Angel Thomas, a resident at the Alder Grove complex off Broadway, holds her puppy, Cinnamon, on the second floor of her three bedroom apartment on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025. A recent report by SHRA estimates renovations on Marina Vista/Alder Grove could exceed $1 billion.
HECTOR AMEZCUA
hamezcua@sacbee.com
There were two important meetings in Sacramento on the same critical topic on Tuesday, and together they illustrated why this region never seems to make any progress on homelessness.
The Sacramento County Board of Supervisors and Sacramento City Council both heard about a disturbing audit of the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency. This is the agency that manages government-funded affordable housing for thousands of Sacramentans. Why these two sets of politicians weren’t in the same room hearing the same information makes no sense and yet explains Sacramento’s homelessness failure perfectly.
The council and supervisors formally voted to create the agency in 1982. Yet year after year, meeting after meeting, council members and supervisors oversee SHRA separately in their respective chambers.
This is downright goofy, as the quest for better collaboration is now on the hottest front burner of local politics.
State Sen. Angelique Ashby of Sacramento has legislation that would essentially force the supervisors and council, along with neighboring cities, to manage homelessness together through an expanded SHRA. The idea has divided the local community, but nobody has come up with a better plan that achieves the same level of partnership.
How about taking a baby step in the meantime—by having the city and county manage public housing together under the same roof—and see how that feels?
SHRA meetings are like Groundhog Day
Watching both Tuesday meetings about SHRA felt like the movie “Groundhog Day,” just not nearly as funny.
SHRA officials gave carbon-copy presentations. The only thing that changed was the locale and the politicians.
The Bee’s Ishani Desai detailed what happened in the separate meetings. “Overall, staff observations and findings from SHRA’s external auditors present significant concerns,” according to a letter dated Feb. 20 and signed by finance directors for both the city and county.
For example, in SHRA’s main program for affordable housing, the Housing Choice Voucher Program, auditors found numerous instances of the agency failing to verify eligibility within a year. SHRA is supposed to verify a participant’s eligibility annually, but that isn’t consistently happening.
Metrics like this are an important indicator of the organization’s overall effectiveness. There was plenty for supervisors and council members to discuss.
Supervisor Patrick Hume was the only public official on either body who actually had a question.
“And in my reading of this, things weren’t done as well as they should have been, but it wasn’t necessarily a misrepresentation or anything rising to the level of fraudulent behavior,” Hume said. “Correct?”
“Nothing of that nature,” said Mandy Merchant, the outside auditor from the firm, CLA.
Council members had no questions.
There’s more than enough for supervisors and council members to talk about when it comes to SHRA. It took them months, for example, to decide who should temporarily run the agency after the 2025 retirement of longtime Executive Director La Shelle Dozier. Supervisors have sought a full-blown independent assessment of the authority, but progress has stalled due to inaction by city council members.
SHRA governance is a three-headed creature
The governance of SHRA is downright odd, akin to a three-headed creature. Not only do the council and supervisors meet separately to oversee the agency. SHRA also reports to a 10-member commission appointed by both bodies.
These layers of supervision make no sense. When everybody is in charge, nobody is.
Meanwhile, the City Council majority seems singularly focused on the governance of homelessness.
On a 7-2 vote in January, the council asked staff to outline the possible roles and responsibilities of a new joint powers authority with the county on homelessness—essentially duplicating Ashby’s efforts.
The county is on record opposing a JPA on homelessness and officially opposes Ashby’s legislation, Senate Bill 802. The city doesn’t have an official position, as Mayor Kevin McCarty is opposed while a majority of his council colleagues appear supportive.
Absent a breakthrough, there is local gridlock when it comes to improving governance of homelessness. Yet sitting right in front of everyone is a path to better oversight of housing.
If the City Council asked the supervisors to start holding joint meetings to oversee SHRA—or vice versa—how could anyone say no?
The bottom line: these two elected bodies would be doing voters a huge service by meeting together more often on our biggest problems. Meeting jointly to address SHRA is in both of their interests. Someone in a position to make this happen should do so.
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Tom Philp is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist who returned to The Sacramento Bee in 2023 after working in government for 16 years. Philp had previously written for The Bee from 1991 to 2007. He is a native Californian and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.