Jacob Ikeokwu says he has what Sacramento’s mayor calls a “golden ticket.” Ikeokwu is one of an estimated 175 homeless Sacramentans who have the last available vouchers for federally subsidized affordable housing. Due to budget constraints in the program, these vouchers will expire in the coming weeks.
The 62-year-old now finds himself in a race against time.
“I just keep praying,” he said outside his homeless shelter in the River District. “That’s all I know I can do.”
Sacramento County’s primary affordable housing program, with 13,000-some participants, is shrinking due to the region’s explosion in market rent rates. A painful decision to shut off new entrants into this essential program is creating conditions for a new wave of homelessness just as local governments brace for their own budget problems.
“It’s going to have a devastating impact in Sacramento,” said City Councilwoman Karina Talamantes after a staff briefing on the pending crisis.
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“It’s hard enough to get people off the streets without a golden ticket,” said Mayor Darrell Steinberg.
The Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency estimates that more than 45,000 families are on various waiting lists hoping for a more affordable home. This stunning statistic illustrates the enormity of the county’s housing problem. This is the at-risk population that is a step away from homelessness. About 6,000 Sacramentans are on the street without a home on any given night.
“It’s not a good situation,” said MaryLiz Paulson, the director of SHRA’s Housing Choice Voucher Program. But Paulson has no choice. Rents have gone up 55% in Sacramento in the last four years. People eligible for a “golden ticket” only pay 30% of their income towards housing and there simply isn’t enough federal money to pay the remainder of the prices landlords are charging in Sacramento’s ultra-competitive rental market.
This is another consequence of California’s failure to build housing — particularly affordable housing — and how it leads to homelessness here more than any other state in the nation. Housing Choice (formerly known as Section 8) is a long-time federal program that seeks to keep lower-income Americans in homes.
President Joe Biden’s website boasts of how federal funds for Housing Choice have increased by 27% between 2020 and 2024. But that number, however laudable, pales when compared to the aforementioned 55% increase in Sacramento’s rental market, an obscene number calculated by the federal Housing and Urban Development Department.
About 700 families with vouchers are currently searching for a home, Paulson said. About 175 of them are homeless. And now they only have a few weeks until their vouchers expire.
Ikeokwu first applied for the Housing Choice program about five years ago and ended up homeless two years later after a dispute with the landlord over his pet dog. After living in a West Sacramento parking lot for two years, he has had a bunk at the Shelter, Inc . on Fifth Street for about a year.
SHRA granted Ikeokwu a housing voucher last year, he said, but it hasn’t led to housing. Homeless and disabled with a back injury, Ikeokwu has little ability to find a participating landlord on his own. He depends on the government and nonprofits to find him home. All he can do is keep his voucher number, written on a small orange card, in his wallet.
“I know I have that number, but it doesn’t even mean anything,” he said. “It’s very frustrating.”
Paulson said SHRA is reinstituting a deadline that was waived during the pandemic to give voucher holders 180 days to find a home. She has no choice but to manage costs. SHRA expects to have $180 million in federal funds this calendar year for rent subsidies in the county, a modest increase from last year’s $173 million support level.
As SHRA has spread the word of the new deadlines in recent weeks, its staff has experienced the desperation of people seeking a place to live. Some of those on the waiting list are currently homeless.
“It’s really hard on our staff to tell people who are homeless who are coming in looking for housing,” Paulson said. “It’s difficult for everybody.”
Among the impacted homeless is Michael Melton, 42, who lives in the same shelter as Ikeokwu. Melton does not currently have a voucher for housing. On Tuesday afternoon, he went to city hall to tell the council that he once had a voucher, but did not know it at the time.
“I was selected for housing,” Melton said. “Because I’m homeless and had no address, they took me off the list. And I think thousands of people that are homeless are going through the same thing on the streets.”
A self-described graduate of C.K. McClatchy High School, Melton said he has been trying to turn his life around for the past decade after a prison sentence for drug dealing. A rapper known as Redboi who has performed locally, Melton is working in a series of laboring jobs as he searches for housing from the shelter. Steinberg at the Tuesday meeting asked SHRA to look into his case.
“I’m a hard-working man,” said Melton, who has been married twice and has seven children. “I would love to have a one-bedroom apartment where my kids can come visit.” Meanwhile, he hopes for a voucher and ample time to find that elusive home.
“There shouldn’t be a time limit,” he said. “It’s just unfair.”
All this comes at a time when homeless management in California has more questions than answers and as Sacramento is poised to back away from a lease promise to keep a homeless encampment open until its residents can find permanent housing.
The North Sacramento 33-trailer encampment, known as Camp Resolution, is atop a former city vehicle maintenance yard. Concerned about vapor contamination, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board agreed to a waiver to allow the camp to operate so long as residents did not sleep in tents. But that waiver is expiring in June. The city isn’t trying to renew the waiver, despite signing a lease committing to extending it so long as residents couldn’t find a permanent home. Nor has the city yet to find an alternate site for all the camp’s residents.
Sacramento may soon have only one managed encampment site, off Roseville Road in North Sacramento, with 240 trailers and tiny homes. Despite years of attempts to find more sites, first by the City Council and now by City Manager Howard Chan, a network of managed Safe Ground managed encampments has never materialized. Nor does it seem on the horizon any time soon.
So many of the state’s economic problems are rooted in the decades-long failure to build housing for the poor and the shrinking middle class. Lack of affordable housing is the proven, primary cause of homelessness. The Housing Choice rental subsidy program at best can chase the problem. And soon it will be falling further and further behind the demand. Only those with golden tickets have any short-term hope.
Ikeokwu, born in West Africa and a resident of Sacramento for eight years, hasn’t given up. For his back with degenerating discs, “I got to finish my rehab,” he said. “And then I want to get me a job.”
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