There she goes again. Oakland has spent, what? Tens and tens of millions of dollars on homeless services, including those Tiny Homes that [ahem] have a tendency to burn down. So what did Bas say when the Oakland Unified School District sent a letter to City Administrator Ed Reiskin expressing their “concern” about an encampment and a neighboring Tiny Homes project that were near a high school? Specifically, OUSD was worried about “public nudity,” “fire,” “unleashed dogs,” “disturbing the peace,” “garbage,” “trespassing,” and other horrors visited upon the students. The School Board “demanded” that the city take steps to “remedy these very valid and escalating issues.”
Bas could have commiserated with the School Board. She could have agreed that it’s a terrible idea to put Tiny Homes and an encampment next to a school. She could have said, “Thank you, OUSD, I agree with you. This situation is intolerable, and as the President of the Oakland City Council, I’ll take immediate steps to put an end to it.”
But she didn’t. Instead, according to Oaklandside, Bas blamed the city for failing to ensure that the camp and the Tiny Homes are run properly. In a statement she released, also quoted in Oaklandside, Bas said, “I am frustrated by the city administration’s lack of follow-through and action to ensure that the merging of our [Tiny Homes] program with the neighboring [co-governed] community is safe and successful.”
Let that sink in. Homeless residents are setting illegal fires that are burning stuff down. They’re letting unleashed dogs run wild, are exposing themselves to children, are dropping garbage all over the place, are trespassing on the school’s property, are disturbing the peace. And whose fault is it? Not the homeless residents themselves, God forbid. No, according to Bas, it’s the city’s fault—the same city that spends tens of millions of dollars on homeless services, the same city that is bending over backwards to assist homeless people, the same city whose Mayor invited the Bay Area’s homeless people to move to Oakland, the same city that tried to defund the police and channel the money to homeless services, the same city that wants to turn Police Headquarters into low-cost housing, the same city that has done more to help homeless people than any other city in the U.S. Yes, Nikki Bas is blaming Oakland’s government for the mess that the homeless people are themselves making.
I mean, what kind of “follow-through and action” is Bas dreaming about? What is she suggesting the city do—send patrols into the Tiny Homes and encampments? Who are these patrols--cops? Social workers? Firefighters? Secretaries? City Council members? Let’s get real. Can you imagine what would happen if city employees went in and tried to get homeless people to leash their dogs, or stop running around naked, or put out their fires, or clean up their garbage, or stop disturbing the peace? There would be hideous confrontations. Carroll Fife and Rebecca Kaplan would accuse the city of Gestapo tactics. The ACLU might sue. There would be picketers outside Loren Taylor’s home. So what the hell is Bas talking about?
Why can’t Nikki Bas for once crawl out of her ideological straitjacket and utter a few words of criticism of homeless people? She acts as though they’re angels when, in fact, everybody knows that they do create garbage, they do disturb the peace, they do expose themselves, they do start fires, they do let their dogs (frequently pit bulls) run wild, they do intimidate their neighbors. Not all homeless people, thank God, but enough of them to cause real and ongoing problems.
When you have a situation as bad as this, next to a public school, and the School Board begs the city to please do something about it, and the best Nikki Bas can come up with is, “It’s the city administration’s fault” (as if she’s not part of the city administration!)—well, that is just plain pathetic and dishonest. It’s another reason (and there are many) we’ll be looking for someone to run against Bas in the upcoming November election (and actually, we may have found someone. Stay tuned…).
Steve Heimoff