The rubber is meeting the road in San Francisco, where the raw edges of both sides of the encampment crisis are about to collide. The ACLU and pro-homeless groups just sued San Francisco for clearing camps, claiming the move violates the civil rights of the homeless. At the same time, the city—and residents fed up with unsightly, dangerous tent camps—has been actively clearing some camps, and has not indicated it’s prepared to stop.
Crunch time.
We’re familiar with the outlines of this epic battle in Oakland. On one side, campers and their advocates, who say that Oakland is “criminalizing poverty” whenever it moves to remove a camp or individual tent. On the other hand are city officials who, responsive to constituent complaints, take whatever tentative steps they can to roust tenters. There seems to be no middle ground, no point at which the two sides are prepared to negotiate. As usual with these starkly binary choices, tempers flare, both sides go to the mattresses, and the only winners are the lawyers, who are kept busy.
The Coalition wishes for all encampments in Oakland to be cleared, and for campers to be prevented from simply moving across the street. A good example is Wood Street. We’re glad that a Federal judge has—against his will—agreed to let Caltrans clear their property. At the same time, everyone knows that the evicted campers are simply moving (sometimes just across the street) to city-owned land, which is not covered in Judge Orrick’s decision.
We’re not happy with this game of whack-a-mole. The homeless campers aren’t happy with it. (The Chronicle cites the story of one homeless man who said SFPD cops made him move “five times a week.”) No one is happy with this charade. But we do have a solution, one we’ve made many times, and that is to dedicate a large area of unused land, somewhere in the city limits, construct a tent city, and compel all homeless people who wish to remain in their tents to relocate there, or else be forced to leave Oakland.
We floated this idea well before City Council member Carroll Fife advanced her own proposal to move 1,000 homeless people to the old Army Base in West Oakland.
The idea makes perfect sense. All services could be centralized and improved upon from the current scattershot approach. Residents would finally have a secure place to dwell, where they would have the comfort of knowing they won’t be rousted. The City would provide for security, since campers routinely worry about the theft of their property. Additional services—medical, psychological, drug treatment, recreational, even educational—could be included, helping campers make the transition from their present hopeless state to one of possible re-entry into functioning society.
It baffles me that Oakland and other cities have not already taken this approach, which is entirely consistent with the determinations of the Martin v. Boise lawsuit. I suppose that San Francisco is more hard-pressed to come up with enough acreage to do something similar, but from my knowledge of the city, there are industrial areas where such relocation camps could be established. Frankly, there’s no other solution. If you can think of one, let me know! Because if we can’t do something like this, then we’re stuck with encampments for the foreseeable future—and so are their unlucky inhabitants.
Steve Heimoff