Sacramento's Waterways and Sidewalks Tell the Story of California's Housing-First Experiment

Over the past three years, a group of retirees in Sacramento has pulled nearly four million pounds of waste from the city's rivers and canals — including 29,000 discarded needles, 19,000 shopping carts, and more than 70,000 batteries. The volunteers, members of the River City Waterway Alliance, have quietly become one of the last lines of defense against what they describe as environmental collapse along the capital region's waterways.

Meanwhile, the Sacramento County Sheriff's Homelessness Outreach Team (HOT) has visited nearly 4,600 homeless camps in a single year, closed more than 1,300 of them, and cleared an estimated three million pounds of trash — work that one volunteer group recently repeated when they removed another 5,000 pounds of waste from a canal that had been fully cleared just one month earlier.

Yet during that same period, Sacramento County's homeless population has continued to climb, most recently by 13 percent in the past year alone, adding roughly 1,000 more individuals to a crisis the region has struggled to keep pace with. The death rate among the homeless population in the county has more than doubled over the past three years.

The scale and persistence of these numbers sit at the center of a growing debate over California's approach to homelessness — and specifically over the Housing First policy framework the state adopted in 2016. That year, California became the only state in the nation to formally embrace the federal government's Housing First mandate as its sole, taxpayer-funded approach to addressing homelessness. The model directs billions of state and federal dollars toward subsidized, permanent housing placements, without requirements for sobriety, treatment, or work.

Sacramento County followed suit in 2017, adopting the housing-only model despite repeated warnings from frontline service providers that housing alone would not address the addiction, mental illness, trauma, and behavioral health challenges that frequently accompany homelessness. Since then, the county's homeless population has more than doubled.

Nationally, homelessness has risen roughly 35 percent in the years since these policies took hold. In California, the increase has been closer to 40 percent.

The visible consequences extend beyond the human toll. Sacramento's waterways, parks, and sidewalks have become what observers increasingly characterize as wastelands — spaces marked by encampments, scattered needles, and the daily accumulation of trash. Volunteers and law enforcement alike describe a Sisyphean effort to contain the destruction, only to find the same areas refilled within weeks.

At the state level, Governor Gavin Newsom last year vetoed legislation that would have created a sober living housing set-aside within California's homelessness system, despite pleas from addiction advocates, frontline providers, and mayors across the state who argued that recovery-focused housing options were desperately needed. The veto highlighted tensions between the state's Housing First framework and critics who say the approach strips accountability and recovery expectations from the system.

Now, even the teams tasked with containing the fallout face cuts. The Sheriff's HOT Team, which has been a central force in clearing encampments and removing debris, is reportedly on the chopping block as Sacramento County leaders confront a $100 million budget deficit.

For those doing the cleanup work on the ground, the experience has been transformative. Volunteers with the River City Waterway Alliance say they spent years begging local and state leaders — including the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Wildlife Conservation Board, and the local chapter of the Sierra Club — to confront the accelerating environmental destruction unfolding along Sacramento's waterways. Those pleas, they say, were met with silence.

City and county officials have begun to respond more visibly in recent months. But for longtime observers, the question is no longer whether the current approach is failing — it is whether the political system will acknowledge it before conditions deteriorate further.

Sacramento, in the view of those working most closely on the crisis, now serves as a warning to other communities about what happens when accountability is removed from homelessness policy, when the underlying causes of homelessness — addiction, mental illness, trauma — go unaddressed, and when cleanup crews are overwhelmed faster than they can be replenished.

The crisis, those observers argue, was never simply about a lack of housing. And the solution, they say, was never simply more apartments.