No wonder average people have tuned out of the politics around homelessness. As a topic, it’s boring. The vocabulary alone requires a Ph.D in homeless-ology, with each term hauling complications and implications that the public can barely fathom—and shouldn’t be expected to.
Homeless shelters. Shelter beds. Temporary housing beds. Transitional housing beds. Specialized care beds. Treatment beds. Permanent supportive housing. COVID-era beds. Carceral beds. Sober beds. Higher-acuity beds. Housing First. What does it all mean? The terminology is as complex as anything in demonology. It’s fine if you’re a paid homelessness professional, like Mayor Lurie’s new chief of homelessness, Mike Levine. You spend all day in meetings with other professionals defining these terms and comprehending their intricacies.
But most of us are just trying to live our lives. We don’t have the time or interest to get into the tall weeds of homelessness jargon. We understand the difference between “shelter” and “encampment.” All we’re asking is for our electeds to manage the problems associated with homelessness. Instead, they create a vast new academic field of intellectual concepts that purport to solve the problems but in reality make everything so complicated and debatable that it actually prevents solutions from being implemented.
And while the experts debate the finer distinctions between sober and non-sober transitional housing beds, the number of homeless people increases, and with them, the ugly urban blight that comes in their wake.
Honestly, things are a lot simpler than city bureaucrats admit. We know that the situation under the freeway on Grand Avenue at Splashpad Park is completely unacceptable. We know that blight attracts blight like iron filings to a magnet, or roaches to garbage, and that every day we waste trying to figure out “the right model” is just another day for the blight to metastasize. What is our leaders’ response? Call another meeting, hire another consultant, invent new quack terminology, write more reports, compile more statistics. Rearrange the chairs on the Titanic. Deny, obfuscate, guilt trip the public, kick the can down the road for some future politician to clean up, demand more taxpayers dollars to pay for the stalling, and pretend that they’re seriously working on solutions when in fact they’re doing what bureaucrats have always done: nothing, except draw their salaries and benefits while the rest of us go hell. It’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
We don’t need no more damned studies. We’re in, what, the tenth year of this encampment mess in Oakland, and all the City Council has ever done is studies. We have statistics up the yin-yang. We don’t care about “x” number of blah-blah beds with another “y” number envisioned in the next two years. All we care about is finally cleaning up Oakland. When an encampment defender like Lukas Illa, of the Coalition on Homelessness, whines, “Where are they [homeless people] going to go? If the answer is jail, then say that.” Okay, I’m saying it. Yes, jail. They’ll get longterm supportive housing (food, medical care, heat, a toilet) and we’ll get our city back. A good deal!
Steve Heimoff