By Paul Menard, AIA
In the last six months the northeast corner of the intersection of Fair oaks Boulevard and Howe Avenue has become an increasingly dense tent camp for unsheltered homeless human beings. I know this because I drive by it every day on my way to work at the UC Davis Health campus in Sacramento from my home in Carmichael. I notice it more in the morning because the westbound lanes of Fair Oaks Boulevard are immediately adjacent to the encampment.
The reality and ubiquity of homelessness in Sacramento is undeniable. It is a multifaceted, intractable, and heartbreaking problem. We may want to look the other way, but this is becoming more difficult to do. We may want it to disappear, but it refuses to do so. We may deny that it could ever happen to us, but in the long shadow of the Great Recession we fear deep down that maybe it could.
I attended the October 21 meeting of the Newton Booth Neighborhood Association and watched some very angry business owners and residents vent at Mayor Darrell Steinberg and Councilmember Katie Valenzuela over the City’s plan to place five temporary remedial homeless shelters under the W-X Freeway between 18th Street and 24th Street as part of its 2021 Master Siting Plan to Address Homelessness[1] (Master Siting Plan). See Figure 1 below. These business owners and residents described how this piece of their neighborhood has changed for the worse during the COVID-19 pandemic. They told of open drug use, drug transactions, and property crimes. They believe the City’s plan to place temporary homeless shelters in their neighborhood will make things worse. Mayor Steinberg and Councilmember Valenzuela listened to all of it.
Figure 1 – Excerpt from page 26 of the Master Siting Plan
One of our long-time chapter members, Mike Malinowski, is a business and property owner on X Street. He felt strongly enough about this issue that he has filed a lawsuit under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) against the City. Mike is a proven leader in our profession and has provided years of service to the AIA at the local, state, and national component levels. He is also one of the primary reasons the AIACV and the City of Sacramento now have an ongoing and mutually beneficial working relationship. Mike took this action reluctantly due to the City’s use of various sidesteps to avoid consideration of the environmental impacts from concentrating five additional major shelters to be added to the W-X Corridor’s three large existing shelters.
We all want a solution to the current homeless crisis. We’ve run out of patience, and we want something to happen quickly. But, as a society, we’ve been building and zoning ourselves into this crisis for over 70 years. It’s going to take patience, perseverance, hard work, open mindedness, and significant time to reverse the trend. The lack of attainable missing middle housing forms[2] in our neighborhoods dates back to the end of World War II when our service members returned home and the production housing industry, fueled by the G. I. Bill, began to build the 4 to 5 dwelling units per acre subdivisions that now fill the suburbs. (Full disclosure—I live on a quarter-acre lot in Carmichael myself. Our property does include an accessory dwelling unit that we rent to a long-term tenant for $800 per month.)
Jane Jacobs in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 17 – Subsidizing Dwellings, writes that “Our cities contain people too poor to pay for the quality of shelter that our public conscience (quite rightly, I think) tells us they should have.” This 17-page chapter, written 60 years ago, contains some of the clearest and most sensible writing I have found on the topic of affordable housing.
In it, she proposes the establishment of a municipal Office of Dwelling Subsidies that would guarantee construction financing for the builders and guarantee to these builders or subsequent owners a certain level of rent in perpetuity. “The physical units involved would be buildings, not projects—buildings to go among other buildings, old and new, on city streets.” These guaranteed-rent buildings would be integrated in the neighborhoods.
The passage “buildings to go among other buildings” is describing permanent housing mixed into the neighborhoods, not remedial temporary shelters. While we may need solutions with temporary housing components in the near term, the long-term solution is permanent affordable housing integrated at building scale into neighborhoods—all neighborhoods. As Jane Jacobs proposed in 1961 and as the housing crisis now facing us locally, nationally, and globally evidences, creative forms of government intervention and new methods of delivery are required.
Regarding the need for remedial temporary shelters, the City’s efforts alone will not suffice. Recognizing the need for a regional solution, County Supervisor, Rich Desmond, and City Councilmember, Jeff Harris, recently went to San Antonio, Texas, to tour the Haven for Hope facility. The City and County are now evaluating sites that may serve to bring the Haven for Hope model to Sacramento. The following statement is from the www.havenforhope.org website. “Haven for Hope and our partners, address the root causes of homelessness by offering programming tailored to the specific needs of the individual. Our approach is person-centered, trauma-informed, and recovery-oriented. The goal is to meet individuals where they are and support them as they move toward self-sufficiency.”
The AIA Central Valley Chapter is working with the City and County through its Civic Engagement Team and Housing Task Force to facilitate permanent affordable housing solutions with stable ongoing funding (see our Housing Position Statement). In addition to adopting the Housing Position Statement in December 2019, the Chapter hosted a panel entitled Neighborhoods for All as part of the October 2020 Experience Architecture, the Emerging Professionals Committee sponsored a design competition to explore using surplus land at school sites for work force housing, the Housing Task Force hosted an event during 2021 Experience Architecture week on the Fair Oaks Boulevard Corridor Plan[3] and is planning for a Spring 2022 design charrette to explore what can be built on this aging commercial corridor under the Corridor Plan’s Main Street District Special Planning Area ordinance. This charrette will include a political sponsor, members of the community, the Carmichael Improvement District, developers, architects, and planners. We hope this charrette will generate design ideas for an exemplary pilot project to include workforce housing, community-serving commercial uses, and a central gathering place for Carmichael.
As we embrace the new year, please consider joining the Civic Engagement Team or the Housing Task Force to engage with your fellow architects and local government leaders to work on affordable housing solutions. You might also want to consider joining local government as an appointed commission member (Planning, Design Review, or Preservation) or as an employee.
[1] Link to the Master Siting Plan https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a67c48df6576e09b7b10ce8/t/610ae998ae18460e789818b5/1628105117731/Final+2021-08.04+Sac+Homeless+Master+Siting+Plan+PUBLIC_DRAFT_WEB.pdf
[2] Duplexes, flats, fourplexes and cottage courts built throughout our nation’s neighborhoods prior to World War II.
[3] Link to article by Gary Delsohn in the December 2021 issue of Inside Sacramento https://insidesacramento.com/people-power-suburb/