I was driving down Roseville Rd. into Sacramento a few days ago. There is a stretch of that road where it is a two-laner and it goes under a freeway overpass in a corridor where there are no houses or stores or any settled area next to either side of the road. It’s desolate for a couple of miles. But it is a main thorofare to the center of the city from the north part of Sacramento so there is fairly constant traffic. There is a railroad track on one side of the road and a golf course that is fenced off on the other side. Both sides of the road are populated with tents and garbage which may or may not be people’s belongings. In a two-mile stretch of road, it appears at least a hundred people live there, maybe more.

This isn’t downtown. There are no facilities, stores, intersections to beg for money, or foot traffic, except those who reside in the makeshift tents. There’s nothing there but a steady stream of cars going highway speeds in both directions. At either end of the stretch is an intersection where there are usually people with signs asking for help/money. It’s a bleak existence for the folk that reside there.

I read the Mayor’s plan to relieve some of the problem. They always talk in millions or even billions when addressing problems and seemingly come up with a figure and then pick something they can spend it on with seemingly little or no investigation as to how to actually solve the problem. We’re gonna house about 800 people in what are called tent/beds for two years for 40.5 million dollars. Two years. I stopped reading there. Yes I know, it costs a lot of money to spend a lot of money. It probably cost five grand to print the proposal they refer to in the city offices.

What that proves to me is these people who are governing this city, and by the way, the whole state, have no interest in solving the problem. They are so uninterested in a solution they haven’t even bothered finding out how many homeless there really are. Google says estimates are of thirty-five hundred people are without a home on a given night and half of them are without shelter, whatever that means, here in Sacramento County. I think I could count that many before I even get to downtown coming from virtually any direction on the many routes into town. So, I’m guessing if they really found out it would be ten thousand or maybe more.

But they are going to pay to house almost 800 of them for two years with no acknowledgment to any of the problems that caused those people to be homeless. In two years they will be back on the street to rejoin their growing brethren.

For forty million dollars I bet they could buy a fleet of motels, Or build little self-contained houses like they are doing in other places, with furnishings and house more people permanently. They could teach the people who are still capable of learning to make a living, and getting some kind of support for those who, because of their addictions or afflictions, can’t learn how to do that. Yes, every budget will have to include something to keep the program moving, take out the trash, and provide necessaries for the ones who get housed, but it will be in permanent residences. Every year they could build a few more and house a few more with the ultimate goal being getting the people off the streets. All of them. How many camps of homeless people should we tolerate? I say none would be a good goal. If you don’t shoot for perfection at anything, you get crap in one hand and whiny baby sniffles in the other.

Yet they want to house 800 people for two years spend another forty-million and a half dollars and not house anyone after two years. How many who get housed do you think will come out of that program with a job, a life, and a home? I think probably 1 out of 800 would be about on the money.

There are those who say about the homeless, “fuck em, they don’t want to work, they’re fucked up, they prefer being homeless,” and go on and on about ‘How it should be.” It’s not that way, they are here, they ain’t fucking leaving. It is a problem that must be solved. You can’t push shit around on some imaginary game board and expect it to work in the real world. And it ain’t gonna be easy and it damn sure will not be solved with a bag of money thrown at it. And with the rate of growth here, they will be in your neighborhood soon and their trash and feces will be next door to you.

In the last two years estimates in most towns and cities of California, the homeless population has doubled, and I’ll bet you the estimates are blatant lies. I don’t know who is to blame, and I’m sure there are plenty of people that will blame it on the democrats or the republicans, Obama, or Trump, or even Reagan, and you all may well be right. It doesn’t matter who caused the problem even a little bit.