Tents stand outside Sacramento City Hall on July 15, 2025.
RENÉE C. BYER
rbyer@sacbee.com
Callers in Midtown and Old North Sacramento made the most reports to 311 about homeless people over a one-year period, data show.
The Sacramento Bee analyzed 311 data from March 3, 2025, to March 3, 2026. In that span, a total of more than 115,000 reports related to homelessness came in. Of those, about 16% specified a “concern” — the word that city personnel use in the data when the caller indicates there is an urgent reason to worry about an individual’s health or safety. For a reported concern, a specialized outreach team or behavioral health team responds.
Another 789 reports were regarding potential overdoses, which led to rapid deployment of emergency medical personnel.
For 311 calls, the top five neighborhoods with reports of homelessness were:
Midtown, with 5,239 reportsOld North Sacramento, with 4,388 reportsParkway, with 3,690 reportsEast Sacramento, with 3,499 reportsValley Hi/North Laguna, with 3,094 reports
For about 13% of the calls, 311 personnel did not assign a neighborhood in the dataset. Some of those were complaints about encampments outside city limits. A small portion of overall reports originated from city personnel, such as workers from the Sacramento Police Department, Code Enforcement or the Department of Utilities seeking assistance with cleanup.
The data show that complaints about homelessness downtown and in midtown did not slow between March 3, 2025 and March 3, 2026. Overall, the volume of calls in that time period slightly increased in those neighborhoods. Personnel from 311 reviewed 2,340 calls regarding downtown.
The public data do not contain information about who makes the reports to 311, and these numbers could be skewed by vociferous individuals. A previous analysis of airport noise complaints found that one individual appeared to have complained about Mather Airport almost 2,000 times in 2024.
The data does not contain much detail on what exactly the callers were reporting, but it does generally classify the topics of the calls. Of the 115,523 reports that came in related to homelessness, the most common complaints appeared to be about the existence of an encampment. Only 16% mentioned critical infrastructure, blocking a sidewalk or close proximity to a school, with most of those reports — just over 11,000 — referencing sidewalks.
Of the 311 calls, 1,839 were from homeless people asking for help. Homeless people are generally directed to 211 for services, but 211 frequently adds names to a waitlist. On any given night, thousands of people sit on a waitlist to enter a homeless shelter in Sacramento County.
Two Bee journalists observed a homeless mother making a 211 call in January when she and her 13-year-old daughter were about to be kicked out of a motel where they were temporarily staying; she was trying to avoid sleeping on the street and hoped to get an emergency voucher. The 211 operator explained that there were no emergency services available and added the mother to a waitlist.
This story was originally published March 4, 2026 at 2:02 PM.
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Ariane Lange reports on regional transportation for The Sacramento Bee. She was a USC Center for Health Journalism 2023 California Health Equity Fellow. Previously, she worked at BuzzFeed News, where she covered gender-based violence and sexual harassment.