I was enjoying my walk yesterday when I came across this delightful scene:
We’re used to seeing messes like this on our streets and in our parks, but on a boat dock? And on boats? Right on our beautiful Estuary and Bay Trail?
We’re entitled to ask the City of Oakland, in all seriousness, how their so-called Encampment Management Policy is supposed to deal with stuff like this. The EMP, you might remember, was passed unanimously last October by the Oakland City Council. It was greeted with a great sigh of relief by most Oaklanders. At last, the powers-that-be who run this town were doing something about the blight of encampments!
EMP mandated a lot of good things. It prohibited camps from being close to schools, parks, playgrounds, bodies of water [such as the estuary and Lake Merritt], and retail businesses. It also banned cooking and heating equipment (which start fires), and offered homeless people the opportunity to live in shelters. The EMP was set to take effect starting Jan. 1, 2021.
But something weird happened on the way to implementation. The pro-encampment crowd went nuts. They complained that the EMP was unfair to homeless people. When a team of Oakland police officers and other officials tried to clear out the notoriously dirty, dilapidated Wood Street encampment, “Protesters quickly organized and gathered around the encampment at 20th and Wood Street and defended the encampment until police and city officials left the scene.”
A handful of lawyers with ties to pro-homeless groups accused the city of trying to get away with “unconstitutional seizures of property and denial of due process rights to those living unsheltered in Oakland,” as if anyone has the right to trash our city.
A group called The United Front Against Displacement called EMP “just a continuation of the City of Oakland’s policy to criminalize and displace the poor working class residents [and] a clear indicator that the local government…does not represent the interests of working people,” as if the people in the Wood Street huts actually have jobs.
You might expect a government, with all its apparatus of enforcement, having made a unanimous decision to do something that was in the interests of its citizens, would follow through on that decision and actually implement it. But not Oakland! An intimidated City Council panicked, and retreated. The Encampment Management Policy was shelved, with no explanation to the public, or to the media—who, by the way, didn’t even ask, bless their incurious souls.
And now, here we are. If you live in Oakland anywhere below Skyline Boulevard, you know that encampments are metastasizing rapidly, even, now, onto the water. The city has no plans, zero, zilch, nada, to do anything about them, except to offer feel-good, token programs like Project Homekey and Tiny Houses, all of which, by the way, have serious problems that have not been analyzed or addressed. These won’t come close to housing all of Oakland’s 4,000-plus homeless people. The fact is, Oakland has no strategy for dealing with encampments. Encampments are going to be a permanent and growing part of our shared landscape, and the City Council is basically telling us, if you don’t like it, you can move someplace else.
Steve Heimoff