Our community can do so much better. We can. And we will, together.
The report released this week estimating more than 2,000 people are living unsheltered in Sacramento County – hunkered down in our streets and alleys, in our bushes and riverbanks – is a public health crisis that demands immediate, decisive action, and a pioneering approach to city-county collaboration.
The toll reaches beyond the hundreds of souls, embodied in these numbers, subsisting in degraded conditions. The impacts reverberate across our community – wearing down businesses, straining law enforcement, and weighing on neighborhoods – undercutting our shared sense of humanity.
I frankly am tired of attending ribbon-cutting ceremonies celebrating marginal improvements in our ability to provide appropriate shelter and services for people living homeless because of untreated mental illness or substance use disorders or residual trauma from having served in our armed forces. We have the resources and capacity to dramatically alter this trajectory. The question is: Do we have the political will?
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