Is Safe Ground dead? I think so.

Events just in this young month show that Safe Ground has been deftly swept under the turf. Perhaps never to cause dust-ups again.

How so? The mayor, in a ploy aided by unspecified others, pushed the core Safe Ground homeless "leaders" into cheap motels rooms¹ and off the streets and parkgrounds and City Council meeting agendas (and out of Friendship Park, for that matter).

Burying Safe Ground works to everyone's advantage because the ordinances to make it happen weren't going to happen. Solid majorities on the Sacramento city council and county board of supervisors were adamantine in their opposition. The homeless-help industry needed to move on to other issues to promote donations during the extended Christmas season. And the far-far left contingent [the Movement² leaders] needs something it can promote that has a chance for success.

The Mayor's new program Sacramento Steps Forward is too clever by half, empty of specifics and really no more than than what was already ongoing, the so-called 10 Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness in Sacramento.

So, the mayor looks far-reaching, innovative and bold [or so the bamboozled Bee thinks], when he's not, and a couple dozen of the least-deserving of the homeless are given motel rooms for five months [up from 4 1/2 mo. as earlier reported] where they are neatly out of the way and 50 Grand of mostly-taxpayer money is spent.

And in the end, near to nothing happened. We are very much where we were a year ago. Tent City is gone [as the mayor showed Lisa Ling]; and Eden [that is, the Sacramento version] becomes just another misty vision of a lost Utopia.
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Footnotes:
¹ This is the second time Mayor Johnson has inefficiently and inappropriately spent much-treasured money for the homeless on not-the-most-deserving homeless people. $800,000+ of city money was spent to extend Overflow last April (thru June), mostly for the purpose of sheltering many of the "notorious" [as the Bee called them] Tent City residents, in order to roust-out the encampment and fence-off the SMUD property where Tent City had been.

² According to a Sacramento Copwatch blogpost on Halloween, Mark Merin, radical attorney extraordinare, is going to see to it that a lot of the money won in settlement of Lehr et al v. Sac'to will go to the Movement (thru SHOC) and Safeground (sic). To aid Safe Ground, Merin hopes to purchase property to establish a camp-/shed- ground. We'll see.