The Sacramento City Council has voted to open a 24x7 homeless shelter on Auburn Blvd. between the children's Receiving Home and the ruins of the once iconic Renfree Field. The site is owned by the City of Sacramento, but since the nearest Sacramento voter is at least 1 mile away, that's not a problem for the residents of the City of Sacramento.

The site is also across the street from lowly, invisible unincorporated Arden Arcade. Apparently it is not good enough that Arden Arcade is already loaded with homeless people. There are encampments clustered around Howe and El Camino and along Alta Arden. Arden Arcade has homeless people living in Cottage Park, at the Creekside Nature Area and in the American River Parkway. There are various sidewalk pop-up campsites scattered hither and yon across the community, including a new one in {...gasp!..} Sierra Oaks Vista at Monroe and Fair Oaks. And now the City of Sacramento is making the 3000 block of Auburn Blvd. and its environs available. Never mind that the services homeless people need - like job training or community college or County health care delivery - are nowhere near the site. It doesn't matter that public transit service in the vicinity is miserable. But by sheer coincidence there is a convenience store across the street, like the many others in our community that have to-go liquor licenses. And there is a handy access to Watt and Auburn where panhandlers can seek solicitations from motorists waiting forever for the light to change.

The County is responsible for our municipal services, which means the Sheriff will have to deal with vagrancy, petty theft or other law enforcement issues that might spill into unincorporated Arden Arcade. The Sheriff will likely have to vector community work-release crews to the area periodically to pick up the inevitable litter (and, sadly, needles). The County is also concerned about neighboring property values and tax revenues from nearby retail establishments. Want to guess how those will trend? Remember, our urban area is governed by the Board of Supervisors, two of whom (Rich Desmond and Phil Serna) said a homeless shelter on Auburn Blvd. was a bad idea. But it takes three Supervisors, not just two, for the County Board to do anything.

Hmm...maybe we should all just do like the Receiving Home's Board did and give Darrell a chance to "make it work". What could go wrong? Nothing, of course, because the City of Sacramento always knows what it is doing and always does everything right. That's why no one who lives in the City of Sacramento - certainly not those who live in the preferred neighborhoods of Land Park, Curtis Park and East Sacramento - has problems. Only those of us who live in the unincoroprated area have problems and all we do is whine about them. All we CAN do is whine, because we have no Mayor and City Council to stick up for us, to work to make our community better. We are at the mercy of other people's Mayor and City Council. We are at the mercy of politicians we can't vote for or against, politicians who have consistently demonstrated that they do not care about us. At all. Like they did again when they voted to give us more homeless people.