Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty tours the 100 new tiny homes on the north campus of the Roseville Road shelter at a news conference on Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025, regarding their completion. The homes have individual heating and air-conditioning, and half will allow pets. Another 35 tiny homes have been added to the south campus.
RENÉE C. BYER
rbyer@sacbee.com
A Sacramento City Council member proposed a site for a homeless shelter in her district, and then turned around and suggested in an email to her constituents they should sue the city over it, and she would “stand beside” any lawsuit to stop it.
Welcome to Sacramento. This is where politicians talk a good game about addressing homelessness until it actually comes to locating a shelter somewhere.
That’s when the performance art starts and our city’s politicians not-so-subtly raise valid-sounding concerns about budget, services and location. But Lisa Kaplan’s very strange email that hit the inboxes of the city’s District 1 residents on Feb. 20 took our city’s homeless contortionism to new levels of low.
In the email, Kaplan laid out her recently-submitted proposal to repeal the City Manager’s power to site temporary, emergency homeless shelters. The ordinance had always been a controversial one; when former mayor Darrell Steinberg introduced it in 2023, the vote barely squeaked by at 5-4. Kaplan, along with Mai Vang, Karina Talamantes and former council member Sean Loloee all voted “No.”
In the following year and a half, using his new powers, the city’s previous City Manager Howard Chan sited just one shelter (albeit a large one) along Roseville Road.
But since taking office, current Mayor Kevin McCarty has used the ordinance — along with the help of interim City Manager Leyne Milstein and now the new City Manager, Maraskeshia Smith — to help to bypass the council’s authorization and announce plans for four new sites: A safe camping location in the River District, and three tiny home communities in North Natomas and south Sacramento, called “micro-communities.”
“When this proposal came to council in 2023 — I voted ‘No,’ because I knew something like the homeless micro-community that the city staff proposed and wants to put in on Arena Blvd might happen,” Kaplan wrote in her email.
And then she said something rather unusual for an elected official:
“The last remaining option I have in my power is to attempt to get a council vote to stop the construction of the micro-community … That is, unless someone in the community sues to stop its construction. I will stand beside you, if that lawsuit is filed.”
A city council member is openly encouraging her constituents to sue the city to stop a housing project in her district? That’s some desperation; and for all of Kaplan’s public feather-fluffing about minding the city’s budget deficit, soliciting a lawsuit against the city feels particularly counterintuitive.
The strangest part is, Kaplan was the one who proposed the site on Arena Boulevard.
What the council member didn’t include in her email (or her post on Instagram where she published her submitted proposal in full,) is that she personally directed Brian Pedro, director of the Department of Community Response, to consider the site in North Natomas during a city council meeting in April.
Pedro duly followed his boss’ direction, and placed the micro-community on the “sliver” of land Kaplan found that she said she wanted to “fully (dedicate) to 100% affordable housing.” That was the site on Arena Boulevard.
“I am supportive of a micro-community concept, but it must be set up and done right with transparency (and) good governance, including budget and best practices along with community input and a good neighbor policy,” Kaplan wrote in her post on Instagram.
That sounds great, but Sacramento has seen this exact scenario play out over and over again: Whenever the city begins to make progress on siting a homeless shelter, our elected officials start looking for a way to scuttle them. They cite convenient excuses like budgets, giving too much power to an unelected official, not enough wraparound services or a lack of community involvement.
All of those reasons sound good, but we already know what happens when a community gets overly involved in siting decisions: Without fail, they hate it, and the project is stalled for years.
That’s exactly why Steinberg gave the power to site to the city manager, so that they could make informed decisions, and bypass the obstructions that are thrown up by the communities and the council members who are beholden to them.
“It’s the age-old story here,” said former mayor Steinberg. “We, collectively, cannot have it both ways: We can’t put up obstacles to creating more beds, homes and services for people and at the same time, decry the state of homelessness on our streets and sidewalks.”
He’s right: This city and its council cannot constantly complain about the homeless problem, then continue to turn around and stall any proposal to fix that issue. More housing is needed, and Sacramento should not — as Elk Grove’s city council has done — simply push it to the edges of town. Housing must go in every district. We must accept that not everyone is going to be happy about it.
Mayor McCarty said he “wholeheartedly support(s) the City’s 2023 policy on the siting of homeless facilities and will not proceed with efforts to repeal it.” That leaves the decision to consider the repeal solely to Smith, who started as Sacramento’s city manager in January.
The kind of housing California and Sacramento need simply will not be built if we continue to fold to the demands of councils and communities. They must be sited and built with speed, because getting people living in homelessness off our streets is perhaps the one thing we can all agree on.
And that’s why Kaplan’s proposal is nothing but NIMBYism at its worst.
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Robin Epley is an opinion writer for The Sacramento Bee, with a focus on Sacramento County politics. She was born and raised in Sacramento, was a member of the Chico Enterprise-Record’s Pulitzer Prize-finalist team for coverage of the Camp Fire, and is a graduate of Chico State.