For the last few years I’ve admired Matt Mahan and San Jose for their (relatively) tough stance on homeless encampments. I say “relatively” because at least they tried to clear the camps, even if they haven’t been fully successful. Meanwhile, Oakland didn’t do squat regarding our camps, because our compassionate woke politicians feel sorry for the addicts and thieves.
Of course, every once in a while, our City Council and Mayor are compelled to performatively clear out an encampment due to public pressure and/or lawsuits. Horror stories like Wood Street, a hell from Dante’s Inferno, sometimes are removed. But Oakland was never serious about “inconveniencing” homeless people. No, it was the decent citizens of our fair city that had to be inconvenienced, because Oakland government treated the homeless as a favored and desirable constituent.
San Jose, on the other hand, got serious about eliminating camps. As the denizens of the camps there felt the heat, many moved to Oakland, where they knew the City would not bother them. They came to places like Lake Merritt, which remains as bad as ever even though it’s supposedly Oakland’s “jewel.”
The worst of San Jose’s encampments was “The Jungle,” in the Coyote Meadow area near Story Road. It rivaled Wood Street in squalor and extent. The city first tried to clear The Jungle thirteen years ago, but to no avail: the squatters brazenly moved right back, as they usually do given their correct surmisal that the city wasn’t serious about eliminating them permanently.
Today The Jungle (I hate capitalizing the words because it makes it sound like something geographically legitimate) still contains 100 people. But Mahan and his city have now given them a deadline to get out: April 15. Oakland has done similar things, on paper: occasionally the city will post notices warning homeless people to vacate a certain park or street corner. But the homeless people seldom heed these warnings, and even if they do, they return when they feel the heat has lifted. And the city never, ever does anything about it.
This time, though Mahan—who’s running for Governor—seems determined to do something different. “Once the city completes the clearing, which is expected to take 30-60 days, it will create a no-encampment zone,” says the Press-Democrat. That sounds like a promise to the citizens of San Jose, but is it really? We’ve heard these words before, and nothing ever changes. At the last minute, homeless advocates—those benighted defenders of the indefensible—file lawsuits challenging camp closures, and depend on their liberal friends in the media to portray their cause sympathetically. Their argument is usually something like the remark attributed, in the Press-Democrat, to a homeless advocate named Shaunn Cartwright, who said “she believed the changes the city has outlined are still flawed, noting the city needs an easier way for residents to retrieve their belongings, and continue to demonstrate a lack of due process.”
Well, I suspect Shaunn and her friends will always find the process “flawed” because they don’t want homeless people to ever be restricted, no matter how dirty, dangerous and polluting their camps are. As for the matter of “belongings,” can we all agree that’s ridiculous? It’s not like homeless squatters have pianos or china cabinets or collectibles or closets of suits and shoes. City officials generally are understanding about this matter of “belongings,” giving homeless people a reasonable period of time to retrieve their stuff. But let’s get real: they’re not going to get weeks or months (which is something Shaunn seems to demand), and only an insane person would claim that the festering piles of rotting garbage piled outside and inside their tents could be called “belongings.” Trash is what it is, and the city should have the right to haul trash that has been dumped on public property to where it belongs: the dump.
As for “due process,” the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which is what these due process claims are based on, says that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This is pretty generalized language. It clearly doesn’t mean that the State (or city, or county) doesn’t have the right to create regulations governing the peace, safety and security of the local community. I doubt that the Founding Fathers ever anticipated so extreme an aberration as our homeless encampments; had they foreseen it, they would have outlawed them, but they had no way of knowing that American government (at least some of it) would veer so far into insanity that these festering eyesores not only would thrive, but be protected by irresponsible politicians.
The trash homeless people accumulate is not, properly speaking, “belongings.” Two days at most should be enough for them to pack it up and leave the rest of their junk to be disposed of. The Constitution does not protect the right of homeless people to plop down anywhere they want and live in filth they then impose on the rest of us.
Matt Mahan knows this. Yet he’s not only Mayor of San Jose, he’s trying to lead California. How the politics of that will play out in his head, and in his actions, between now and the primaries can only be imagined. My two cents: If he’s serious about getting elected, he’ll be as tough on encampments as possible, and when the “homeless advocates” bash him, he’ll tell them where to go.
Steve Heimoff