KTVU News aired a feature last night on Caltrans’ clearance of the Wood Street homeless slum. Naturally, they interviewed homeless people who have been evicted. There was one woman in particular who grabbed my heart. She was Black, middle-aged but looked old, with the worry lines of care etched into her face, and as she told her story of no place to go, her eyes filled with tears.
No one has been harder than I on the need to clean up Wood Street, but honestly, that poor woman brought home in stark relief the human element of the situation. As I watched, I wondered all sorts of things. Where would the woman go, what would she do, how did she get into that situation in the first place? And I thought, also, of Carroll Fife, whose determination to help people like the woman has driven her political career. As much as I object to Fife’s anti-police attitude—and I do, vehemently—I can’t help but admire her determination to help the lowest of the low, society’s outcasts.
So what is the answer? I sincerely hope the woman gets some sort of help from somewhere. At least, she should have a roof over her head, and food to eat, and a place to go to the bathroom. At the same time, I realize that there are so many homeless people in Oakland that there’s simply not enough money to provide all of them with shelter. One can argue that, with an annual budget of something like $1.7 billion, Oakland can afford to help 4,000 homeless people. But such an argument is false. That’s a lot of money, but Oakland has big expenses. Others argue that the police department budget can be slashed, but I think that majority opinion on that, today, is very different from what it was two years ago. Crime is on everybody’s mind, and the public has justifiably concluded that we need cops.
So at some point the intellectual deliberations come to gridlock. We want to do something to help the woman and others like her. But what? The woman’s story is heartbreaking and tragic. But what can be done about it? I suppose we have to depend on the largesse of the State, which has given Oakland a lot of money. We have to depend also on philanthropic and religious help, but there’s never enough of either. We can’t spend our way out of this. We can’t legislate our way out of this. We can’t compel landlords to lower their rents to 1970s levels. We can’t force developers to build affordable housing. The situation truly has reached stalemate.
I find myself dejected by this conclusion. I’m forced to conclude that this current spate of homelessness is, like COVID, a temporary sickness in our society. It will resolve itself—how, I don’t know. Sometimes, when you’re ill, you just have to wait it out, until the fever breaks and you’re feeling better. As Queen Elizabeth used to say, “Often, the best thing to do is…nothing.”
Steve Heimoff