Sacramento restaurant owner says nearby homeless encampment is hurting business

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The owner of a south Sacramento restaurant says a homeless encampment near his property is hurting business, and he feels the city isn’t doing enough to solve the problem.

ABC10 reached out to the city of Sacramento for answers and spoke with an advocate for the unhoused community for additional perspective.

Inside South Sacramento’s Golden Corral, customers enjoy food and family. But outside the restaurant on a recent evening, a raucous fight happened in the parking lot.

“I’m calling the police!” the general manager’s voice calls out in a video she took of the fight.

“As she rounded the corner to go get her car, there was a full-blown brawl. They’re swinging on each other, they had bats,” said Golden Corral owner Mike Sacca, showing the video to ABC10. “I mean, this is a family restaurant.”

Sacca owns the restaurant and the land it sits on, along West Stockton Boulevard near Highway 99 and Cosumnes River Boulevard.

“We haven’t really regained back from COVID. And so in addition to that, now we have this homeless camp that has given us another challenge to keep the doors open,” he said.

This part of town is no stranger to encampments, Sacca said, but he calls the response to the camps a game of whack-a-mole.

“They do uproot them, and then they’ll be gone for awhile then they come back,” he said.

Over the course of the past year, he said an increasing number of tents have popped up in the field across from his restaurant, which he says is causing problems.

“I’ve definitely kicked a lot of them off my property for opening car doors and bothering the patrons,” Sacca said. “They’ll come up and yell and scream at people, they spray paint the building, they’ve broken windows — this is an ongoing daily thing for us.”

ABC10 found one review on Google that said, “Homeless are moving in front of the restaurant. Looks dirty.”

Another on Yelp said, “beware… across the street is a huge homeless camp and looks like (a) tent city.”

“We’ve got guests telling us that they’re not going to return because they see these homeless people,” he said. “They’re afraid to come in because of them.”

Sacca estimates he has spent more than $8,000 in recent years, cleaning up and repairing vandalism and messes from those living on the streets.

“They did break in the back one time. I had to repair the door. They broke into the boiler room, where the hot water heaters are and they somehow stayed in overnight there,” he said.

Sacca feels the city is giving him the run-around and not solving the problem.

“They’ll say, ‘Oh, well, that’s county.’ And then I’ll call county and they say, ‘Oh, well, that’s city.’ And so there’s a lot of buck-passing going on,” Sacca said. “We actually tried to contact 311, and we’ve talked to the police, the sheriff and trying to get somebody to help us out with this.”

Fed up with the lack of results, he reached out to ABC10.

“I just decided, I’ve got to say something to somebody to try to save my business,” Sacca said. “We supply jobs for over 50 families… The taxes that are generated from this facility is to the tune of the better part of $600,000 a year. So, if they’re OK with this closing down and allowing for that (encampment) to go on — I mean, I don’t think that that’s right…. They’ve got to put a stop to it, and it’s going to ruin a lot more businesses, as it has already.”

The city told ABC10 in a statement, in part, “The City is aware of Mr. Sacca’s concerns and communicated with him earlier this month to let him know that 311 is the best place to report an issue regarding an encampment.”

311 call data show more than 250 calls for service in the past four years at the Golden Corral and immediately surrounding properties, most classified as relating to homeless encampments. 19 of those calls came in April alone.

The city told ABC10 it is prioritizing the area in which Golden Corral is located.

The city’s Incident Management Team (IMT), launched last year, combines the Fire Department, Police Department, Department of Community Response and other agencies and departments to enable a more unified, streamlined approach to addressing homelessness.

The city tells ABC10 the IMT has spent extensive time in that whole neighborhood, and it remains a high priority.

“The IMT expects to again dispatch personnel to this area in the coming days to conduct outreach and compliance work,” the city told ABC10. “The City remains committed to helping people experiencing homelessness connect with available resources while ensuring compliance with laws and ordinances.”

Sacca wants to see more action.

“If the city is going to allow them to stay, they need to supply them with garbage cans and have a company go around and pick up their trash. They need to be held accountable for how they live,” he said.

Advocates for people experiencing homelessness say clearing, or ‘sweeping,’ an encampment can be traumatic for the people living there.

“While someone might want to see one encampment gone or another encampment gone, people are going to continue to exist in public space because they don’t have a viable alternative, and the sweeps really just serve to cause harm,” said Nikki Jones, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, as well as a member of the Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee.

Homelessness is the product of a broken system, she said.

“This is a policy failure on the part of city, county, state and federal government, and we need to put that blame where it belongs,” Jones said. “The people who are experiencing the acute crisis of homelessness are not the ones who have caused the systemic policy failure of homelessness.”

Until there are policies that make housing accessible to everyone, she said our cities and counties will continue to see encampments.

“I won’t say it’s just the public officials; it’s those pushing them to enact these types of policies and not truly protect housing,” Jones said. “Unless we get to the root solution — which is housing that is accessible and safe for every person, regardless of their income — we are not going to see a significant change in the homelessness crisis. We are going to attempt to criminalize it, push it around, push people around. But people will not disappear — nor should they — and we should be acting in a way with a human-centered response to this crisis.”

People can report an issue with an encampment by calling 311 or going to 311.cityofsacramento.org. The city also provides a data dashboard for the work of the IMT.

“The City is not a health and human services agency, nor is it the housing authority for our region. However, through its partnership, the City is working closely with the County of Sacramento, which has the ability and qualifications to provide behavioral health assessments and enroll or link people to an appropriate level of mental health and substance use services,” the city statement said. “In addition, the City is participating in Sacramento Steps Forward’s regional plan to strategically address homeless (‘All in Sacramento’), which includes plans for preventing people from becoming homelessness and well as expanding permanent supportive housing.”

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