A recent change to the city of Sacramento’s motel shelter program — a longstanding lifeline for hundreds of homeless mothers — is leaving families kicked back out on to the streets without notice, or even knowing why.
The changes, which went into effect Monday and designed to save the city $3.2 million, include:
- Motel staff will now make some decisions about which families get a room, and which families get evicted.
- Motel staff also have the unilateral ability to place families on a “do not rent” list, barring them from staying there. They are not required to share the list with the city or the nonprofit the city pays to run the program.
- The motels, fully paid for by the city since 2020, now require some of the families to pay for a portion of their rooms. Families who can’t pay may be evicted immediately.
- Families won’t be able to stay in the motels past six months, even if they still don’t have housing to move into.
The changes have so far caused at least six Sacramento families with autistic children, who had lived in the motels between five and 24 months, suddenly left without a room last week. Motel staff told four of the families they were on a “do not rent list” but did not give specifics on why.
All six families were still living in the motels last Sunday, the day before the city changed its program. Whatever the violations were that caused the “do not rent” list, they had never prompted eviction notices, leaving them blindsided when the program changed…