Sacramento cleared homeless camp in 2019. Four years later it wrote checks to 3 of the evicted

Over four years after Sacramento County cleared a large tight-knit south Sacramento encampment, it wrote $18,500 in checks to three of the homeless people it evicted.

The county wrote the checks to settle a May 2019 federal lawsuit after the Sheriff’s deputies cleared the camp at a vacant lot owned by the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency, near the intersection of Stockton Boulevard and Fruitridge Road.

The $18,500 was divided between three homeless people who were cleared from the site — Lucille Mendez, Palmer Overstreet, and Betty “Bubbles” Rios, according to an August 2023 settlement agreement, which The Sacramento Bee obtained from a California Public Records Act request.

The publicly-owned lot had been vacant since 2010 when the San Juan Motel closed and was demolished. Rios had worked in the motel, and when it was demolished, so was her trailer, leaving her homeless. She was the unofficial mayor of the self-governed camp, where she lived for a decade, working with the other residents to come up with rules and building community. The model is similar to North Sacramento’s Camp Resolution, which opened in 2022 and is slated to close this month.

SHRA paid $186,000 to erect a fence around the site to prevent illegal dumping, Jones said. Crews installed the fence while residents were still living there. Then on May 1, 2019, dozens of deputies came to the site to evict the homeless, resulting in a dramatic standoff between homeless residents, their advocates and deputies. Eventually deputies arrested two people for unlawful assembly, cleared the site and put a padlock on the newly-constructed fence.

The site has been sitting vacant ever since, though an apartment building is planned to open in summer 2026, said SHRA spokeswoman Angela Jones.

“There’s no one to protect us at night time,” Rios said days before the sweep. “We like staying in a group here because we feel safer in a group than on our own.”

After deputies evicted Rios, she spent time living in several other frequently-cleared camps along Morrison Creek and Roseville Road and then the state’s COVID Project Roomkey motels while she tried to find affordable housing.

Sanchez estimates there were once a whopping 145 people living at the San Juan Motel camp, many of whom nestled in the trees. Many of the occupants of the camp are now living in tents on the sidewalks of Stockton Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare where pedestrians and bicyclists are hit by vehicles frequently. A man in March 2023 died after he was hit by a vehicle less than a mile from the site.

In the six months leading up to the sweep, neighbors and businesses nearby made 69 calls for service to the encampment — including several for ongoing fights including weapons, which have resulted in injuries, the Sheriff’s Office told The Bee at the time.

Sacramento police and Sheriff’s deputies frequently clear homeless camps — and might do so increasingly in light of a new Supreme Court ruling — but lawsuits from the homeless residents don’t typically follow. Legal Services of Northern California filed the lawsuit on behalf of Rios, Mendez and Overstreet.

The new 113-unit affordable apartment building at the site is set to open in summer 2026, Jones said.

“(The project) achieves SHRA’s goal to revitalize a distressed area and strengthen the neighborhood,” Jones said in a statement. “Nothing does this better than by creating quality affordable housing with access to services and enrichment programs that will help residents at The San Juan Apartments live stably and thrive.”