Who can forget the grotesque Wood Street homeless encampment, the biggest in the city, a mile-long heap of garbage and crime that took an entire city’s outrage before the incompetent government of Oakland was compelled to clean it up.
Well, we now have another Wood Street in embryonic form, and it’s just one block from where I live! It’s on the spacious lawn of the Oakland Senior Center and V.A. building, on the highly visible corner of Grand Avenue and Harrison Street. For many years, this lawn has been the prize in a tug-of-war between the neighborhood, which naturally wants to protect the area, and the opportunistic homeless bums, who keep returning to it every time they’re rousted by the city. And things are quickly getting worse: overnight—between Wednesday and Thursday afternoon—the number of tents doubled, to eleven at last count. And let me tell you how it works in Oakland: as soon as the word gets out that Oakland is permitting encampments there, more and more transients will arrive, and pretty soon we’ll have Wood Street redux.
We have to prevent that.
I’ve called 3-1-1 multiple times but that process doesn’t work. I’ve let Carroll Fife’s office know; it’s in her District 3. But Carroll Fife doesn’t care. The middle class folks whom she purportedly represents, who pay our taxes and want to live in a clean, safe neighborhood, aren’t Fife’s concern. Instead, she’s focused on the “rights” of our “unsheltered sisters and brothers,” most of whom are Black, and who in her opinion are the most underserved demographic in Oakland. Fife is a “communist” in the sense that she wishes to tax working people to the max and then transfer the money to these parasites, who refuse to play by the normal rules of society. Why hold down a job and pay rent when you can throw up a sloppy tent, plug an extension cord into a city-owned electric outlet, and live on a grassy knoll, right next to a charming creek? In real estate lingo, it’s location, location, location—and that lawn is a prime location for a dirty tent.
This situation has been going on for decades. I started alerting the city to it twenty years ago. Every year or two, the tents disappear for a day or so—why, I don’t know—but then they rebud, like mold, and now, as I say, they’re proliferating at a pace I’ve never seen in my forty years here. And if we’ve learned anything, it’s that these encampments, like an infestation of fleas or cockroaches, will grow and grow until we have—well, another Wood Street, only this time, not confined to an obscure edge of town, but right in the heart of Oakland—an intersection that holds the key to Downtown-Uptown’s success or failure.
In any normal city—San Francisco, San Jose, Fremont, Concord—city authorities wouldn’t tolerate this erosion. It would be cleaned up overnight. But this is Oakland, where the homeless right to squat on someone else’s property is considered holy by “progressives” like Fife. That shouldn’t be surprising: after all, Fife started her political career by invading somebody else’s house and refusing to leave. That in itself should have disqualified her from holding office, but in our backwards, addled city, the woke voters decided they rather liked and admired a bad-ass Black woman, and have now elected her twice to her high office. I hope they’re happy to live in the most dangerous, highly-taxed city in California. Next time some moron who voted for Fife gets mugged, the police should refuse to investigate. It would be poetic justice.
Here are Fife’s telephone number and email: 510-238-7003 and district3@oaklandca.gov. I don’t imagine that any number of complaints will force her to clean up the lawn, because that’s not who Fife is: responsive to her constituents. She is an angry, vengeful radical who fancies herself a warrior for Black equality, and if you don’t like it, you can move someplace else. As long as Fife is in office, the homeless—with their garbage, criminal behavior and disdain for an orderly society—will have official protection, while the rest of us can go to hell as our city descends further into the pit.
You know what would be incredible? If we brought enough pressure on Fife to actually do something in this case. But I don’t think there’s enough pressure to force her to do anything. She’s a fanatic like Trump and his White nationalist cult, people who think they were sent here (by God? Satan?) to do whatever it takes, “by any means necessary,” to lift up Blacks. It may be hard for Fife to understand that she’s as much of a threat to our democracy as the faux-Christian Magas who want to turn America into the Taliban, but she is.
The evil and stupidity of the far left are just as bad as the evil and stupidity of the far right. Both of those insane cults should be banned from our society. But that won’t happen because America is too chicken shit to do anything about it. I may be crazy, but I think that most Oaklanders know that Carroll Fife is bad news. Most of her City Council colleagues don’t like or trust her, but they’re afraid to upset the BIPOC fringe and SEIU thugs that promote and protect Fife. We need to let our council members know that it’s okay to denounce Fife. In fact, it’s a requirement for staying in office.
Have a great weekend! Be safe. Be loving.
Steve Heimoff