The Watt Service Center and Safe Stay, if open for at least 15 years, will serve about 18,000 unsheltered people. Photo courtesy of Sacramento County

SACRAMENTO COUNTY, CA (MPG) - Sacramento County has long envisioned a large-scale project that can serve the unhoused population with diverse offerings to help people in various stages of homelessness. In 2022, the county purchased a 13-acre property on Watt Ave. near Roseville Road that also has a 130,000 square-foot warehouse on site. ​

The vision is to have a mixed-use service center with shelter, respite, safe parking, Behavioral Health services co-located on-site with case management, storage, pet respite, laundry services, showers, bathrooms, job training and more.

With the board’s action on Oct. 22 to approve the staff recommendation to move forward with the construction bid, the Department of Homeless Service and Housing can make this vision a reality.

The Watt Service Center and Safe Stay (Center) provides the space and opportunity to make all of these visions a reality. While the initial price tag feels hefty – at a purchase price of $22 million for the parcel and an estimated cost of $42 million for construction of the full vision for the campus – the reality is that this center will serve thousands of people – not just the 350 it can serve at any given time.

The Service Center will have capacity to host (at any given time): 225 beds in Safe Stay cabins, 50-person capacity in Safe Parking and 75-person capacity for emergency/weather respite beds.

Conservative estimates, based off the data from other county sheltering and respite projects, show that over 15 years the Service Center will serve 18,000 people – which lowers the cost to less than $3,600 per person.

With the expectation of this center operating longer than 15 years, those costs continue to shrink as the impact on homelessness across Sacramento County grows.

In 2017, Sacramento looked at the cost born by the public systems (county jail, shelters, behavioral health and City Fire), and found the average cost for an unsheltered individual to be $45,000 annually for the top 250 users of these systems. It costs far more to leave people unhoused than it does to stabilize them, address the issues keeping them in homelessness and doing whatever it takes to get them housed. 

The Service Center’s size and configuration offers a unique opportunity to serve folks immediately exiting homelessness in the emergency/weather respite center, as well as those more stabilized and working towards permanent housing in the Safe Stay cabins. Additionally, it will allow staff to serve people living in vehicles, which includes working poor and those who are only recently homeless.

While having the space to serve folks at these different stages of their homeless experience, the site will allow for a myriad of community-based supports – behavioral health, physical health, employment services, treatment services (and many more) – to co-locate at the site and support clients towards a permanent exit from homelessness.

Watt will be the county’s fourth Safe Stay Community, with locations in south Sacramento at Florin, East Parkway and on Stockton Blvd. In addition to these shelters, the county also has scattered site shelter homes across the county, as well as several other sheltering programs. This will be the county’s first year-round weather respite and its first Safe Parking program.

The county continues to pursue new and innovative programs and services to address homelessness, stretch limited funding and partner with its cities, community-based organizations and local non-profits in the mission to end homelessness.

For more information about what the county is doing to address homelessness, visit https://schs.saccounty.gov/pages/default.aspx.