After the slowest start of any Oakland mayor in memory, Lee just announced she will create “lasting solutions” that will ensure “everyone has a safe, clean place to call home.”
Wait a minute. Isn’t that what Quan said? And Schaaf? And Thao? They announced big plans too. Yes, that’s what the last three mayors promised us—and each of them lied. Well, maybe “lied” is too strong. Let’s just say none of them came remotely close to fulfilling their promise. So why should we B.LEEve Barbara Lee this time?
Because of money. Oakland is about to receive—in theory—a couple hundred million dollars from Measure W, the 2020 county initiative that raised sales taxes. While Lee’s optimism is nice, there remain plenty of unknowns. Exactly how much will Oakland get for its share of the Measure W money? How will that money be spent? Will Lee and City Manager Jestin Johnson create vast new bureaucracies (with DEI hiring practices) to manage the new spending? (That’s what the city usually does.) Will there be long-term followup studies to make sure the money was well-spent? Since nothing the city has done over the past ten years has made the remotest dent in homelessness, will they devise an entirely new plan, or simply repeat their mistakes on a grander level? Even David Haubert, president of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, admitted during a discussion on Measure W that he was worried about the effectiveness of any plan the Board comes up with. “I’m ready to throw out everything we’ve done before, especially if it doesn’t work,” he said. “We’re never going to fix this the way we’re going. I think we’re going to have to break the mold a little bit.”
I would amend his statement: We’re going to have to break the mold a lot. What has Oakland done about homelessness? Pathetically nothing. They’ve wasted huge amounts of money creating new departments, but these new employees just suck up taxpayer dollars, fill out forms, and do nothing. Our so-called leaders have made homelessness the number one talking point in their rhetoric, even as they’ve tried to defund the police—but rhetoric doesn’t mean a damned thing. They’ve built tiny houses and bought old motels that they converted to housing, with little effect. They’ve created programs that, on paper, purport to train homeless people to live on their own, but there’s no evidence any of it has worked. What they’re not doing this time around is explaining how increasing the budget of failed programs by 200% or 500% will result in anything other than bigger failed programs.
It scares the bejesus out of me that the Supervisor considered the expert on homelessness is Nikki Fortunato Bas. She’s become the face of Measure W funding. She’s by Lee’s side in photo ops promoting Measure W and quoted in all the news coverage. But the truth is, Bas’s resumé in dealing with homelessness is one of abject and cynical failure. If she, or Lee, or anyone has an actual plan that sounds reasonable, we haven’t heard it. I have a feeling Supervisor Haubert is going to discover that his prophecy--“We’re never going to fix this the way we’re going”—becomes reality.
The truth is, there is no solution to homelessness without a radical upheaval of the psychic condition of homeless people themselves. This is a population that by and large rejected the socialization process by which humans become fit to participate in society. They didn’t want to conform and thought they were clever enough to outsmart life. Sadly, they found out that the socialization process can’t be outwitted: people either play by the rules, or they fail. It’s going to take generations to repair the mental damage that doomed so many people to such drastic ends. It’s going to have to start with a complete change from the mindset of entitlement and rejection of societal norms constantly pushed by progressives. But—and this is a huge but—as long as progressives remain in charge of Oakland, that change will never happen. Nikki Bas isn’t going to suddenly get religion and tell her people to grow up and stop whining. No, she’ll continue to demand that the world owes her homeless constituents a home and a living. You could throw $1 billion, $1 trillion, or $1 gazillion at homelessness, and it would only metastasize again and again, because money isn’t the problem. The problem is people who think they’re too good to have to obey age-old rules of human propriety.
Steve Heimoff