I am so impressed by Ken Houston. The District 7 City Councilmember is the only one, in my memory, who has the guts and integrity to speak the truth, which is that Oakland doesn’t want and shouldn’t have any encampments, anywhere anymore.
I was listening to KQED yesterday morning, when they had Barbara Lee on as guest, but I just couldn’t take her lies after ten minutes. I don’t like her voice anyway, but when she kept yammering on about her “plans” to reduce blight and homelessness, I just gave up. She doesn’t have a clue—can we all please admit it?—and it’s an insult to us intelligent people for her to insist she does.
We’ve been patient with do-nothing mayors for how long? Years and years and years. Patience is not a virtue in this case, it’s a sickness. We should have dealt with dirty encampments in Libby Schaaf’s first term, before they metastasized and spread everywhere. Now, they are everywhere. I was tempted to call in to KQED to ask Lee a simple question: Why doesn’t the city clean up every tent and ramshackle hut now that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision makes it legal to do so without the homeless not having to be offered alternative shelter? But I thought, what’s the point. Lee will just babble something incoherent. So I turned off the radio.
Then I heard Houston’s plan, which is working its way through the City Council and will be taken up again next Monday. He calls it the Encampment Abatement Policy. It would entirely replace the Encampment Management Policy of October, 2020, which as you all know the city has chosen to ignore even though they passed it unanimously. Houston prefaces his plan with the true statement that “The rapid growth of the unsheltered population has led to escalating threats to public safety, sanitation, and environmental health. These conditions have reached a crisis point…”. Grants Pass, that SCOTUS decision, gives Oakland the right to “adopt clear, enforceable rules governing use of public property.” The refusal of the city to do so is completely unacceptable.
The city has made piecemeal efforts now and then to get rid of encampments but, as I know personally, these campers either move a little bit away or else they sneak back to their original site overnight. They do so because they know the city isn’t serious about getting rid of them. Instead, we always elect a bunch of crybaby leftist showflakes who feel sorry for the homeless even though they’re basically a bunch of drug addicts/dealers and sociopaths. They claim that it’s our—the taxpayers’—duty to provide them with homes and all the amenities, even though we consistently reply that, No, it’s not. But being committed socialists, our political representatives insist they know better than we do what’s right and best, and that means keeping the homeless in our midst forever, regardless of what their own law or the U.S. Supreme Court says.
The text of Houston’s bill is very long and insightful. It presents a brilliant analysis of the steady ruin that these encampments cause to Oakland. Here’s a link to Houston’s actual resolution. It actually doesn’t go quite as far as I’d like in terms of stuff like the city’s perpetual “equity” demands (which should be struck down entirely), or in Houston’s kindness in giving homeless people who have been cited weeks or even months to comply before more severe action is taken. Lawbreakers—which homeless people are—will take advantage of the slightest loophole to extend their stay on our streets. But at the very least, Houston’s Encampment Abatement Policy represents a new, fresh start on finally ending the embarrassment and scourge of homeless encampments.
I’m not fooling myself in the slightest in thinking that the rest of the City Council and Barbara Lee in particular won’t attempt to wash it down and dilute its impact by saddling it with amendments that render it useless. But the fact that Houston got even this far is a sign of hope. Here’s his email. He’s going to get a lot of blowback from the fools who want the encampments to remain, so please write him a little note expressing your thanks and support.
Steve Heimoff