder of the homeless vagrant population they virtue-signal so energetically they want to save. Whether directly or through neglect or the desire to build their slush funds they have killed the very people they are responsible to help, then walked away with pockets full of cash. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we were to learn that the “new drug on the street,” the one that is reportedly 100 times more deadly than killer fentanyl, and its entry into the U.S. and distribution to the street homeless, had been personally orchestrated by Newsom, Steinberg, and the rest of the Usual Suspects we have come to know to well.