Sacramento plans to close tight-knit homeless camp Monday. Where will its seniors go?

After months of threatening to do so, the city of Sacramento plans to shut down a tight-knit North Sacramento homeless camp Monday.

Since 2022, about 50 people have been living at Camp Resolution in city-issued trailers at a city-owned vacant lot at Colfax Street and Arden Way.

The residents, many of whom are seniors, are used to hearing threats that the city is closing the camp . But the city has taken the action of posting a notice to vacate on the property.

The city’s notice orders all residents to leave by 12 a.m. Monday. The residents were in violation of a state law against trespassing, the notices states.

“If you remain on the property after Aug. 26, further enforcement action will be taken,” the notices state. “Shelter space has been reserved for you.”

Although the city has a growing waitlist of over 2,600 people waiting for a shelter bed, it has set aside 50 beds for Camp Resolution residents to avoid them going back on the streets. Those beds are located in trailers and tiny homes at a Roseville Road shelter as well as an indoor facility on Auburn Boulevard.

The city says those shelters are safer for the residents than Camp Resolution, where the generators that guests have attached to the trailers are causing a fire hazard. The city also says the other shelters are better because the residents can get signed up for housing waitlists — something the city claims organizers at Camp Resolution have blocked them from doing.

But the Roseville Road and Auburn Boulevard city shelters present issues for several residents. They both only usually allow guests to bring one dog, said city spokesman Tim Swanson. All but one of the Camp Resolution residents have more pets than that, said Crystal Sanchez of the Sacramento Homeless Union.

“The pets are more than pets,” Sanchez said. “They are family. People will not leave without their pets.”

In addition, the trailers and tiny homes at the Roseville Road shelter do not have electricity or allow guests to hook up generators, even if they need it for their oxygen machines and other medical devices.

Those options present several problems for Shonna Adams, 55, who lives at Camp Resolution.

Adams, who is in a wheelchair, uses an oxygen machine powered through a generator hooked up to her trailer at Camp Resolution. She has two cats and a dog.

“I have to be on (oxygen) all the time or I die,” said Adams earlier this month, through tears. “Sacramento wants to throw us back in the street again. What am I gonna do? I don’t know ... I got laid off and lost everything, I’ve been homeless ever since.”

How we got here

Camp Resolution came to be after The Sacramento Bee reported the city had payed $617,0000 to pave and fence a city lot for a homeless shelter that never opened. A handful of homeless women broke in and started camping on the lot. Instead of clearing them off the property, as the city had in the past, the city got on board.

It signed a lease with Safe Ground Sacramento, a nonprofit run by civil rights attorney Mark Merin, which was running a Safe Ground at 12th and C streets . It even dropped off trailers from the state that had been sitting empty, for guests to use. Unlike other shelters, which cost several million dollars a year to run, the site did not cost the city anything other than the donation of the trailers.

At first, things went smoothly. The fence was covered in artwork, including a large banner that read, “COME MEET YOUR NEIGHBORS.” Community groups and volunteers would drop off food, there were big cook outs, poetry and music nights, and residents from the surrounding neighborhood would pop by.

But things got more complicated as the Sacramento Homeless Union, a different organization than the lease holder, told camp leaders not to allow staff from the city’s Department of Community Response through the gate.

Sacramento Homeless Union president Crystal Sanchez said DCR was not allowed in because they only sign people up for shelter waitlists, while the lease promises permanent housing. For permanent housing, there is a different system. Sanchez says she placed all the residents and their necessary documents in it months ago, but city officials say they are not properly entered.

As a result, when the residents have to leave Monday, the only likely options for them will be shelters or the streets.

The saga has also played out in court. The Sacramento Homeless Union in May sued the city over its plans to close the camp. Then in July, Merin submitted a letter to the city stating the lease would end Aug. 10 but said that did not mean the city had to close the camp. On Aug. 10, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Jill H. Talley ruled the city was allowed to close the camp.

According to the notices, it appears the city has decided to close it. If all residents aren’t off the property by Monday, it’s unclear if police will remove them, or will issue criminal citations for hundreds of dollars, as they have increasingly been doing.

“We made history with Camp Resolution — the entire world knows about it,” Anthony Prince, an attorney for the Sacramento Homeless Union, said during a Wednesday news conference. “And nobody can ever take that away.”

With its messy and public ending, some are calling Camp Resolution a failed experiment.

But with the city facing a $77 million projected deficit for the fiscal year that starts July 1, it’s sill the cheapest option to get people some basic necessities — locking doors, water, food, and bathrooms — as they wait years on affordable housing wait lists.

“I don’t want people to think the model doesn’t work because we’ve seen it work at 12th and C, and around the country,” said Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela, who represents the central city. “I don’t want the message to be that this broad concept has failed because it doesn’t need to be this way. We can learn what we have learned and make it better. I don’t want the other message to come out of this is we are just kicking them back out on the curb. We’ve been holding spaces for them. I hope as many residents as possible accept that, I really do.”