SACRAMENTO, Calif. — 175 tiny homes are coming to South Sacramento as temporary shelter for the city’s unhoused community.
It will be a ‘Safe Stay’ community through the city’s and county’s partnership on homelessness solutions.
The site is currently a patchwork of dry, grassy fields and empty parking lots along Stockton Boulevard, near 65th Street. It’s on a 13-acre property originally designed as a shopping mall, at 6780 Stockton Boulevard, which has sat vacant and mostly-never-used for the better part of two decades.
At a news conference announcing his plans for the tiny homes – or sleep cabins – Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said he is pushing for a groundbreaking to prepare the site by the end of the year.
“We are laying a foundation here for real change and today is the beginning,” he said.
It was back in March when Gov. Gavin Newsom promised 350 tiny homes to the City of Sacramento. At the time, Newsom said the structures could be ready as soon as the fall. ABC10 has been following this promise - and reported back in late July that no developments had come out since March.
However, the state won’t be able to deliver them until sometime next year.
"I know everyone asks about timeline, 'What's next? When are we going to actually see the tiny homes here?' And the answer is: soon," Steinberg said.
There’s a bigger vision at this South Sacramento site, as Steinberg announced - and ABC10 reported - in August at one of his State of the City addresses.
The ‘Safe Stay’ community will be just one part of a Community Wellness Campus. The county will oversee the Safe Stay site, but WellSpace Health will develop and operate the rest, transforming the long-empty shopping mall buildings and erecting new structures to create wrap-around services for the unhoused and others in need.
“We’ve heard about this property being vacant, being abandoned. It has been. It’s more than a decade,” said WellSpace CEO Dr. Jonathan Porteus. “These buildings have really great bones, but they’ve been here a long time.”
He drew a connection between the buildings and people experiencing homelessness.
“Many of the people we serve have been abandoned. Many of them have been untouched for 15 years. Many of them have huge potential, have good bones, but they’ve not been given the opportunity,” Porteus said. “Many of us have watched people suffer for too long.”
He wants to see this Community Wellness Campus heal people and says some of the services will be up and running by next summer.
"This is vision in action,” Steinberg said. “Look at this old property and look at what it is going to become. It is going to become a model for how we build these multi-service center campuses, not only throughout the Sacramento region, but throughout the state of California."
As for the other 175 tiny homes promised by Newsom, Steinberg said those are set to go somewhere on the Cal Expo campus, though he did not offer additional details about exactly where or when.
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