I pay $9,000 in property taxes every year. When is Sacramento County going to stop burning $277 million of taxpayer dollars on homelessness, with $48 million from the general fund?
Follow the money and it mostly goes into a strategy let’s call Housing First, Morgue Second. That’s right. The coroner counts nearly 1,400 homeless deaths in the last five years. Half from overdose. One in five from violence.
Only 13% of those dollars go into state-funded permanent housing.
The county has mastered the art of keeping expectations lower than the Kings’ hopes of a championship season.
The homeless director isn’t a thought leader. She is more concerned with spinning a harm-reduction stigma narrative than actual performance outcomes.
In a June 2024 podcast interview, county homeless director Emily Halcon equated drug addiction to having a glass of wine.
“If I were to tell you, Kim, if you want to keep your house, you can’t possibly have that glass of wine tonight at dinner … you would laugh, because it’s preposterous that I would take choice away from you.”
Cute. Except a glass of chardonnay doesn’t leave you naked screaming at traffic across from City Hall, living in filth or overdosing on the sidewalk.
Now for the numbers Halcon doesn’t talk about.
Among Sacramento County homeless, 32% are addicted to drugs and 49% have psychiatric behavioral health problems. This explains why two-thirds resist shelter help.
Of the county’s homeless people who enrolled in an addiction treatment program, 71% left before completing the program.
Then there’s the report card on the programs themselves, courtesy of Sacramento Steps Forward’s first-quarter 2025 numbers.
Nearly half of every program in the county pipeline produced no successful housing outcomes. Rapid Re-Housing, the county’s biggest bet with 53 programs, posts the worst failure rate at 58%.
Managed failure drives 55% of the county’s homeless people out of shelters and back to the streets. Or they vanish from the tracking system.
In June, the city’s auditor confirmed what every neighborhood already knows: There’s no measurable link between the services taxpayers buy and any change in outcomes.
Only 11% of homeless dollars went to anything resembling treatment, such as rehab, recovery and psychiatric stabilization. Twenty-eight million dollars went to motel housekeeping, furnishings, private bathrooms and mini fridges.
Here’s the fix. It’s not complicated.
Trade harm reduction and Housing First for honest medicine. Stop hiring more navigators and six-figure executives.
Hire clinicians who can write a digital care plan for stakeholders and prescribe buprenorphine, naltrexone, acamprosate, disulfiram, methadone and naloxone—the pharmacology that pulls a body out of withdraw.
Measure the body, not the building.
Let the district attorney put the grace of diversion and involuntary anti-psychotics on the table. Bring in peer group therapy and applied behavioral analysis. Emphasize closed-loop clinical bundles and faith-based recovery for those who want it.
And stop the narrative spin.
The motel with fresh linens is finished. It doesn’t heal schizophrenia or meth addiction.
The new strategy needs to be plain English, eight words long and written as a performance goal for the homeless workforce.
Peace for the human, value for the taxpayer.
John Morales is a health care analytics manager. He can be reached at johnfmorales@gmail.com.
