Where Will The Next Sacramento Homeless Triage Shelters Be Located?

Sacramento City Council members have been looking for possible homeless shelter triage sites for a couple of months.

Jay Schenirer represents Oak Park and part of south Sacramento. One of his possible sites is the parking lot behind a Sacramento Regional Transit station on Florin Road.

"We'll be doing two things this coming week,” he said. “One is we'll be going to the Regional Transit Board as an information item to see what the board thinks about leasing a piece of this parking lot to the city for this shelter. Hopefully that will have a positive discussion and then we will be going Tuesday to meet with the community."

The community meeting will be held at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Luther Burbank High School.

Schenirer says these sites would likely include large temporary tents and would provide services. He says most homeless people stay in the neighborhoods where they grew up or last had shelter.

"It's not bringing more homeless into the neighborhood,” Schenirer said. “It's not a walk-in shelter. But it would be something that we would bring folks to and hopefully get them services on the road to permanent housing."

The original winter triage shelter on Railroad Drive off Del Paso Boulevard is in Jeff Harris' district. He's also working to bring a similar shelter with 100 beds and city services to the other side of the American River at Cal Expo. But he says there are hurdles to gaining business support, like panhandling and so-called street feeding by charities.

"If we do a sprung-tent shelter and the business community feels that there are negative impacts, getting another shelter in any other part of the city is going to be ever so much harder,” Harris said.

For Eric Guerra, it’s been a struggle to find city land in his District 6, which includes Power Inn Road.

“We've reached out to business districts to see if there are any properties that might have the requirements we need,” Guerra said. He has requested an expansion of services for homeless women and children for programs such asSt. John's shelter. There is $1 million in the mid-year budget proposal that would accomplish that.

Some counties in the state have already been performing homeless counts, while Sacramento's is this week. In 2017 there were about 1,800 homeless people identified in the city.