By Robert J. Hansen | OBSERVER Staff Writer
Sacramento County supervisors voted last month to adopt the regionally coordinated homelessness action plan and accept $12.8 million in state funding.
The funds will be allocated for the expansion of scattered site sheltering, outreach teams and youth serving programs, the county said.
The plan, adopted March 12 and otherwise known as All In Sacramento, strives to address the challenges of people experiencing homelessness in the region by providing the overall strategic framework for a unified approach to addressing homelessness across the county.
The plan primarily aims to reduce the number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness by 20% between the 2024 Point-in-Time count and the 2026 count, and increase the percentage of people exiting to permanent housing this year to at least 42%.
The city on the same day also passed the regionally coordinated homelessness action plan.
All In Sacramento builds off a local homelessness action plan approved by the county and city in 2022. That plan established a community-wide strategic framework to address homelessness.
Supervisors Patrick Kennedy, Phil Serna and Rich Desmond voted for the plan March 12, while Sue Frost and Pat Hume voted against it.
“We’re not throwing a dart at the wall,” Kennedy said. “We are basing this on data that we got from our past experience.”
Desmond expressed the desire to specifically fund behavioral health services as part of the solutions to homelessness. Such services currently are tied to other areas of allocated funds.
Desmond said he believes behavioral health issues are a cause of homelessness and that the county ought to highlight its efforts to help people with behavioral health needs.
Emily Halcon, the county’s director of homeless services and housing, said the plan’s overall goal is to shift the county system’s focus from crisis response to increasing access to permanent housing and preventing people from becoming homeless.
“A good majority of that [funding] is going towards sustaining existing programs that we’ve been operating,” Halcon told the board.
The regional plan was developed last year in partnership among Sacramento Steps Forward, the city and county of Sacramento, and the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency.
The 2022 Gaps Analysis Report for the Sacramento Continuum of Care indicates that 16,500 to 20,000 people in Sacramento County experience homelessness annually.
The 2024 Point-in-Time count is expected to be released late May, Sacramento Steps Forward said.
Black people are disproportionately overrepresented among the county’s unhoused population, as reported by The OBSERVER. Black people make up 11% of Sacramento County’s population, yet 31% of people experiencing homelessness in the county are Black, according to the 2022 Point-in-Time count, making Blacks three to four times more likely to experience homelessness than their counterparts.
Since 2019, the state’s Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program (HHAP) has provided local governments nearly $4 billion. The $12.8 million approved in March by the county comes from the HHAP funding plan.
Sacramento County, the city and its continuum of care have received roughly $173 million in HHAP funding. Only 7% of that went towards permanent housing, according to the county.
In Sacramento, rising rents and limited affordable housing options are a leading driver of homelessness, according to Sacramento Steps Forward.
Collectively, the Sacramento region will receive approximately $53.2 million in HHAP funding with allocations to the city and county of Sacramento, and Sacramento Steps Forward. Once the application process is complete, the city will receive $27 million in HHAP funds in two disbursements.
“Two thirds of the people who are considered homeless could be just briefly homeless if we made that early intervention and [prevented] them from becoming homeless in the first place,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said.