Ken Houston is proving to be one of the more reasonable members of the Oakland City Council, which has long been dominated by leftist quacks. Houston’s effort to allow the city to quickly get rid of homeless encampments on sidewalks was, predictably, immediately opposed by Carroll Fife, the poster child for the pro-encampment group.
You might have thought that, after all these years, there were already laws in Oakland prohibiting encampments on sidewalks. Well, yes, and no. The city’s attitude toward encampments has always been one of malign neglect, due largely to the pro-encampment ideology of council members like Fife, Nikki Bas, Rebecca Kaplan and Sheng Thao. Although there’s language in the city’s official Encampment Management Policy enabling the city to order the removal of sidewalk encampments, that policy was dead on arrival: the council passed it only to appease public outcry against dirty, dangerous encampments, but its woke authors never intended it to be anything more than a Potemkin Village. It was never enforced, not even after the U.S. Supreme Court’s famous Grants Pass decision gave cities the legal ability to clear encampments.
Enter Houston, a moderate who represents District 7 (known as “deep East Oakland”), where the encampment problem is severe. Houston has shown a rare sensitivity to cleaning up encampments. Call him a pragmatic liberal: he’s progressive enough to get elected in Oakland, but at the same time his new proposal, which he calls the Encampment. Abatement Policy, “would place homeless camps that are on sidewalks in the ‘emergency’ category that makes them eligible for immediate closure without any advance notice,” according to Oaklandside. Houston has released remarkably few details of the policy, suggesting that it’s a work in progress.
Still, it’s a sane policy that should have been rigorously enacted years ago, but for the recalcitrance of Fife & Co. Anyone who walks around Oakland sees the blocks of filth and degradation lining our sidewalks and freeway underpasses. That we’re even still debating this in 2025 is insane. No city in its right mind would have tolerated these blights. But Oakland is not in its right mind. It was hijacked years ago by these extreme leftwing politicians who cared more about the “rights” of drug addicts and sociopaths than about the rights of law-abiding, tax-paying citizens. The result was entirely predictable: grungy tents, shopping carts and cardboard condos completely blocking pedestrian walkways, with toxic garbage spilling out all around.
Fife, needless to say, immediately opposed Houston. She couldn’t exactly come out and admit she’s in favor of sidewalk encampments. But she’s proven to be adroit at dissembling and kicking the can down the road, buying time for her homeless constituents to remain in situ, and hoping that future developments will drift in her favor and make it impossible for Oakland to finally clean up encampments. So far, her policy of block-and-postpone has worked, to the detriment of us all.
The City Council will next debate the Houston proposal on Sept. 30. Houston said he’d release a new report before then on the situation and provide more details on his proposed legislation. (He did not respond to my request for more information.) I encourage Houston to follow through on this sensible move. If he can out-maneuver the wily Fife on this, Ken Houston will have a bright future in Oakland politics.
Steve Heimoff