Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg proudly announced “Sacramento’s historic Capitol Park Hotel reopens this week as St. Clare at Capitol Park, a permanent supportive housing complex for people experiencing homelessness.”
Calling the state’s homeless vagrant population “unhoused” has justified spending billions of taxpayer dollars on housing for the homeless in lovely new apartments, renovated hotels, and tiny homes.
The Globe first reported on this fishy project in 2019:
The city just closed a triage shelter for the vagrants living on the streets. Mayor Steinberg is pinning his hopes on the Capitol Park Hotel which was used for decades as housing for low-income disabled adults. The city is kicking them out, and renovating the hotel for $23 million. Steinberg says it will have 180 beds for homeless by August.
As one neighbor said in response to Steinberg’s press conference, “these are the drug addicts and mentally ill who refuse the city services. To call them ‘homeless’ is an insult to those that are truly down on their luck. They are ‘vagrants, ‘criminals,’ ‘druggies,’ and ‘junkies’ who have chosen this lifestyle.”
Truer words could not be spoken.
In 2019 Steinberg complained, “some neighborhoods are complaining about the homeless, and then say ‘Don’t put the shelters in our neighborhood.’” He singled out the neighborhood of Land Park, which is adjacent to downtown Sacramento just to the South. This is my neighborhood.
Steinberg spoke of the “homeless” without addressing their open lawlessness, drug dealing, theft, people masturbating in public, shooting up heroin in the open, soliciting drugs and prostitution in public, and defecating and urinating on streets in front of local businesses. It’s not a pretty picture. According to Mayor Steinberg, “it’s a housing crisis.”
The “housing crisis” and the “unhoused” are apparently worth a really large bounty per head to the City of Sacramento – they are the “facilitators” for the hotel and apartment renovations, bringing billions to the cities in California from the federal and state governments.
That “housing complex for people experiencing homelessness” ballooned up per unit cost by 2020 to $445,000 each. Mercy Housing began the project with a $34 million price to convert the Downtown Sacramento building’s 180 hotel rooms into 134 studio units of about 280 square feet each. The project grew to a $64 million project, that we know of at this point.
That’s $478,ooo per 280 square foot room – $1,707 per square foot. The average square foot cost of real estate right now in Sacramento is about $300 to $400 per square foot.
As we reported in 2020:
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg has been pushing for permanent housing for the city’s homeless. While that may sound reasonable and even decent, the latest project to provide tiny apartments in a renovated old downtown hotel will cost more than $445,000 per unit for about 250 square feet of living space.
But wait!
In 2020, we reported, “Redevelopment of the hotel is now budgeted at $59.6 million, (up from $23 million in 2019) and is expected to be completed in the summer of 2022 (not August 2019).”
It was finalized in 2024.
The City of Sacramento says it contributed $20.3 million. The rest was other taxpayer funds via Gov. Newsom’s state-funded Project Homekey.
It is 2024, and “guests” are just now moving in. We are taking bets on how quickly the apartments will be trashed by the “unhoused;” the opening bet is 2 months.
The Mayor and city officials kicked out the low-income disabled adults who paid rent, and moved in some “homeless” while the renovations were taking place.
The hotel used to house 180 paying residents.
The newly named St. Clare has 134 remodeled studio apartments. How fortunate for the ‘vagrants, ‘criminals,’ ‘druggies,’ and ‘junkies’ who have chosen this lifestyle. Each apartment has a bathroom and kitchenette.
The first group of 80 residents will start moving in this week. The final 54 residents are delayed due to supply chain problems, according to the city.
And if you are still not sure that this is a racket, “Sixty-five of the units in the St. Clare were funded by the Mental Health Services Act, the so-called “millionaire’s tax” authored by Mayor Darrell Steinberg when he served in the Legislature,” the city says. “These units will be reserved for people experiencing homelessness and living with a serious mental illness. Residents will receive behavioral health services from Sacramento County.”
San Antonio’s Haven For Hope Transformational Campus and Courtyard, perhaps the model program in the country, had a $28.5 million annual budget in 2022. Their 2021 budget was $36 million. And they do this annually for less than what Mayor Steinberg spends on remodeling hotels and 134 apartments.
Haven for Hope coordinates and delivers an efficient system of care for the homeless in San Antonio, Texas. They have been a nationwide model for effectiveness. At the 22-acre campus, they serve more than 1,700 people daily in-residence on the campus, and another 700 in a low-barrier emergency shelter.
Haven For Hope does not provide renovated hotel rooms or tiny apartments for its homeless population. “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.”
Despite spending millions on futile “solutions” like tiny homes, FEMA trailers, and renovated hotel rooms for the city’s growing homeless population, Sacramento’s 11,000+ transients are not receiving the treatments offered at Haven for Hope.
Nor are they receiving the residential care offered at 9-month program at the Union Gospel Mission Sacramento, which the Globe reported on. “We feed 8,500 to 9,000 meals a month to the homeless, and even continued during COVID lockdowns,” Pastor Tim Lane told the Globe. Union Gospel Mission offers a Bible-based Twelve Step Course and Heart of Addiction program, and Anger Management Course, Weekly Counseling with their Chaplains, Assigned duties to serve the homeless community and Aftercare with attaining jobs, schooling, finances, reconciliations, transportation, and housing.
And they do this annually for about one-fifth of the cost of Mayor Steinberg’s one-time hotel renovation.
