Sacramento and the Catholic Church: Shaping a Capital City

9. Homelessness and Fighting the City Consensus, 1970–2000

There was yet one last use for the old St. Stephen Church at Third and o streets. Urban renewal had already begun to knock down the West End flophouses and cheap hotels. One of those left homeless by the demolition of the cheap housing was Abel Chacon, a migrant worker who followed the crops in the northern valley. In 1966 Chacon approached Father Keith Kenny, administrator of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, with the suggestion that the now vacant St. Stephen’s be turned into a hostel for the temporarily unemployed. Kenny readily agreed and helped Chacon set up more than 100 cots in the decrepit structure and install rudimentary cooking facilities. The demand for the makeshift shelter was greater than Chacon or Kenny had imagined, as more than 140 persons were crammed “temporarily” into both floors of the building. Only one toilet served the sanitary needs of all.1 This was more than the building could safely hold. Anxious to remove the building for redevelopment, the city shut it down in 1967 for multiple code and safety violations. No one knows where the homeless went. The aggressive city action to close the c h a p t e r 9 Homelessness and Fighting the City Consensus, 1970–2000 “Nobody wants them” 247 makeshift shelter met no resistance from the diocese, which was anxious to get rid of the aging building. In hindsight this small episode was a sign of things to come. In later years, care of the homeless and the demands of urban redevelopment would clash bitterly in Sacramento. The church and the community that had, for the most part, enjoyed an amicable relationship , eventually found themselves at loggerheads. As we have seen, Sacramento, like many communities, relied on a combination of public and private agencies to aid the “homegrown” poor. However, when the Great Depression pushed the network of private providers to their limits, social welfare fell largely to the local, state, and federal governments and became a major part of their annual expenditures . Sacramento had long made distinctions between the “worthy” and “unworthy” poor. These too were initially swept away in the suffering of the Great Depression. Sacramentans of all faiths continued to give to the poor. Catholics in particular kept up their charity through the Catholic Ladies’ Relief Society as well as branches of the popular St. Vincent de Paul Society, which were organized in various parishes. After the church reforms of Vatican II, many parishes formed social justice committees that raised money or undertook projects for the poor. But the visible poverty of the Depression did not return in the postwar era. A healthy economy created thousands of jobs, and the Sacramento metropolitan area experienced a burst of prosperity. Suburban flight left the poor in the city, many on the now decrepit West End of Sacramento and in pockets of poverty near the downtown. However, even these “safe” quarters were falling to the plans of urban developers who were anxious to eliminate blight and make urban areas more attractive. Although redevelopment proceeded in fits and starts, its advocates in the 1980s and 1990s believed that Sacramento could now become a “major league city.” In addition to a new push for urban beautification, the nation and the community experienced a backlash against the “overly generous” welfare policies of the 1950s and 1960s. This was spearheaded to some degree by a revival of conservative politics in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Keying into middle-class resentment at paying taxes to support the “shiftless,” conservative ideologues revived and rehabilitated the nineteenth-century distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. These dynamics created a complex and combustible political and 248 s a c r a m e n t o a n d t h e c at h o l i c c h u r c h social climate in Sacramento when a tidal wave of hunger and homelessness washed over the state capital in the late twentieth century. Some Catholics found themselves caught between their traditional impulse to support city development and the need to help the poor. When a Catholic Worker–inspired food program that laid down no means test for the distribution of food and clothing refused to move or alter its services in an area coveted by city developers and politicians, a season of controversy erupted. The old church-city consensus fell apart, and an unusual antagonism reigned where there...