More than 25,000 people have moved from homeless to housed since 2017 through the efforts of Sacramento City and County, the leader of Sacramento Steps Forward told the City Council Tuesday.
Progress on helping people exit homelessness has accelerated due to the increased efforts of both local governments during that period, including more emergency shelter beds, more permanent supportive housing projects, and more outreach and placement of unhoused residents in behavioral health services.
The City of Sacramento now runs more than 1,300 emergency shelter beds a night, up from less than 100 in 2017. The City in late summer also launched a multi-disciplinary, Incident Management Team that quickly dispatches crews to address complaints about encampments.
“Your housing placements have increased considerably over the last couple of years,” said Lisa Bates, Chief Executive Officer of Sacramento Steps Forward, the non-profit continuum of care organization that partners with local agencies in Sacramento County to reduce homelessness.
Bates made her comments during a presentation to the Council of “All in Sacramento,” the new regionally coordinated plan to prevent and end homelessness.
The Council voted unanimously in favor of the plan, which includes new performance metrics and the goal of reducing the number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness by 20 percent from 2024 to 2026. The plan also contains an increased focus and funding to prevent more people from becoming homeless in the first place as well as a concentration on rehousing assistance.
“We have helped tens of thousands of lives,” said Mayor Darrell Steinberg during the presentation.
The Council also Tuesday received an update on the progress under the City-County partnership agreement adopted by both jurisdictions in December 2022, which increased coordination and established 10 outreach teams that include county behavioral health workers.
In the first year of the partnership agreement, the joint City-County teams responded to 5,192 unique locations and provided 27,316 services to 3,855 unduplicated individuals. As a result, the teams helped 373 people transition from homelessness to housing.
In addition, 261 people were enrolled in behavioral health care programs, including specialty mental health care, substance use treatment, or full-service partnerships that provide wrap-around care and case management.
These numbers reflect the results from the joint City-County teams and do not comprise the full results of the City’s and County’s individual efforts, including hundreds of “rapid placements” into shelters and Safe Grounds by the City’s Incident Management Team.
“We are just over a year into the program,” said Brian Pedro, who leads the City’s Department of Community Response, during the presentation. “We have learned many lessons along the way – things we have done well, areas we can improve on — but we have always focused on process improvement and providing better service to our homeless community.”