Despite billions of dollars invested in California cities to combat homelessness, with billions more to come, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and other urban areas continue to see rising numbers of homeless people and tent encampments.
Interventions—such as they are—have been largely cosmetic. We hear about tiny houses, or Project Homekey, or sanctioned RV camps and a host of other innovative projects, but if we’re being honest, they haven’t made a dent in the homeless numbers. What’s worse, the future of these interventions is unclear; it’s obvious that current levels of funding (massive) cannot be sustained, especially if there’s an economic downturn, which is just a matter of time.
All of which raises the question nobody wants to ask: What if there’s no solution to homelessness?
It’s profoundly against the grain of American can-do optimism to think that problems can’t be solved. From the very beginnings of our country, American exceptionalism—that rah-rah belief system that we’re different from all other countries, a “shining city on a hill”—has included optimism as a core value. Ronald Reagan, who never saw a patriotic cliché he couldn’t use, gave it typical expression: “We believe deep down inside that working together we can make each new year better than the old.”
Homelessness in Oakland really started to become a major problem back around the time when Libby Schaaf became Mayor for the first time, in 2015. Schaaf has made smiley-faced optimism her personal brand; when she told “our unhoused sisters and brothers” that Oakland loved them, and that they were welcome here, she was merely conveying the liberal values she absorbed from her political mentor, Jerry Brown. Schaaf had no “plan,” per se, for dealing with homeless people. Instead, she believed that “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice,” and that all would be well, because Oaklanders are a loving, compassionate people.
Of course, it didn’t work out that way, and we’re now having to deal with the disastrous consequences of Schaaf’s feckless optimism. Oakland has spent years and untold amounts of money trying to tackle homelessness. Smart people have invested countless hours devising strategies; the City Council has had endless meetings on the subject; creative ideas are not in short supply.
But solutions are. The tents keep proliferating. Where one day there was a nice patch of green grass, the next day there’s an encampment. The situation has become endemic: indeed, it’s been around for so long that a six-year old child raised in, say, the Oakland flatlands has never seen her neighborhood without encampments.
So I will point out the elephant in the room: What if the problem of homelessness has no solution? We can’t build enough housing to begin to solve it—you may not like this fact, you may storm and rage against it, but it’s reality and will remain so. We can’t buy enough old motels or dormitories. We have thousands upon thousands of homeless people and their numbers rise every day. Nothing that our best minds are devising seems to be working.
This isn’t to say we should just give up and stop trying. The problem is, Oakland politicians and bureaucrats consistently take a short-term view: Can we house a few dozen more people today? when what they need to be doing is looking years down the road and asking, “If the problem really is unsolvable, then how can we manage encampments so they’re not a burden on the majority population?” Sadly, no responsible person in our city seems to be asking that question. In this way, so-called homeless advocates are similar to climate-change deniers: they refuse to admit that there’s a longterm threat looming over us all.
Steve Heimoff