Read the full article by Chris Nichols at CapRadio
Sacramento’s X Street homeless shelter opened two years ago this fall, serving the W-X corridor south of downtown, home to one of the city’s largest concentrations of illegal encampments.
From the very start, the shelter’s goal was clear: Get people off the streets and connect them with housing. But a review of city data shows that while the shelter is making progress, it’s fallen short of its housing targets.
“It is our goal to serve 200 people in our first year. It is our goal to get the majority of those people housed,” Amani Sawires, the former chief operating officer of Volunteers of America, which runs the shelter, told CapRadio in September 2021.
“Some people aren’t going to be ready, and we will have planted a seed and they’ll go do something else, but the seed will be planted. And I consider that a success,” Sawires added at the time.
Two years later, the shelter at X and 28th streets has served far more people per year than Sawires expected, but it has not met the goal of getting a majority of them housed.