Empty Promise
Lack of accountability, not homes, fuels crisis
By Michele Steeb
July 2026
The homelessness crisis is often framed as a housing crisis. It is not.
Homelessness is a crisis born from the collapse of accountability at every level of the system. The consequences are visible in neighborhoods across Sacramento.
In 2016, California became the only state to formally adopt the federal government’s Housing First mandate as its sole taxpayer-funded approach to homelessness. Billions in state and federal dollars went toward subsidized-for-life apartments with no accountability for sobriety, treatment or work—ever.
Sacramento County followed in 2017, embracing the Housing First model despite repeated warnings from frontline providers that housing alone would never adequately address the addiction, mental illness, trauma or behavioral health challenges that often accompany homelessness.
Those warnings proved tragically accurate. The problem was never just a shortage of apartments.
Under Housing First, homelessness in California surged 40%. In Sacramento County, the homeless population more than doubled.
More alarming than the numbers was what communities learned to tolerate: human deterioration, environmental destruction, sprawling encampments and public disorder. Meanwhile, accountability and expectations were systematically stripped from the system.
The problem was never simply homelessness. The solution was never simply more housing.
Waterways, parks and sidewalks didn’t become wastelands because of a lack of housing. They were devastated by a policy framework that removed recovery, restoration and accountability from the center of homelessness policies.
What followed was predictable: needles tossed on sidewalks and shopping carts strewn across public spaces. Encampments became government-sanctioned waiting rooms for permanent housing that often never came.
When vulnerable human beings are left idle for years without treatment or purpose, social decay takes root. What should shock the public conscience becomes normalized.
It became heartbreaking to walk Sacramento’s streets and watch humans visibly deteriorate physically, mentally and spiritually while passersby barely looked up. No shock, no outrage.
This is what we saw last month when a colleague and I spent a day working with River City Waterway Alliance, a volunteer group primarily made up of retirees. They are one of the last lines of defense to protect local waterways from environmental collapse.
Over the past three years, Waterway Alliance volunteers cleared nearly 4 million pounds of waste from local waterways—including 29,000 needles, 19,000 shopping carts and more than 70,000 batteries.
Over that same period, the death rate among the homeless population more than doubled.
We spent another day with the sheriff’s Homeless Outreach Team, which removed an estimated 5,000 pounds of waste from a canal that the team had cleared one month earlier.
In one year, the sheriff’s outreach team visited nearly 4,600 camps, closed more than 1,300 and cleared 3 million pounds of trash from encampments.
As volunteers and law enforcement struggle to contain the fallout, Sacramento’s homeless population grew by another 13% last year—about 1,000 individuals.
The deterioration accelerates faster than it can be contained. The scale of destruction is almost impossible to comprehend unless you see it firsthand.
The conclusion is impossible to avoid. Homelessness is a crisis of zero accountability.
Sacramento’s streets show what happens when accountability collapses, ideology replaces outcomes and leaders refuse to confront the consequences of their policies.
Michele Steeb is an expert on homelessness policy and recovery-based solutions. She served 13 years as CEO of Sacramento’s Saint John’s Program for Real Change, where she helped transform the organization into one of Northern California’s largest programs serving homeless women and children. Steeb served on Sacramento Steps Forward’s steering committee and regional policy boards addressing homelessness. She is author of “Answers Behind the RED DOOR: Battling the Homeless Epidemic,” and writes and speaks nationally on homelessness, addiction, mental illness and public policy reform.
