FOLSOM, Calif. — Homelessness in Folsom is on the rise, and city and community leaders are taking steps to address it.
Mayor Mike Kozlowski will host a community listening session on homelessness at 6:30 p.m. Thursday in the Folsom Community Center’s R.G. Smith Room at 52 Natoma Street. The session comes more than two weeks after Folsom city council decided not to take further action implementing a homelessness services site at a 3.1-acre property about half of a mile south of the Historic District light rail station, an effort Kozlowski spearheaded.
“It's hard to segment the topic of ‘should we (the city) provide services, and what kind of services should we provide? And, then, where should we provide them?’ It's difficult to disentangle those three things,” Kozlowski told ABC10. “My hope was that we could at least kick off a discussion of ‘should the city actually be involved in supporting groups that provide services? Or should the city be providing services directly?’”
Folsom Police Chief Rick Hillman told residents during a “Coffee with a Cop” event on Feb. 22 the city estimates its newest point-in-time count will show around 120 homeless inhabit Folsom nightly. Folsom’s point-in-time count estimated 20 homeless inhabited the city nightly back in 2022.
This year’s official numbers will be published sometime this spring, according to nonprofit Sacramento Steps Forward, who conducts the count.
Jeanne Shuman founded and operates Jake’s Journey Home (JJH), a nonprofit homeless aid program serving Folsom amidst a larger area including Sacramento, Placer and El Dorado counties. JJH is a boots-on-the-ground service, meeting and building rapport with members of the unhoused community and providing them with basic needs like obtaining a driver’s license or ID and getting them into mental health services, Shuman said.
The nonprofit also services unhoused veterans. Shuman created the organization in 2019 after the death of her 35-year-old son, Jake, a U.S. Navy veteran with whom she would work to get unhoused veterans and community members into services.
The Homeless Assistance Resource Team (HART) of Folsom, a separate nonprofit, also provides services in the city, including a transitional housing program and a winter shelter.
Shuman said Folsom currently lacks homelessness services like a day center, a shelter unhoused community members can enter when being moved and rehabilitation services. However, JJH is part of a navigation unit helping the city develop those services, and she said the city is listening to community input.
“You can't open up a doctor's office and say, ‘Hey, I'm going to help you take care of your heart, but I'm not a heart doctor,’” Shuman said. “So, why would you say, ‘we have services, we're going to help you,’ but you don't have the services to help.”
Behavior and homelessness
JJH has contacted roughly 300 unhoused clients and enrolled them into a service, bringing them into what Shuman calls a family of sorts.
“A success is to be able to have that trust to say, ‘OK, I'm going to go to inpatient, but will I be able to call you?’ Yes, you will, because now they're kind of in that family,” she said. “That's important because a lot of people on the streets don't have anybody left. For whatever reason, they’ve destroyed it (or) the family shut them down. They’re done. So, we try to make it a family community.”
In her experience, Shuman said most members of the unhoused community can almost always root their circumstances’ origins back to one traumatic incident. At the organization’s start, JJH contacted one man while he was on community trails using drugs, she said.
“His story, it's all trauma,” she said. “His mom shot him up (with meth) when he was 12-years-old, so that was his trauma way back to 12-years-old. He behaved accordingly… he didn't progress past 12-years-old (and) he'd behave just like a teenager.”
Shuman said her organization is working with public defenders and district attorneys, so in some cases instead of unhoused community members going to jail after criminal offenses, they participate in community service with JJH.
“The folks that we work with — I check the crime log every day — they are not on the crime log,” Shuman told ABC10. “If they are, it's because of probation violation, or an outstanding warrant because they didn't check in with the courts because they don't have a phone. It's this whole systemic problem that we, as entities that are trying to help, should all be working together to figure that out.”
Capt. Dustin Silva, a deputy with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office who’s lived in Folsom since 2011, said during public comment to Folsom city council on March 26 any homelessness services the city provides need to begin with law enforcement. Silva said he has previously served the sheriff’s office as a lieutenant overseeing the sheriff office’s homeless outreach team (HOT).
“From what I've seen is, number one: engagement. You have to have leadership that's willing to put bodies on the ground and actually go out and engage with the community,” Silva said. “Number two is treating it as a community. They're their own community, they have their own issues (and) their own problems. They deserve the same protections as everybody else, but…they have to be held accountable.”
Silva said he has seen members of the unhoused community who want help and members who don’t.
“You have people that are down on their luck that just need a helping hand — something to get them by, to get them to that next level — then, you have people that have no interest in integrating into society,” Silva said. “We keep extensive stats on everybody that we contact…and one of the things that we keep track of is how many people actually accept the help that (was) offered. That number is way lower than you would think it would be.”
Silva said the sheriff’s office conducted an operation about two months ago that contacted over 100 homeless people. Only two of those people accepted help from law enforcement.
Shuman said all of JJH’s interactions during service provision to 300 clientele do not involve police.
“Are people screaming and yelling? Absolutely. Are they having mental breaks? Yes, they are,” she said. “That didn't require the police. It required proper services.”
Violence and homelessness
On Thursday, Feb. 15, a 20-year-old man, who is reportedly homeless, allegedly attacked people with a pickaxe just before 8 a.m. at Folsom City Lions Park.
The man was booked into the Sacramento County Main Jail and is still in custody, jail records show. In February, the man faced a felony attempted murder charge and a felony deadly weapon assault charge, ABC10 previously reported.
JJH is working with the man, who Shuman said is now sitting in jail with a future unknown. She said he has mental health issues and wanted to be involved in the shelter, but he was sent out because he couldn't conform. Shuman told ABC10 she believes the situation could have been handled differently and he should have received mental health treatment.
“It could have been prevented,” Shuman said. “The violent problems are really not from any of the folks that we work with. They're really nonviolent, they stay out of the way (and) they don't want to be seen.”
Shuman said she appreciates the police and can acknowledge their hands are tied when they are called to a situation in which a homeless person is screaming and yelling. She said she would hope behavioral health services get involved in these instances, or law enforcement call JJH.
“Law enforcement needs to be there when someone calls and says ‘I'm definitely afraid because someone's out here in front of my business or my house screaming and yelling, and I'm afraid,’” Shuman said. “That to me as a police call. You're afraid, so you call the police. I think the police could be more proactive with that. Come by, get behavioral health involved (and) get the person.”
She said things get blown out of proportion without behavioral health intervention.
“If we have unhoused that are sitting in front of a business, I always check in with them,” she said. “They're on my route. I go out early in the morning and go around all the businesses that have called because there's people that sleep in front of their door. I go and I say, ‘good morning. Time to get up. You got to move, Let's clean up the trash. Here's your lunch. Let's talk.’ That's as easy as it is.”
Folsom’s steps forward
Shuman said she thinks Folsom needs to understand the perspective of the community, and everybody's perspective is different, but it’s time to own the situation.
“Yeah, I think the city could do more than they do,” Shuman said. “I think it’s time. They need it, and they're doing it.”
Kozlowski, who is hosting Folsom’s listening session on homelessness Thursday, said he doesn’t think the city has reached a consensus yet on what services it should be involved in providing, if any.
“The city not being involved in that is a valid answer,” Kozlowski said. “We're good-hearted, but we're not compelled by law to do those types of things.”
Silva said the city cannot ignore the homelessness problem or else it will have to build itself out of a crisis later. Additionally, the sheriff’s office work collecting data on the unhoused community within the county may prove crucial to tackling and ending the homelessness crisis.
Homelessness in California
The Associated Press (AP) published a report Tuesday on the findings of a state audit, which found California spent $24 billion to tackle homelessness over the past five years but didn’t consistently track whether it improved the situation.
The audit analyzed five programs receiving a combined $13.7 billion in funding, according to the AP. It determined only two of them are “likely cost-effective,” including one converting hotel and motel rooms into housing and another providing housing assistance to prevent families from becoming homeless.
Three other programs have received a total of $9.4 billion since 2020. They reportedly couldn’t be evaluated due to a lack of data.
An estimated 171,000 people are homeless in California, which accounts for roughly 30% of all homeless people in the U.S.
WATCH MORE: Homelessness Crisis | Housing advocates demand no budget cuts to solve the homelessness crisis
