By admin 
Prior to his election as mayor of Sacramento in 2024, Kevin McCarty campaigned heavily on his plans to bring micro-housing solutions to the city’s growing homeless population.
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He’d really like everyone to think he’s upholding those promises and everything is going smoothly — but that’s true only if he can keep control of the microcommunity projects out of his City Council’s hands.
Because in Sacramento, the mayor has to be cagey on homeless shelter projects, since they almost always get killed by the not-in-my-backyard crowd. The public is frustrated by those living in homelessness on the streets, but finding a place to shelter them always becomes political — and ultimately fatal — to housing projects.
The Sacramento City Council has made it clear they’re utterly incapable of agreeing on new shelters and moving forward. Time and time again, plans crumble apart.
Knowing that, in 2023, former mayor Darrell Steinberg took the authority of erecting modest shelter projects out of the hands of the council entirely. So long as they cost less than $5 million, the unelected city manager controls where shelter projects are placed.
This was a controversial proposal, and the council only approved it by a slim margin, 5-4, just months before Steinberg left office.
Once in office, McCarty moved quickly on identifying two shelter sites in South Sacramento on Gardendale Road and 25th Street, and one in south Natomas on Arena Boulevard.
And yet, the only sites that are moving forward are the two in South Sacramento, a community that has long borne the brunt of the city’s housing initiatives, and is once again being asked to do more than its fair share.
The proposed third site in Natomas — in council member Lisa Kaplan’s district — is on indefinite hold.
So forgive me if I can’t get upset that McCarty openly admits he’s keeping his microcommunity projects under the $5 million magic number, purely to keep it out of the council’s hands. Really, how else can we expect these shelters to get built? Imperfect housing delivered now is preferable to perfect housing endlessly debated, but never built.
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When these tiny home communities were first proposed last September, Assistant City Manager Ryan Moore reported that other cities in California were doing similar projects for $50,000 to $90,000. But City Manager Maraskeshia Smith recently told The Bee that her office was now estimating the cost of the Gardendale site at $4.9 million for 30 units — or around $163,333 a bed.
McCarty put some of the blame for rising costs on President Donald Trump’s tariffs. He also said the estimates were based on other cities’ projects that didn’t have some of the same infrastructure issues that Sacramento’s sites need. He even called city staff’s previous numbers a “rosy guestimate.”
Unfortunately, that makes it appear as though McCarty has overpromised and underdelivered. And it raises an important question: How low should Sacramento let its expectations for these microcommunities drop before our city council should require a reckoning? That day might yet come.
But, for now, if the first project off Gardendale Road in the Meadowview neighborhood gets 30 units for now instead of 40, then at least that’s 30 more than we had previously. It means at least 30 more people off the streets, and on a truly viable pathway to stability.
Then the next tiny home community, just up the road from the first site, will add another 30. And once those two are up and running, the hope is that Sacramentans across the region (but particularly in NIMBY-rich areas like Natomas, the Pocket and others) will see these microcommunities are truly practical solutions for our region’s homelessness crisis.
At some point later on, each of these lots could add a few more structures and ultimately fulfill their potential capacity.
We fight each other a lot in this city over what the perfect solution should look like. Some people are mad about the proposed locations, others are mad that the units are little better than air-conditioned sheds or that there are only communal bathrooms and kitchens. But I think we too often allow the pursuit of perfection to stymie progress.
There are at least 7,500 Sacramentans living in homelessness right now. They don’t have time to wait while the city council argues over the best possible solution. They need a roof over their head as soon as possible, and concerns of process need to be secondary.
McCarty’s tenure as mayor is by no means perfect either, but we really don’t have time to argue over it while dozens of our neighbors die on our streets every year. Sidelining our oft-stymied city council is the right solution for right now — and it’s justified under the current conditions.
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