Sacramento, California – I drive the same streets I’ve known since I was a kid. Some mornings I still take the route past the American River where we used to picnic and let the kids wade when they were small.
Now there are tarps and shopping carts and the occasional fire smoldering in a barrel. Other days I’m on Alhambra or J Street and I see the same guy who walked out of the grocery store with an armful of stuff last week doing it again.
The security guard just watches. My grandkids ask why people live like that and why nobody stops the ones who steal. I don’t have a good answer that doesn’t sound like an excuse.
Sacramento has spent real money trying to fix these problems. Tens of millions from the city, hundreds of millions when you add county and state layers, all aimed at homelessness, outreach, shelters, and social services. We added shelter beds and saw some people move indoors on any given night.
That’s not nothing. But the total count just hit 7,458 and the problem keeps spreading into new neighborhoods. At the same time we’ve effectively dialed back consequences for the low-level crimes — the trespassing, the public drug use, the repeated shoplifting, that make encampments and visible disorder possible.
Police respond, reports get written, and too often nothing sticks because the system decided those cases aren’t worth pursuing. That’s not compassion. That’s a signal to everyone that certain behaviors carry almost no cost.
Now layer on the school district’s $170 million deficit and 503 layoffs. SCUSD is the system that’s supposed to give the next generation a shot. When it’s forced into deep cuts while enrollment has already dropped by thousands, something fundamental is out of balance. Families notice. Some pull their kids to charters or move. That accelerates the enrollment decline and makes the budget math worse. It’s the same pattern: big spending and big promises, followed by visible decline in the things that actually shape daily life.
I’m not saying we should slash every social program or pretend addiction and mental illness aren’t real. Plenty of the people on the streets are sick or broke in ways that started long before they ended up in a tent. Treating those problems seriously requires treatment capacity, not just harm reduction and a key to an apartment some people won’t stay in.
But we also can’t keep pretending that refusing to enforce basic public-order laws is a solution. When small crimes become background noise, they don’t stay small. Businesses pay more for security and cleaning. Parents map their routes around certain blocks. The sense that this is a city that works for the people who live and work here erodes a little more every year.
Housing is the other piece that keeps getting talked about without enough to show for it. We all know the numbers, too few units, too high a price for what’s being built, too many barriers that make new construction slow and expensive.
Some of the money going to homelessness response would be better spent removing the zoning, permitting, and regulatory obstacles that prevent both market-rate and genuinely affordable housing from getting built faster. Every year we delay real supply increases, the pressure on rents and home prices stays high and more working families edge closer to the edge. That’s not theoretical. It’s why some of the people I know who grew up here are now looking at Elk Grove or Roseville or further because they can’t make the numbers work inside city limits anymore.
The common thread is a budget and policy culture that still hasn’t done a real reality check. We keep measuring effort and dollars spent instead of asking the blunt questions: Are fewer people living on the streets in stable housing year over year? Is retail theft and quality-of-life crime actually down in a way residents can feel? Are neighborhood schools stable enough that families aren’t fleeing the district? If the answers are no, and right now they’re mostly no, then the current mix of spending and priorities isn’t working, no matter how many task forces or five-year plans get announced.
I want leaders who are willing to say the hard parts out loud. Public safety and basic order are not optional or secondary to other goals. Housing supply has to increase dramatically across all price points, and that means confronting the rules and interests that slow everything down.
Schools need enough stability to actually educate kids instead of lurching from one fiscal crisis to the next. None of that requires cruelty. It requires focus. Protect the core functions that make daily life livable first, police and prosecution that actually deter disorder, faster housing production, classrooms that aren’t constantly being hollowed out, then layer on the social investments that can show measurable exits from homelessness or real treatment outcomes.
Sacramento still has a lot going for it. The river, the tree canopy, neighborhoods with real character, people who show up for each other. But the gap between what we spend and what we see on the actual streets, in the actual stores, and in the actual schools is getting harder to ignore.
I’ve watched this city work through tough stretches before. It can do it again. What it can’t afford is another round of the same approach that treats visible results as optional while the problems keep compounding.
Prioritize safety that residents can feel, housing that actually gets built, and outcomes that can be measured in real numbers instead of press releases. Everything else is secondary until those basics start moving in the right direction.
That’s the reality check the budget and the people who live here both need.