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"In Sacramento, California, an estimated 6,615 people are experiencing homelessness, a number that — while still heartbreakingly high — has declined 29% since 2023, according to the latest Point In Time counts. 

But a new project, which has been in the works since 2022, might bring that number down even lower.

A new 13-acre property purchased by Sacramento County will soon be home to the Watt Service Center and Safe Stay. 

The county broke ground on the mixed-use service center this week, which will provide shelter, emergency respite, safe parking, health services, and more to community members who are unsheltered — meaning they don’t have a place to safely sleep at night.

“We wanted to do something that is not only larger, but a large-scale campus to provide more than just the shelter,” Janna Haynes, of the county’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing, told KCRA3 News.

The Watt Service Center will have amenities to help meet the needs of anyone staying there, including bathrooms, showers, laundry, and food, as well as mental health, treatment, and employment services.

“You can also meet with your case manager, get behavior health services, look for a job, get rehousing services, a place for your dog,” Jaynes added. “It’s really everything you need, not only for your day-to-day life, but to hopefully end your homelessness.”

While the center is a costly offering, the city explained that it is ultimately less expensive than allowing the homelessness crisis to go unmitigated.

The land was purchased for $22 million and will cost an estimated $42 million to construct the center. According to ABC10 News it will be mostly funded by the American Rescue Plan Act.

While the center will have the capacity to host 225 beds in Safe Stay cabins, 50-person capacity in Safe Parking, and 75-person capacity for emergency/weather respite beds, it will serve countless others outside of the 350 total people it can house at any given time.

According to a press release from the county, “conservative estimates” have found that over the course of 15 years, the center will serve 18,000 people.

In 2017, the city found that the average cost for an “unsheltered individual” was about $45,000 a year, considering public systems like county jail, shelters, behavioral health, and more.

With the projected impact of the shelter, that cost lowers to less than $3,600 per person.

“If you break down the funding, it’s actually not that expensive,” Rich Desmond, county supervisor for District 3, told ABC10.

“It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than letting someone stay out in the community, unsheltered where they are extremely expensive in terms of the emergency response from fire, our emergency rooms, our law enforcement response.”

Providing what the county calls “wraparound services” not only brings down costs but truly helps people meet their basic needs.

“The really great thing about this site in particular, that we don't have at any other shelters, is the sheer size and the ability to really wrap everything people need,” Emily Halcon, director of the Department of Homeless Services and Housing with Sacramento County, told ABC10. 

One notable feature is the center’s Safe Parking spaces, which are the first of their kind in the city. People living in their cars will now have a safe place to park, monitored by security.

“We know a lot of people who are unsheltered actually are living out of their cars,” Desmond said, “maybe a family that’s barely hanging on but they still need that vital transportation to get their kids to school or get to work.”

This support is especially helpful for those who are newly homeless, Halcon added, building on the amenities provided in the county’s two other “safe stay” facilities. 

While Sacramento County just broke ground on the Watt Service Center, officials say they hope to begin moving people into the facility in January 2026.

“Our staff is putting in extra time and attention to this campus, ensuring that it houses everything we need to end homelessness for people,” Desmond said in a statement.

Once it’s up and running, Jaynes told KCRA3, they plan to onboard formerly unhoused community members as part of the staff at the facility.

“When you have a conversation with someone who understands where you’ve been, and you see the success they’re having now,” Jaynes said, “it really does give you hope something could be different.”

-via GoodGoodGood, January 24, 2025

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on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

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We’re doomed oh I mean good morning. I guess

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When I was trying to write my tags on the last post, I attempted to copy-paste my special tag-friendly comma (‚) and it. It pasted an image of a spiral staircase? This wasn't on my clipboard. I've never seen this staircase before. What the fuck?

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Hey guys, did you know that Trump/Musk/et al have had a really bad day in the legal department?

All your hellraising (especially with my suggested targeting of state AGs, especially Democratic AGs) is working! Keep it up! There will be many bad news days to come, but remember: pushing back is always worth it and it is already working.

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i should wake up and automatically be restored to full health, that's how sleeping should work, what is this horseshit

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why would you do this to me

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What it says on the tin, plus some simple explanations of who has the power to do what.

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This from In Writing, a collection of writers reflecting on practice, really resonated with me.

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hey, I was just at "things got better" island and everyone there is talking about how excited they are to meet you

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today it rained for the first time in ages and ive got my window tilted to let in the cool air and i just heard a woman's voice say "hey i found another puddle!" followed by a little child's happy shriek followed by a big splash sound i absolutely love being alive i hope that kid has so much fun bc i am already thriving just listening to it all

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Justine Kurland's Girl Pictures

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Everyone do yourselves a favor and click on this link to have a transformative media-based experience