LaMonte Ford, a homeless person who lives at the Wood Street encampment, makes a poignant plea for dignity and understanding in a lengthy op-ed piece he wrote in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle. He portrays the Wood Street “Commons,” as he calls it, as a charming, neighborly community, a sort of Mayberry of West Oakland that features “dinner parties and performances [and] gardens,” where happy residents “shop together, pool [our] resources and try to repurpose” thrown-away stuff they find in the streets. Wood Street dwellers, he tells us, are “artists, activists, chefs, carpenters, teachers, students, and caretakers.”
Sounds idyllic. Ford, who describes himself as “resident leader” at Wood Street, essentially demands that the City of Oakland cancel its plan to evict the several hundred people that live there sometime later this month, and he is asking Sheng Thao herself to “stop our eviction as her first act in office.”
I don’t know if Thao will or won’t stop it, although I suspect she will because she’s beholden to the pro-homeless interests. If she does, she will have declared her allegiance, not to the law, not to the norms of good conduct, and not to the will of the people and businesses of Oakland, but to the demands of the Wood Street campers and their radical, woke supporters.
I have a question for LaMonte Ford: How much money in taxes did you give to Oakland last year? Did you pay property taxes, or business taxes, or sales taxes? For that matter, did you pay income taxes to the State of California or to the United States of America? And how about your neighbors: How much in taxes did they pay?
The fact of the matter, Mr. Ford, is that Oakland, like any municipality, is not a charity. It’s a business, and it costs a lot of money to run. Every time one of the Wood Street campers starts a fire—and there have been hundreds—it costs money for the Fire Department to put out, not to mention for the city or CalTrans to repair the damage. Why should the taxpayers cover the cost of your negligence? The city also spends money on cleaning up after you, collecting the refuse you produce, and I would bet that when one of you gets sick, the cost of the healthcare you get at an emergency room also is picked up by the public. I don’t know what other costs the city has to pay in order to deal with the Wood Street encampment—lawyers, city staff, police, consultants—but I bet they’re sizable.
So, Mr. Ford, the bottom line is that you can’t reasonably expect Oakland to allow you to live permanently on city property, when you contribute precisely nothing of value but consume a lot of resources. The deal that any civilized society makes with its inhabitants is a two-way street: We’ll take care of your big needs, while you contribute a portion of your income. If you have no income, then you’ve chosen to live outside our established norms. If that makes your life harder, it’s basically your choice. As my Dad used to tell me, “You made your bed; now you can sleep in it.”
By the way, if some of the Wood Street campers actually have jobs, I would suggest they “pool resources,” as Mr. Ford says they do, and rent and share apartments instead of squatting. The first responsibility of any homeless person should be to re-enter society, which means playing by society’s rules, not flouting them and demanding special treatment. If you can’t do that, Mr. Ford, then maybe living in Oakland isn’t for you.
Steve Heimoff