Time to look in the mirror: Sacramento tent city attracting national media attention

Sacramento's homeless population is front page news on the New York Times website. Homelessness is not a new issue in Sacramento. Neither is the fact that the city regularly shuffles people who build temporary encampments between several locations along the Sacramento River near highway 160, Discovery Park, and the industral area near Loaves and Fishes and the Salvation Army. The homeless population is visible along Richards Boulevard and 7th Street.

Their tents, either along the river under the 16th street bridge or in the railyards, are regularly raided by police and their belongings confiscated. Ostensibly this is to keep settlements from becoming too permanent, which, in the eyes of city officials, could raise issues about tenure and code enforcement.

One idea that has been floated recently is creating a permanent shelter, basically a warehouse site with basic services like a roof and bathrooms, modeled on shelters in Portland, OR. According to the Times article and Good Morning America, this idea has gained traction with Mayor Johnson. Foreclosure rates in the Sacramento Valley are among the highest in the nation. Increases in homelessness have, apparently, become too embarassing to the city to ignore any longer. To be seen is how a "permanent shelter" would be implemented- whether homeless people with pets would be accomodated (a major barrier for many to seeking formalized shelter) how safety would be provided for, and whether people would even want to live there.

The idea that we would need a "government sanctioned tent-city" speaks to the fact that we treat homeless people as sub-citizens, criminalizing their very existance and ability to meet their own basic human needs. We exclude them from the streets with loitering laws, by removing park benches, and puting spikes on the ground under window ledges where someone might sleep. The very word "homeless" indicates that someone is deficient because they are "without a home" or "without a roof" as some romance languages put it.

As Berkeley Professor Nezzar AlSayyad is fond of saying, Americans have a "right to safe and sanitary shelter, not a right to shelter." This means that although we make sure that a "formal" housing structure meets strict codes, we don't make sure that everyone is housed. In other words, if a homeless person erects a tent or a shanty without proper plumbing and insullation, it will be torn down even if it means that the person is sleeping on the ground in the rain with nothing over their head.

There are bigger problems of inequality, a broken economic system, and government indifference that fuel homelessness and turn the problem and the stigma on the individual, rather than society. We will see if Sacramento decides to address both the immediate housing crisis and its underlying causes.

E. Mattiuzzi