It would be very easy to solve the encampment problem in Oakland: simply arrest anyone who attempts to illegally squat, and keep re-arresting them until they realize Oakland is no longer going to permit them to break the law.
I was in favor of Ken Houston’s Encampment Abatement Policy in its original form. I still favor it, even though several councilmembers, including Zac Unger who generally has common sense, watered it down. But can we please view this from the perspective of the last ten years? For every step forward Oakland takes in clearing encampments, we take two steps backwards because everybody seems to believe his or her opinion is the only one that’s right, and more: that homeless people have some sort of God-given right to squat in The Town. As a result, we never achieve consensus, and every time there’s an argument (over, say, whether homeless people can have pets in tiny cabins), the can is kicked down the road, and another bureaucracy is created: the Oakland Commission on Dogs in Temporary Shelters, which will require, of course, hiring 17 new $300/hour consultants. (Confession: I made that up, but it’s close to the truth.) As the percentage of Oakland employees working on homelessness grows and grows, the Homelessness-Socialist-Criminal Complex becomes an integral, ongoing part of governance in Oakland, delivering nothing to taxpayers but hitting them hard in the wallet.
All this just ends up sending encouraging signals to the pro-homeless crowd, whose life’s work is to keep homeless people in Oakland. You know how little kids manipulate the situation when they see that mom and dad disagree over some issue concerning parenting? They exploit it, playing mom against dad and vice versa, until the little kid has lost all respect for authority and the parents don’t know what to do. Well, that’s exactly how it is in Oakland. These squatters, addicts and bippers know that Carroll Fife will always protect them. They know they can always depend on getting 15 or 20 homeless people to turn up at City Council meetings and play on the sympathies of council members. They know they have the support of the local media. They know that Barbara Lee understands how to stall, postpone and obfuscate—something a Congressperson learns after 30 years in office. Lee has no intention of solving homelessness in Oakland. The best she can do is form new commissions, create more flow charts, and devise new ways to raise taxes to give to her slushy friends at SEIU. And, lest we forget, now she’s demanding that the City Council give her far more power than any previous Oakland mayor has had. Of course, even when and if we do pass her “strong mayor” nonsense, what will Lee say a year from now when homelessness is still raging? “Don’t blame me,” she’ll kvetch, “blame the City Council for not giving me the funds to end homelessness.” And we’ll be back precisely where we were in 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023, 2025.
Why do I pick so much on Carroll Fife? Because she’s the worst of the worst. I’ll give you an example: When Fife opposed Houston’s new encampment policy, she announced, “I can’t support legislation that’s going to perpetuate racist policies that impact my people more than anybody.” Let’s take a closer look. What is “racist” about enforcing laws against public camping, which is already a misdemeanor offense? Anything Fife doesn’t like is “racist,” when in fact her policies are the most racist of all.
The fact that enforcing the new abatement policy would affect mainly Black people is simply because a majority of homeless people in Oakland are Black. That doesn’t make it racist: it reflects the sad reality that, in the Black community, too many people are not interested in playing the game as most of us understand it. In fact, not enforcing the law is racist because it discriminates against the White and Asian people whose neighborhoods and parks are destroyed when homeless people invade. But Fife has never seen a law she could support, if it turned out that it was mostly Black people who were violating it. She loves “her people,” yes, but unfortunately she has chosen the disastrous course of seeing everything through the distorting lens of skin color, just as Hitler saw everything through the lens of Aryan anti-semitism. That kind of hatred can never succeed in a multi-ethnic, multi-racial society like Oakland. If Oakland were a normal city, we’d have 150,000 angry people marching on Carroll Fife’s house (does anyone know where she’s squatting these days?) and demanding she leave town immediately.
Carroll replies that, well, if Oakland would address the root causes of homelessness, she’d be a happy council member. But what are the root causes of homelessness? Happy to answer. In general they fall into two categories: lack of affordable housing, and what are known as “individual precipitants,” meaning things that interfere with the ability of individual Americans to rise out of poverty and join the contributing classes.
There are ways to overcome both of these root causes. The first is for Oakland to build enough affordable housing to cover, say, 5,500 people currently living on the streets or in their vehicles. Assuming a widely accepted figure of at least $500,000 to build a single unit of housing, that would come to $2,750,000,000. (In fact it would be a lot more because of Oakland’s high cost of development.) Oakland’s annual budget runs around $2.1 billion. That means that, to build one year’s worth of housing for the homeless, Oakland couldn’t spend a dime on anything else, and even then it wouldn’t have enough money.
The second way out of this is for predominantly Black people to earn enough money to be able to afford their own housing. But this is something the Black community has not been able to do on its own. Carroll Fife, Pamela Price, Nikki Bas and their kind argue that this is due to structural racism, but that is a lie and I believe everybody knows it. However, they can’t admit it’s a lie, because their entire political careers depend on that lie being accepted. So they have to double down on the lie, triple down on it, exaggerate it to insane proportions, until it seems like Oakland is really run by the Ku Klux Klan, rather than a bunch of whining politicos who just want free money and don’t think twice about taxing homeowners and business owners. That, my friends, is not a way to run a city. It’s a way to kill a city, and, along the way, to kill the critical thinking skills necessary for intelligent humans to actually run a functioning democracy.
Ken Houston knows these things, although he’s restricted on how forcefully he can say them because, after all, he still lives in Oakland. Zac Unger knows these things, too, but he restricts himself from saying them because he wants to get re-elected. There aren’t that many Black voters in his District One, but there are a lot of progressive White voters who feel sorry for Black people and therefore vote for progressive candidates. Never mind that these same progressive voters would be the first to call 9-1-1 if they saw a couple of young Black men roaming their neighborhood at night in the Hills. That’s a disconnect progressive voters are unable to resolve in their confused minds. It’s why they put up “Black Lives Matter” signs in their yards yet worry about property values if the house next door is sold to a Black family.
And so, going into a second decade of our homeless crisis in Oakland, the problem continues. The names and faces in the City Council change with each election, but the basic problem—yes, the “root cause” of Oakland’s dysfunction—remains. Oakland politicians can’t figure out whether they want a city that works, or one where they can virtue-signal until they feel good about themselves. Sadly, they can’t have both. If Oakland wants to get serious about being a decent place to live, let our leaders look to the red counties of inland, where the voters don’t tolerate the B.S. we put up with here in Oakland.
Steve Heimoff