Vallejo crafts ‘humane’ plan to resume encampment sweeps

VALLEJO – The Vallejo City Council voted Tuesday to resume sweeping encampments around the city later this month while approving a list of recommendations to improve handling homelessness, which Mayor Andrea Sorce said would be more “humane.” 

The City Council froze all encampment removals on March 18 in order to reconsider its options for addressing homelessness. 

On Tuesday, the council discussed using $175,000 to hire a consultant and voted 5-2, with Sorce and Councilmember Diosdado Matulac opposed, to resume removing encampments within two weeks.

The council unanimously voted to approve several recommendations for assessing how city staff conduct encampment sweeps, including how people are notified about incoming sweeps and how to manage them to protect people’s safety and belongings. The council also recommended identifying neighborhoods to “keep clean,” creating a homeless outreach team and distributing trash bags and garbage cans to homeless people to make it easier to clean up public spaces. 

Councilmember Helen-Marie Gordon drew on her personal connection to the issue after several hours of public comment, giving an impassioned description of her arrival in Vallejo years ago as a homeless person with several children suffering from severe illnesses in a shelter. 

Gordon said during that time, she experienced how difficult it was to get help and prevent her children from sleeping on the street. Things have only gotten more difficult since then. Years ago, a two-bedroom apartment might rent for around $750 per month  and the same home might cost nearly $3,000 per month to rent today, she said. She said that’s why she wants to see citywide rent control, as well as more understanding between homeless people and city staff.

“I’m not being insensitive – I’m trying to explain to you I understand how you feel,” Gordon said to homeless residents present at Tuesday’s meeting. “We’re not trying to be cruel to you … You don’t deserve to live like that. You deserve to have the best quality of life.”

The council previously allocated $175,000 to hire a consultant to craft a plan for managing homelessness and develop recommendations for how the city should transition unhoused people into stable housing, given that the city has a larger share of unhoused people than anywhere in Solano County, according to the county’s most recent count. 

The council took that step after a March 18 report from assistant to the city manager Natalie Peterson, which found that programs designed to address homelessness have made “little progress.” For example, the city has struggled to build a $2.5 million navigation center at 1937 Broadway to offer 125 emergency shelter beds and case management.

Meanwhile, the death of James Edward Oakley during a December encampment clean-up alarmed observers and the city is facing a legal challenge from a disabled homeless woman who the city has tried to move without offering alternative services.

Peterson said Tuesday that for years the council has rejected proposals to use nine sites for different alternatives, such as for safe parking and camping sites and tiny homes or pallet shelters. A safe camping site discussed in 2022, for example, would have cost up to $4,000 per tent per year with volunteer management, or up to $60,000 per tent per year with an assigned operator. Peterson said cities like San Francisco which have closed their safe camping or parking programs left people at the mercy of law enforcement or whatever service operators still exist to help them. 

Councilmember Alexander Matias said he sides with pro-housing policies, both temporary and permanent, to move people into shelter and homes. He said the city has tried to consider various options to make this happen, and agreed that temporary vouchers to help people shelter in hotels could be a helpful program to move people indoors.

“The city has tried, and it has made many mistakes,” Matias said. However, he also demanded more transparency from staff. He asked city employees for regular reports on how many people have been housed or serviced and for a list of public and private land that might be suitable for building different kinds of housing.

Councilmember Tonia Lediju opposed spending $175,000 on a report since she said the city already has years of data and vocal advocates to help take action. She volunteered herself and Palmares to help drive more action at roundtable discussions between homeless advocates and different stakeholders.

Lediju said she supports increasing security around encampments to improve public safety, but added that the city must consider how much trauma has been on display from people who have been homeless or have loved ones who lost their homes. 

“It is hard, on whichever side you’re living on … to stay housed,” Lediju said. “It takes one thing to unearth your whole life. And without compassion, without care, it is difficult to rebound.”

Sorce disagreed with resuming encampment removals and said the city should examine how those removals are managed. She said that what is a complex regional, statewide and national issue cannot be solved with a strategy that relentlessly moves people from neighborhood to neighborhood and doesn’t help anyone but increases people’s trauma. 

“What’s been so frustrating for me is that the concerns align most of the time,” Sorce said, pointing out that homeless people also want to improve garbage cleanup and enjoy safer neighborhoods. “There’s pretty broad consensus in Vallejo that we want a humane approach to this issue, and we want clean and safe public spaces.”

About 40 people who spoke during the meeting’s public comment period mostly agreed with that sentiment, although they had different ideas for how to shelter hundreds of people who live on public streets, or whether to simply remove them every time they camp in a public location. Some said the latter approach “is not working”, and creates inhumane situations by displacing people repeatedly. 

But others, such as resident Kimberly Christiansen, said that the city must take action to clean up the amount of garbage in the city accumulating at encampments. “It is embarrassing, it is a disaster, and I don’t appreciate our town being trashed like this,” Christiansen said. 

“They build fires wherever they want, and I see that all over town. We have cleaned up abandoned encampments. We did a coastal clean up near White Slough … [it’s] unbelievable what we saw and cleaned up, including syringes,” Christiansen said. “I think the people causing this should be cited for littering, and be made to do community cleanups themselves if they cannot pay fines. Something needs to be done, because our towns and waterways are suffering.”

Members of Vallejo’s Homeless Union said they want to organize cleanup drives in the White Slough area and hope that the city would allocate some money to such approaches, not sweeping encampments. Union member and advocate Eli Smith said that unhoused people need action, not words, on solutions to move them into better situations. 

“When you ask for solutions, one of them would be to engage directly with those people who are acting directly to end homelessness,” Smith said. “People do not need to be incentivized to move into housing – there is no housing. Give us a chance to help.”

Others demanded more dignity and respect for their situation. Resident Kevin Jones singled out residents who he says disparage unhoused people, saying that since the early 1990s he’s watched Vallejo grow more hardened against encampments and the people inside them.

“There’s nothing like the feeling you get from people who look at you over the bridge of their nose every day,” Jones said. “The things they say to us as they’re driving by … are usually very degrading and disrespectful. We are not all criminals. A lot of us have jobs, a lot of us are working to get off the streets.”