Former Safe Ground director pushes ‘cabin city’ model for Sacramento

As the Sacramento City Council weighs making tent encampments a piece of its response to homelessness, Steve Watters wants to make sure his vision doesn’t get lumped into that one.

For the past two years, the executive director of First Step Communities—and the former head of Safe Ground Sacramento, which is spearheading talk of tent towns—has been seeding the idea of portable villages of tiny cabin homes, dotted around a permanent community center and medical clinic.

These temporary communities would house up to 125 people a year, directly connecting them with caseworkers, as well as medical, mental health and addiction services. Watters says the villages could be tailored to serve different subpopulations of those experiencing homelessness, from families and youth to chronically unsheltered individuals.

Watters envisions temporary communities as the evolutionary bridge between emergency tent encampments and permanent housing. “We’re somewhere in the middle,” he said. “We’re not the solution to homelessness, but we think we can play a big role.”

As people leave the village to enter permanent housing, new people would take their place. And when there was no more need, the cabins could be moved to where that need still existed. Meanwhile, the community would get to keep its community center and medical clinic.

Versions of the villages exist in Oregon and Texas, among other places. Watters says Sacramento City Council representatives in Districts 2, 5 and 8 have expressed potential interest in providing the land, a fact he says was twisted in a recent column by The Sacramento Bee’s Marcos Breton, who implied the villages were being forced onto poorer neighborhoods. Not true, says Watters. He says the idea is to “go to the neighborhoods where the need exists.”

The tricky piece, of course, is securing the funding, estimated at $700,000 annually. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development isn’t really investing in new transitional projects, Watters notes, which means he’d have a better shot at federal aid by making the cabins permanent fixtures with their own plumbing, rather than headquarter bathroom facilities in the community center. But Watters prefers the transitional model, where the cabins can be moved once they’re no longer needed, and hopes to gather enough grants through community foundations and the like to make his vision a reality.

“The idea of putting tent communities in shouldn’t stop us from looking at longer-term solutions,” he said. “We support that as an emergency response. It gives people some hope.” But “what we’re talking about is really a separate concept.”