America’s homelessness crisis is routinely framed as a housing crisis.
It is not.
It is a crisis born from the collapse of accountability at every level of the system. Nowhere are the consequences of that collapse more visible than in California — and especially in its capital city, Sacramento.
In 2016, California became the only state in the nation to formally adopt the federal government’s Housing First mandate as its sole taxpayer-funded approach to homelessness, directing billions in state and federal dollars toward subsidized-for-life apartments with no accountability for sobriety, treatment, or work — ever.
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Sacramento County followed in 2017, embracing the housing-only model, despite repeated warnings from frontline providers that housing alone would never adequately address the addiction, mental illness, trauma or behavioral health challenges that so often accompany homelessness.
Those warnings proved tragically accurate.
Under this mandate, homelessness rose nearly 35% nationally. In California, it surged 40%. In Sacramento County, the homeless population more than doubled.
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But even more alarming than the numbers was what society increasingly learned to tolerate: human deterioration, environmental destruction, exploding encampments and escalating public disorder, all while accountability and expectations were systematically stripped from the system itself.
That’s because the problem was never simply homelessness, and the solution was never simply apartments.
Waterways, parks and sidewalks did not become wastelands because of a lack of housing. They were devastated by a policy framework that systematically removed recovery, restoration and accountability from the center of homelessness policy.
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What followed was entirely predictable: tens of thousands of needles and shopping carts strewn across rivers, canals and public spaces as encampments became government-sanctioned waiting rooms for permanent housing that often never comes.
As vulnerable human beings are left idle for years without treatment or purpose, social decay takes root — and what should shock the public conscience becomes normalized.
This is what we saw in Sacramento last week, as a colleague and I spent one day there working with the River City Waterway Alliance — a volunteer group made up largely of retirees who have quietly become one of the last lines of defense protecting Sacramento’s waterways from environmental collapse. We spent another day working with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s HOT Team, which removed an estimated 5,000 pounds of waste from a canal that the team had fully cleared just one month earlier.
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One conclusion became impossible to escape: America’s homelessness crisis is, at its core, a crisis of zero accountability — and Sacramento is the telltale sign of what happens when accountability collapses, ideology replaces outcomes, and leaders refuse to confront the consequences of their own policies.
Realities in Sacramento alone paint a staggering picture:
Over the past three years, Alliance volunteers removed nearly 4 million pounds of waste from Sacramento waterways — including 29,000 needles, 19,000 shopping carts and more than 70,000 batteries.
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Meanwhile, the death rate among the homeless population more than doubled over that same period.
In one year, Sacramento County’s Sheriff’s HOT Team visited nearly 4,600 camps, closed over 1,300 of them, and cleared 3 million pounds of trash from homeless encampments.
Yet as volunteers and law enforcement struggle to contain the fallout, Sacramento’s homeless population grew by another 13% last year alone — an additional 1,000 individuals — further compounding a crisis the region was already failing to keep pace with.
The deterioration is accelerating far faster than it can be contained, and the sheer scale of the destruction is almost impossible to comprehend unless you witness it firsthand.
But most heartbreaking of all was our time walking Sacramento’s streets, where we saw human beings visibly deteriorate physically, mentally and spiritually while passersby barely looked up — no shock, no outrage, no gasp. In Sacramento, this level of suffering and societal breakdown is now tolerated.
Yet none of this was inevitable.
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For years, volunteers with the River City Waterway Alliance begged local and state leaders to confront the accelerating environmental destruction unfolding across Sacramento’s waterways. At the very same time, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation that would have created a sober living housing set-aside — despite pleas from individuals struggling with addiction, frontline providers and mayors across California who warned the state desperately needed more recovery-focused options within its homelessness system.
To their credit, the city and county are now responding. But repeated pleas to the governor, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Wildlife Conservation Board, and even the Sacramento chapter of the Sierra Club — organizations with real power and publicly stated missions tied directly to these issues — were met with silence.
Crickets.
At the very same time, the Sheriff’s HOT Team, which is actively containing the destruction, now faces the chopping block as county leaders grapple with a $100 million budget deficit.
That tells you everything you need to know about the priorities of the current system and the elected officials leading it.
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Today, Sacramento stands as a warning to the rest of the nation about what happens when accountability is stripped away, when leaders refuse to confront the consequences of their own failed policies, and when voters continue returning those same leaders to power even as human suffering, environmental destruction, public disorder and societal collapse accelerate in plain sight.
That is the real crisis. Not simply homelessness. Not simply housing.
It’s the collapse of accountability itself.