Sacramento Wants to Hand Over Responsibility for the Homeless to Someone Else

It worked for tech support, why not homeless services? Sacramento County, California is considering outsourcing its programs that target the homeless to a new non-profit organization made up of government officials and private stakeholders.

Why now? Well, the city's homeless services budget will be depleted by February 2011, so they've got to do something. Things were already bad enough last winter that the city closed down its cold-weather shelter, leaving churches and homeless residents scrambling to find warm spaces.

The hope is that forming a new non-profit that would serve as a middle man between both the homeless and agencies that serve them and between those agencies and local government (and would collect between $20 million and $30 million in annual government funding) will streamline services. The idea is that it will also make private fundraising events easier to pull off. But it sounds like it might just add more red tape.

Decisionmakers in Sacramento should be sure to study what's happening in San Antonio right now. It's a different kind of consolidation, but a scenario to be avoided. In May, the city opened a 37-acre, $100 million mega-center named Haven for Hope that hosts services from 78 local governmental, non-profit and faith-based organizations. Soup kitchens and other proven service centers that people were used to frequenting were shut down in preparation. Anecdotal evidence from homeless people in San Antonio — lots of anecdotal evidence — says that the center feels like a prison with its one-size-fits-all rules and regulations meant to incentivize leaving homelessness behind right then and there. Want to get hot meals now? You have to sign up for recovery programs. By creating a clearinghouse, the city zapped freedom of choice. Well, technically there's a choice — if you don't want to sign up, you can have a cold meal and sleep outside in the courtyard, according to the shelter's caste system.

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson has made homelessness one of his leading issues, and so far has talked the talk and walked the walk when it comes to ending homelessness. His representatives have already met with people in Columbus, Ohio who run the kind of private supervisory entity they hope to establish.

Another supporter is Leo McFarland, president and chief executive officer of Volunteers of America. He told the local paper, "I can't quite get my arms around exactly what it would look like, ... but the fact is that this is the way business is going to have to be conducted. We're going to have to do more with less, and nonprofits can do that because we can be more creative and flexible than the government."

Tom Armstrong over at the Sacramento Homeless Blog is firmly against it, though. He writes, "In other words, the county is shirking its responsibilities to the most needy of its citizens and turning things over to some new fandangled agency it'll create and toss a bunch of powers to. 'YOU take over this hornets' nest,' says the county."

Photo credit: markhillary