Did you know Oakland actually has an official “Strategic Action Plan” for homelessness? Yes, from the swamp of the City Council has emerged, like a lizard crawling out of the muck, the SAP, which “focuses on preserving affordable housing, preventing homelessness, and ensuring community stability through strategic initiatives and funding allocations.”
It’s reassuring, isn’t it, to know that our Solomon-esque civic leaders have created this 35-page manual that points the way to a Shining City on a Hill where every resident will have the dignity of shelter, and the security of knowing they’ll always have a place to live, even if they skip the rent.
The SAP is based financially on Measure U, the $850 million bond voters overwhelmingly approved to produce nearly 11,000 “affordable units” of housing, stretching from the Berkeley border down to the San Leandro line. Oakland’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) was put in charge of overseeing the spending and development. HCD explained that “racial disparities in housing access, affordability and stability persist in Oakland, driven by histories of racialized exclusion and segregation,” and that therefore they were following the Department of Race and Equity’s process, which makes “equity” the centerpiece of new construction policies. Thus, “race and equity” became the driving force of nearly $1 billion in new funding for housing, to be made available to “Oaklanders most impacted by racial disparities”—and you know who they are. The audacious goal: “to eliminate homelessness by 2026.”
Well, here we are, nearly half-way through 2026, and what do we see? Progress never even started, and now has stalled. Homelessness is growing by 1,000 persons a year in Oakland, as I reported yesterday. The 35-page SAP report is replete with charts, graphs, and statistics; you can almost see, in your mind’s eye, armies of bureaucrats in green eyeshades drafting it, helped by legions of hired consultants, hosting community-feedback sessions held in multiple languages, holding out their hands for “funding partners,” with all “decisions & processes” based in “equity goals and priorities.”
Feeding time for the nonprofits! Line forms on the left. We are here to “fund as many areas as possible” because, after all, $850 million is a lot of cash, and we have to spend it so we can get even more!
Let’s face it, Oakland has had umpteen City Council meetings on homelessness over many years, produced libraries of reports that are irrelevant as soon as they’re published, assigned scores of bureaucrats to work on the problem, and spent hundreds of millions of dollars, all of it wasted. And then our Great Leaders, seeing the utter failure of their policies, demand still more money for more studies, more employees, more consultants to figure out why their previous actions—which they promised would end homelessness—instead proved worthless. Their explanation is inevitably, “Well, we haven’t spent enough. Give us more!” This is a cycle of failure that would not be tolerated in any privately-held firm. And yet Oakland’s model of governance depends on continuing it. It’s a daisy chain of malfeasance, self-promotion, dirty deals, mutual back-scratching and lies. Looking just a few years ahead, at this rate there will be no middle class in Oakland, just thousands of homeless parasites serviced by thousands of faceless bureaucrats, and, at the top of the heap, Tweedledum and Tweedledee electeds hand-picked by the Communists at SEIU. If only George Orwell were here to tell the story.
Steve Heimoff