Pro-homeless advocates claim they won because they forced the city to rescind the part of its new law that would criminally charge anyone caught “aiding and abetting” homeless people. Anti-encampment activists say they won because the rest of Fremont’s law outlawing encampments remains in effect. The City Council passed the law in February. Its two main components are:
- Prohibits camping on any public property, and restricts camping on private property not designated and equipped for such camping
- Prohibits the storing of personal property on any public property
Pro-encampment activists predictably sued the city, as they always do whenever anyone tries to limit encampments. The case was settled when the city agreed to drop the “aiding and abetting” clause, which would have fined do-gooders up to $1,000 for actions such as providing homeless people with water, food or blankets.
It actually sounds like a pretty good compromise to me, except for one problem. The entire new law—including the two prohibitions--is on indefinite hold. “The measure is still on the books,” noted a lawyer for the homeless people, “but it’s not being enforced.”
The lawsuit, you see, freaked out city officials. Instead of enforcing their own law, Fremont decided to pretend it doesn’t exist. In this, they’re similar to the cowards on the Oakland City Council, who passed their own Encampment Management Policy five years ago and then totally ignored it, allowing encampments to proliferate. A Fremont city spokesperson, Geneva Bosque, said on Friday that the city hasn’t issued any citations or made any arrests “under the authority of the camping ordinance” since the council adopted the ban seven months ago.
So once again we have a Bay Area city initially doing the right thing by outlawing encampments, but then knuckling under to noisy pro-encampment radicals and their lawyers who threaten it with lawsuit after lawsuit.
I find the news coverage of this story, as well as most others about encampments, illustrative of the media’s pro-homeless bias. Most reporters on local beats are young. They tell themselves, and us, that homeless people are just misunderstood poor folks who should be allowed to set up tents wherever they want. (“Why not? They’re not hurting anyone.”) Then they go out to interview homeless people to make this very point. One such who was quoted in the Mercury News said the Fremont law was “one of the dumbest…I ever heard of.” Another homeless person called the camping ban “dehumanizing.” Of course homeless people oppose the new law: they’re no longer allowed to violate city ordinances. It’s like a chronic shoplifter opposed to laws against looting. For a respected newspaper like the Mercury News to quote, not one but two angry homeless people, is really overkill. How about interviewing, say, a young mom who’s afraid to take her kids out to play near encampments? How about interviewing a senior citizen who’s forced to go blocks out of her way, on her walker, to avoid sketchy people?
But you won’t find such stories in the Mercury News, or on KQED radio, or in the august pages of the San Francisco Chronicle or Oaklandside. They’re too woke to publish the truth.
I don’t think it will shock anyone to learn that public attitudes toward the homeless are rapidly shifting, away from undiluted sympathy and towards exasperation and resentment. For years the pro-homeless progressive crowd tried to portray homeless people as wonderful but unlucky citizens who suffered at the hands of capitalism and racism. In Oakland, woke politicians like Carroll Fife, Sheng Thao, Nikki Bas and Rebecca Kaplan clubbed the public over the head with guilt-tripping, informing us that we were horrible, amoral haters unless we opened our wallets to vast new taxes for homeless services. Many of us bought into that narrative for years. But then something happened: we wised up. We looked at the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars that were being spent on homelessness and saw that it hadn’t accomplished a damned thing. We read news articles on the corruption rampant in taxpayer-funded homeless services and the grifting nonprofits that run them. We looked at the homeless themselves and saw drug addicts and criminals who weren’t victims of anything, but were themselves victimizing the neighborhoods in which they set up their squalid dwellings. And we realized what a gigantic mistake we’d made by tolerating these encampments for so long.
Fremont at least tried to do the right thing, but a bunch of leftwing radicals and lawyers thwarted the city—temporarily. I don’t believe the people of Fremont will let this stand. I imagine that the good citizens of Fremont are making their unhappiness known to the City Council, City Manager and Mayor. They want the encampments gone, and they will have their say. So who won this latest battle? Stay tuned.
Steve Heimoff