Now, these experiences have led Cofer, currently a senior policy director at the organization Public Health Advocates, to seek the top job of California’s capital city. Cofer came in first in the nonpartisan mayoral primary in March, an upset victory for a young, Black, female first-time candidate running against several established politicians. In the general election in November, she is facing off against Kevin McCarty, a former Sacramento city council member who more recently served several terms in the state legislature. 

If she wins, Cofer has vowed to take a public health approach to setting policy in Sacramento. “Public health is about maximizing the two things that matter most to humans: the number of years in your life, and the quality of life in your years,” she told Bolts. “And I see that as the major charge of every public-facing institution.” 

For Cofer, this means seeing the city as an ecosystem, understanding homelessness, gun violence and other social problems as akin to infectious disease, and zeroing in on preventing their spread rather than simply treating its effects. “It’s one thing to fight a symptom, it’s another thing to eradicate a disease,” said Asantewaa Boykin, a nurse and activist against police violence who has worked with Cofer on community issues. 

While McCarty has espoused a fairly standard Democratic vision for homeless policy, speaking of the importance of services while also working on laws to restrict where unhoused people can camp, Cofer has called for stopping sweeps of homeless encampments and expanding and improving “safe ground” camping sites. She has also advocated for more funding for violence intervention networks, overhauling the city’s well-meaning but flawed alternative crisis response system, and using the budget to advance a set of clearly articulated values around health and welfare. 

As the primary results showed, hers is an enticing pitch to many in the city who are frustrated that the conventional solutions—a jumbled mixture of services, imperfect temporary shelter options, and homeless sweeps—aren’t working. But Cofer faces various barriers to realizing her vision: a $60-odd-million budget deficit, a district attorney and a state government bent on enforcing the criminalization of homelessness, and housed and homeless residents alike who are deeply mistrustful that anything will meaningfully change. 

In response to an affordable housing shortage and a growing number of people sleeping outdoors, Sacramento has, like many of its counterparts, tried everything from services and temporary housing to criminalization. In 2021, now-outgoing mayor Darrell Steinberg unveiled a costly plan to increase shelter options, but the following year, the city and county each passed ordinances restricting camping on sidewalks or near businesses, infrastructure, and the city’s American River Parkway. 

Then, in the fall of 2022, voters approved Measure O, which outlawed camping on public property. Cofer opposed Measure O, while Cofer’s mayoral opponent McCarty worked on a bill to outlaw camping on the parkway that he suggested could work in tandem with these other restrictive measures. McCarty did not respond to a request for comment for this piece.

Homeless advocates like Anthony Prince, a lawyer for the Sacramento Homeless Union, whose 2,800 members represent nearly half of the city’s unhoused population, argue that the city has wasted much of the money it has spent under Steinberg’s plan. “It was about pop up tents, mass congregant shelters, a few tiny homes scattered here and there, some so-called safe parking sites and safe camping sites,” he said. “This is not housing.”

Charley Willison, an assistant professor at Cornell’s Department of Public & Ecosystem Health, called shelter “a really important first step—if it is used as a transitional housing mechanism. We can’t have shelter being used as the final step.” But she also noted that too many cities create behavioral requirements, like curfews or complete abstention from substances, for shelters that disqualify whole swaths of people. 

Niki Jones, the Executive Director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, believes that the city’s vast expenditures have accomplished little and left housed residents pessimistic, inclined to blame their unhoused neighbors, and thus more likely to support punitive measures against them. “There’s this idea that all this money has gone into homelessness—why isn’t it solved?” she said. “There’s a woman who lives outside who says it really well—she says, ‘They treat us like we blew $80 million.’” 

Meanwhile, homeless advocates in Sacramento say that the municipal government’s repeated  sweeps of unhoused people continue to be destabilizing and traumatizing. It’s a practice that Willison says has been proven ineffective over the long term. “The evidence base shows us that these punitive policies, whether that’s arrests, encampment closures, without links to housing, all make homelessness worse,” she told Bolts. 

Part of the underlying issue, Cofer argues, is that the city has never set explicit priorities for what it wants to accomplish each year, instead opting to create a “status quo budget” based on the previous year’s expenditures. “Unfortunately, when you do that, you keep getting what you’ve always got,” she said. 

To address the root issue of affordable housing and stop people from falling into homelessness in the first place, Cofer supports Sacramento Forward, a policy package put forth by several current city council members that aims to enact “Just Cause” renter protections, mandate a certain percentage of new housing be reserved for low- and very-low-income residents, and prevent corporate purchases of existing housing by giving priority to tenant buyers. If elected, Cofer says she’ll use her power as mayor to expand support for the package and place individual policy items on the agenda for direct approval or an eventual ballot initiative. 

But then, of course, there is the issue of the nearly 9,300 people currently homeless in Sacramento County. Prince has recently served as the lawyer for Camp Resolution, a “safe ground” site that allows people to camp without police interference at minimal expense to the city. Prince stresses that this is not a permanent solution for his clients—“they don’t want to stay there forever,” he told Bolts—but it is safer and more stable than sleeping alone on the street. 

The city initially signed and then renegotiated a lease with the organization Safe Ground Sacramento that promises it will not clear the camp until all of its residents get into permanent housing, but Prince says that officials have also intensified sweeps around the camp and sought various ways to compel residents to leave. Last week, Safe Ground announced that it cannot fulfill the terms of its lease, including providing water and electricity, which Prince worries will give the city another reason to void the agreement.

Cofer has praised the “safe ground” concept as a low-cost interim solution and said she’d extend Camp Resolution’s lease, open more sites around the city, and ensure that any sites have running water, electricity, shower services, and other amenities that allow the people there to live with dignity. She sees the sites as a form of stabilization that might allow people a moment to breathe and get connected to resources that can pave the way for more long-term stability. “60 percent of our unhoused folks have disabilities,” she said. “Are they all receiving disability? Are they all receiving food stamps? Are they all receiving the services that they’re eligible for?”

Cofer also criticizes the city government’s reluctance to robustly fund a suite of programs that could prevent violence, homelessness, and unnecessary police encounters. In 2018, Cofer and others advocated for the passage of Measure U, which would have doubled an existing half-cent sales tax. The revenue from the first half-cent, around $50 million per year at that time, went largely to the police department, but the city said the additional half-cent would go toward things like inclusive economic development targeted at historically redlined neighborhoods, and an affordable housing fund. “That was the campaign promise and that was the way that this measure was marketed to voters,” Cofer said. 

But after the measure passed, most of the revenue from the tax ended up going back to the police department—not illegal, Cofer stressed, but “a breach of trust.” She advocated for the creation of a committee that would advise the council on how to better invest the funds from Measure U, and ended up chairing it from 2019 until the end of 2022. During her time there, the committee piloted a participatory budgeting process that invested money in community-led projects in two Sacramento neighborhoods, which Cofer hopes to continue and focus on youth-related projects if she’s elected. 

Cofer is clear-eyed about the way that Sacramento’s policing budget strains the city’s coffers and takes resources away from other departments. She notes that it’s gone up around $100 million in just four years to reach over $250 million today, and proposes a realignment of the Measure U dollars towards their intended purpose and a return to the 2018-2019 police budget of around $150 million. McCarty is clear that he will not cut police funding if elected. 

But Cofer is also leery about being portrayed as anti-police. She stresses that she empathizes with law enforcement officers and compares their plight to that of teachers: public sector employees burdened with the effects of social issues far outside their remit. 

One attempt to disrupt this paradigm came in the form of the Department of Community Response (DCR), which Mayor Steinberg debuted during the 2020 protests. The idea was to form a team of social workers and mental health specialists to respond to 911 calls related to mental health and homelessness instead of police. But Boykin, whose organization Mental Health First was already doing similar work, told Bolts the department engaged with her only superficially, and conversations soon ended. Jones, who has volunteered with Mental Health First, said that DCR has since betrayed its initial mandate as a police alternative and become imbricated in the broader apparatus of sweeps, displacement, and criminalization. 

“What really came into being was actually just a team that responded to unhoused folks, usually sent there before police,” she said. “They don’t respond instead of police. They respond as a precursor.” 

Cofer wants CDR properly staffed and resourced—she said it needs at least $7 million in additional yearly funds—so that it can fulfill its initial mission of taking over various 911 call types from the police department. This would, in turn, free officers up to respond to calls that involve violent crime, and leave the department less reliant on overtime. “If we’re talking about baking this into 911 response, that means that we have to have staff available 24 hours a day,” she said. “You kind of have to commit.” She also says she’d more closely collaborate with community partners like Boykin’s Mental Health First that have experience doing this work already.

In interviews, both Prince and Willison emphasized that any lasting solutions to the city’s homelessness crisis must come from listening to the people most impacted by it, rather than simply following housed residents’ complaints. 

Generally, Willison said, “the needs, rights and preferences, including the health and well being of people experiencing homelessness, get completely circumvented” in policy discussions around homelessness. A public health approach must prioritize “being responsive to the needs of people experiencing homelessness themselves.” 

Of course, Cofer would also have to contend with the many constituents who want some measure of criminalization, if only because they’re exasperated by the city’s lack of progress on reducing homelessness. Cofer says that it’s understandable that Sacramentans have looked to fixes like the 2022 ballot measure that ramped up enforcement, which she framed as well-meaning but misguided. But convincing residents to be patient as the city attempts to implement longer-term solutions will be a challenge. And it could be a lonely fight, too. 

Sacramento’s District Attorney, Thien Ho, has sued the city twice for failing to enforce its anti-homeless ordinances, and has also threatened a lawsuit over Camp Resolution. And the recent Grants Pass decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has made it harder for officials to argue that their hands are tied when it comes to criminalization. Shortly after Grants Pass, California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered state agencies to begin clearing encampments on state-owned land, and strongly suggested that local leaders follow suit. This could further alarm individual council members reluctant to assert the political will to oppose sweeps or build new safe ground sites in their district, leaving it harder for Cofer or any future mayor to get the votes they need to make significant changes on this front. 

Cofer said that she’ll try to work around these challenges by encouraging collaboration and setting an ambitious affirmative vision for Sacramento. “I want us to set the benchmarks. How many people are we going to house this year?” she told Bolts. “And I want the media and advocates and everyone to be able to call in, or go to the city’s website and see how are we doing towards that goal, and I want us to be unafraid of setting an ambitious goal and potentially failing.” 

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In November, Sacramento residents will be faced with a weighty decision not usually left up to voters: whether to broadly criminalize homelessness within the city. Measure O, a ballot measure brought by a group called Sacramentans for Safe and Clean Streets and Parks and supported by local business interests, would outlaw camping on public property, and allow individual residents frustrated by encampments to initiate abatement proceedings, effectively forcing the city to act on complaints. The city will also create new shelter spaces, but only a few hundred of them—a small fraction of the number of homeless people who will likely be displaced if the measure goes into effect.

Measure O is merely one of a series of recent efforts to crack down on homelessness in Sacramento. In late August, the city and county passed three separate ordinances to forbid camping in a wide variety of public places, including on sidewalks, in front of businesses, near “infrastructure,” and along the American River Parkway, a wooded riverside area where many unhoused people camp.

By now, it’s a familiar story across the state: cities vacillate between trying to offer unhoused people shelter and criminalizing them for lacking it—and increasingly, they do both at the same time. This push-pull dynamic is a result of cities attempting to comply with the letter of a 2018 appeals court decision holding that municipalities can only enforce anti-camping ordinances if they have shelter beds available—while doing as much as possible to bulldoze over the spirit of it. “The rhetoric is like, oh, it’s not as bad as you think it is. Or we’re gonna apply this in a really humane way, so don’t worry about it,” said Bob Erlenbusch, the founder of Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness. “But that belies the reality on the streets, you know?”

The cyclicality of the homelessness conversation in Sacramento has produced a profound feeling of déjà vu. Advocates decry the futility of trying to enact any policy that’s guided by the demands of housed people rather than the needs of unhoused people, involves criminalization, and lacks longer term solutions—condemning people to an endless cycle between streets, shelters, and jail. They fear that Measure O will only keep the wheel spinning. “The only thing you’re doing is finding ways to shuffle people through the hospital system, through the shelter system, through the prison system—and that shit costs a lot of money. A lot of money,” said Asantewaa Boykin, the co-founder of Mental Health First Sacramento, a civilian crisis response team that aims to get police out of mental health calls and works with many unhoused individuals. “We keep funding police to do Band-Aid work instead of finding solutions. I feel like I’m screaming at a wall.”

To Chris Herring, a professor of sociology at UCLA who has done extensive field research on homelessness in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere, the “shelters vs. criminalization” debate is a false dichotomy between two things that have become fundamentally contingent on one another. This dynamic is on starkest display in San Diego, where Mayor Todd Gloria’s “progressive enforcement” campaign has directed police to arrest anyone who refuses shelter, which has produced an eightfold increase in arrests (the city’s shelter system generally hovers around a 93 percent occupancy rate). But it exists in some form in nearly every municipality across the state.

To fully understand why, you have to look back to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2018 Martin v. City of Boise ruling. The decision, which affected nine western states, should have been a victory for anti-criminalization advocates. Instead, it created a series of perverse incentives for cities trying to manage their homeless population and avoid getting sued. Rather than interpreting the ruling as a moral and practical call for the state to stop penalizing people who sleep on the street if it cannot even temporarily shelter them, many cities instead have conceived of shelter availability as a pretext for criminalization and engaged in legal gymnastics to technically comply with that requirement.

Herring has observed law enforcement setting aside shelter beds—keeping them empty despite the presence of people who are ready and willing to accept them—in order to have enough on hand to make enforcement legally justifiable. In San Francisco, he studied a new crop of shelters that opened throughout the city with the intent to offer lodging with no limits on duration of stay, better conditions, and fewer strings attached; the goal was to get people housed long term. But, as Herring recounts in his research paper “Complaint-oriented ‘services’: shelters as tools for criminalizing homelessness,” Martin v. Boise gave police more control over shelter referrals and ramped up turnover, causing the city to strategically worsen shelter conditions. “As they were tied increasingly to policing after Martin v. Boise, a number of them rolled back those offers,” he told Bolts. “So some of these places that opened up initially offering the ability for people to bring their pets [or] partners can no longer allow that.”  

Municipalities have also seized on a single footnote in Martin v. Boise, which suggests that it may still be constitutional to forbid “the obstruction of public rights of way” regardless of available shelter,” to justify new enforcement methods. In Los Angeles, the city council implemented an ordinance, 41.18, that outlaws camping near schools, parks, and other public spaces, and has since expanded it; City Controller candidate Kenneth Mejia has estimated that the new restrictions make being homeless illegal in a full 20 percent of the city’s terrain. The legality of the recent Sacramento ordinances also hinges on that footnote. “Now they’re defining infrastructure really, really broadly, which includes schools and basically any building that the government owns,” said Erlenbusch.

Just last August, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg was boldly declaring a right to housing and introducing a comprehensive siting plan that would have designated 20 new locations across the city where homeless people could stay, ranging from emergency shelters to motel rooms to safe parking and camping grounds. Now, he’s endorsing Measure O. How did the city get from there to where it is now in just over a year? 

“I think the mayor’s proposal for a comprehensive siting plan was a genuine effort to expand options, especially during a pandemic where it was obvious that congregate shelter was not the way to go,” said Erlenbusch. “Out of the eight city council members, only a handful took him up on it. But in the meantime, homelessness has doubled…Businesses are upset. Residents are upset. Advocates are upset. Homeless people are upset—because nothing’s happened.”

To Erlenbusch, it’s impossible to overstate the role that angry constituents have played in the city council’s flip-flop from housing to criminalization. “They all have had tremendous pushback from business groups, community groups, especially neighborhood associations, and you know, the mantra is almost universal: ‘Well, we’re not against homeless people. But not here,’” he said. “I don’t even call it NIMBY anymore. I call it BANANA: build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything.”

Katie Valenzuela is a Sacramento city council member who has repeatedly resisted efforts to ramp up enforcement. She described the backlash from constituents that led many of her colleagues to vote against a vehicle camping proposal seen as an early test of Steinberg’s ambitious proposal. Two of the safe camping and parking locations she identified for the siting plan failed, in large part because of community pressure, and she’s since weathered two recall attempts by constituents angry about her approach to homelessness (a third attempt is already underway). “I think some people hate the solutions almost as much as they hate the crisis,” she said, laughing ruefully.

Enter Daniel Conway, the former chief of staff to a previous Sacramento mayor, who approached city hall with an initiative that would have required the city to come up with around 6,400 shelter beds within 60 days of the measure passing. “Immediately when we saw the text, the word bankruptcy flashed across all of our faces because there’s no way we’d be able to do that that quickly,” said Valenzuela. “We don’t have that much land and we definitely don’t have any money.” A flurry of negotiations and modifications ensued. Under the significantly revised version that will be put to voters, the city must only create up to 600 new shelter spaces, and is only required to spend up to $5 million of its own money doing so,  according to reporting by the Sacramento Bee. The enforcement aspect of the measure, however, stands.  

“It’s not even shelter, it’s shelter spaces, which we’re interpreting as tents on a parking lot somewhere,” Erlenbusch told Bolts. “There’s no requirement that the shelter spaces be evenly dispersed throughout the city. So you’re going to see the same thing that we’ve seen: it will be in disenfranchised communities, low-income communities. It’s not going to be in East Sacramento. It’d be like putting shelters in Beverly Hills in LA.” (Conway did not respond to a request for comment for this piece).

The fracas also reveals profound disagreements between Sacramento city and county on homelessness policy. In August, the council amended Measure O to make its enforcement contingent on the completion of an agreement that would clarify each body’s duties and financial responsibility—meaning that if the measure does pass, which seems likely, there’s a high possibility that it won’t go into effect. “The only possible positive outcome, at least from the no side, is that it won’t become effective because the city and the county can’t get it together to come up with any kind of agreement,” said Erlenbusch. 

While the city’s hand may be forced by Conway’s ballot measure, it’s entirely responsible for the recent ordinance that elevates blocking the sidewalk to a misdemeanor. At the last minute, Mayor Steinberg added a companion resolution stipulating that homeless people who violate it will not be jailed or fined “to the fullest extent practical.” 

Boykin told Bolts she was skeptical of how the mayor’s attempt to restrict incarceration or fines to “extraordinary cases” would play out in practice. “Nothing leads me to believe that if someone’s tent is taken, and there’s some paraphernalia found, that the police won’t charge them for that. They might not catch the misdemeanor, but they’ll definitely catch the substance use charges,” she told Bolts. “It just continues to funnel people through systems so that they’re off the street for a minute, which pleases a lot of their constituents.”

Parallel battles around homelessness are happening all over California—and sometimes, it’s the same people writing the playbook. Conway, the architect of Measure O, is on the board of the LA Alliance for Human Rights, which in 2020 brought a lawsuit against Los Angeles County demanding that the county expand shelter and services—and require homeless people to accept them under penalty of criminalization. Groups that work on homelessness in LA are adamant that the alliance doesn’t represent them or their interests. “This settlement may be trumpeted as a win by Skid Row property owners and politicians who are looking no further than the next elections, but it’s the same failed approach the City has been investing in for decades,” the Skid Row community group Los Angeles Community Action Network said in a statement following the lawsuit’s settlement in April 2022.

A number of groups supporting Measure O also oppose stronger tenant protections and affordable housing expansion in Sacramento, which Valenzuela sees as evidence of bad faith. “Our 2,400 shelter beds county wide are full of people, a lot of whom are ready to move on to the next step but can’t find one because we have no housing or permanent supportive housing available for them,” the councilmember said. “I can call any of these shelters and ask any of these residents why they’re still there. And they’re all gonna say the same thing. I got the job at the restaurant or I got all my benefits and I can’t find any place. There’s no room for me.”

But building housing takes time, political will, and a lot of money. Ultimately, for Boykin, the most tragic and rage-inducing thing about the endless, circular homelessness debate is not that that money doesn’t exist. It’s that it’s tied up in the large percentage of the city and county’s budget that goes towards the Sacramento sheriff and police departments. “It’s extortion. I don’t know any other way to put it,” she said. “And then we go, but where are the resources?”

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