I’m neither surprised nor bothered to hear that Oakland has such a high eviction rate for non-payment of rent. The fact is, Oakland has a lot of people who think they don’t have to pay for stuff they want because it should be free. And in this, our crypto-communist government has encouraged them.
It bothered me a lot a few years ago when Oakland took advantage of the pandemic to arbitrarily impose a moratorium on rent-paying, which nearly broke many small landlords. And then Oakland officials extended that moratorium for years, even after the pandemic ended, because they love renters, they resent landlords, and they positively worship people who don’t pay their rent because they vote reflexively for progressives.
But now, in this new post-woke era, we’re back to enforcing the law, and that includes evicting renters who refuse to pay. You may feel sorry for them, but I’m sorry, no one has the right not to pay their rent.
The thing is, whenever Oakland gets soft on bad behavior, we see an increase in it. Miscreants from other towns figure they may not be allowed to get away with something awful in Concord or Fremont, but in Oakland, they can. So they come here, just as all the homeless did after the clueless Libby Schaaf invited them to, at the beginning of the encampment crisis. With pro-crime politicians such as Schaaf, Thao, Pamela Price, Carroll Fife and Nikki Bas writing the rules, the bad guys knew that Oakland would do little or nothing to stop them. That is why Oakland has become a nest of vipers. Violent crime may be down, but the nuisance factor of so many irresponsible sociopaths amongst us continues to make Oakland unpleasant. And—rest assured—this respite from crime is only temporary. I don’t say that with gladness, but with regret. It’s only a matter of time before the underclass once again launches their war on civilization.
We could fix that if we figured out a way to drive the sociopaths out of town or arrest them all, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do either. It might have happened naturally in the 2000s and 2010s when rents were soaring and a lot of disreputable people had to leave. But the progressives stopped that. Their aim has always been to cause rents to crash (as I’ve pointed out here repeatedly), and to the extent they’ve been successful, the sociopaths have managed to stay. This is why, to woke progressives, the dirtiest word is “gentrification” (or maybe the second-dirtiest word, after cop). To the Cat Brookses, Carroll Fifes and Nikki Bases, anything that makes Oakland cleaner, more attractive, safer and wealthier is gentrification. Anything that makes the city dirtier, poorer and more dangerous is “equity.” It’s not hard to fight gentrification: all you have to do is have policies and leaders who undermine the police, kill local businesses, empower sociopaths, and drive the middle class out of town.
This is what progressives have wrought in Oakland; this is why we fight them. Their insane policies result in a city filled with encampments, overturned garbage bins, bipped automobiles, gun-toting thugs, zombies wandering the streets, and corpses, not to mention the Sword of Damocles of bankruptcy hovering over our heads. Such a city is, per their plan, affordable for their constituents. It’s also unlivable.
And why do I say I’m not bothered by evictions? Because if someone can’t pay their rent, they shouldn’t be living there. They need to make alternative plans for a roof and four walls. They may well have to relocate out of the Bay Area. It’s not the landlord’s responsibility, or the taxpayers’, to provide anyone with free lodging. Sooner or later America is going to have to rediscover the virtues of personal responsibility. It’s the only sane code of conduct the human race has ever devised, and we can’t let the woke left destroy it, as they wish to do.
Steve Heimoff