SACRAMENTO, Calif. (TND) — Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho announced a lawsuit Tuesday against Sacramento, Calif. leaders over their alleged lackluster response to the city’s growing homelessness problem.
Ho announced the suit during a press conference Tuesday, saying the city is undergoing a “collapse into chaos.”
The community is at a breaking point,” Ho said in the press conference. He also alleged the city “allowed, created, and enabled a public safety crisis regarding our unhoused.”Included in the lawsuit are testimonies from dozens of homeowners throughout the city who say they have been threatened with firearms and robbed by residents of its 14 homeless encampments. Local business owners say it cost them thousands of dollars to upgrade security systems following attacks by some homeless on staff.
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“This is a model for the people to stand up and hold their government accountable,” Ho told the Associated Press. “All I’m asking is the city do its job.”
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg accused Ho of making the issue political, saying his suit will only impede progress.
The city needs real partnership from the region’s leaders, not politics and lawsuits,” Steinberg told AP.More than 9,000 individuals in the city were homeless in 2022, a Sacramento Steps Forward count shows, an increase of 67% since 2019. Only 28% of those people found some sort of temporary shelter in emergency shelters or hotel programs.
Nationwide, transgender individuals saw the largest shift in rates of homelessness between 2015 and 2022 with an increase of 231%. A study from University of Southern California researchers shows nearly 1 in 3 homeless individuals in the U.S. live in California.
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