You know the old saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Well, Oakland voters are about to get fooled again, if they vote to pass a huge housing bond that’s on the ballot in November.
The bond is for the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority (BAHFA). All nine counties and 101 cities and towns in the Bay Area, including Oakland, will be asked to vote yes or no to fund BAHFA to the tune of up to $20 billion, the money to be used for building affordable houses, with added provisions including “protection for current residents to avoid eviction.” The BAHFA people say the program will result in “thousands of new homes and house hundreds of thousands of our neighbors.” If it passes, it will likely be the largest government-run infusion of cash into housing in California’s history. Oakland would get up to $765 million in virtually-unrestricted funding.
Carroll Fife is, needless to say, strongly in favor of BAHFA. “We haven't [had] this large of allocation [sic] of public dollars for affordable housing here before,” she tweeted, adding, “I'm in full support of this bond & I'm working to make sure we can use this historic investment for methods that lead to permanent affordability...”.
How would Oakland utilize all that money? On its website, the city explains that “the majority of funds will be dedicated to building new affordable homes, especially for people experiencing homelessness.” There would be a beneficiary selection process in which “factors like health, being a victim of crime, length of homelessness, and others” would be considered in order to “determine a person’s urgency of need.” The city website also reveals that, if BAHFA passes, it would be paid for, not by bank loans, but by a new tax on property owners that could be as high as $200 per parcel per year, based on the property’s assessed value.
We have warned many times that progressives always turn to parcel taxes to fund their schemes, because they’re afraid to raise taxes on the general public, and because parcel taxes are seen by their liberal constituents as fair game, since anyone who owns property obviously must be a greedy millionaire. For this reason, but not this reason alone, I’m voting against BAHFA. I also believe that, in Oakland, this city’s current government cannot be trusted to spend the money competently, without the usual corruption that infects almost everything Oakland does with taxpayer money.
There are many reasons that lay behind my conclusion. For one, I’m sure that Fife and her friends on the City Council will make sure that only “the right people” qualify for BAHFA housing. Of course, they themselves will determine who the right people are. Why should “being a victim of crime” qualify one applicant over another? I’ll tell you why. Oakland included that proviso so that more Black people will be let in, since they’re the biggest victims of Black-on-Black crime. Ditto for “length of homelessness.” Most homeless people are Black. Why should race matter in providing housing to homeless people? Why not sexual orientation, national origin, military service or something else? BAHFA is clearly discriminatory based on race.
The fact is that the longer a person has been homeless, the less responsible they probably are in terms of possessing the virtues of being a good, contributing citizen. Self-respecting people through no fault of their own occasionally fall into homelessness, but their pride does not permit them to remain homeless for long. Chronically homeless people, by contrast, are almost always drug addicts and/or alcoholics, and often sociopaths, with no interest in being part of the larger society that they have, in fact, rejected. They have learned to con and jive their way through life, and are not the sort of people that could keep up the level of civic responsibility we want in a neighbor. Under those circumstances, it’s easy to envision BAHFA-enabled housing projects quickly degenerating into the kind of criminal ghettos that the Old Oakland Lodge and so much other public housing has become, where drug dealing is rampant, shoplifting rings operate with impunity, and fencing of stolen goods occurs on the property.
I also object to BAHFA because the measure’s description in the Voter’s Guide will be written with what the Alameda County Grand Jury called “proponent’s bias,” resulting in language that “fall[s] short of what voters have a right to expect in terms of transparency and impartiality.” It’s easy to bamboozle the public with such government-approved propaganda. As the East Bay Times and San Jose Mercury News both opined, “too many local government leaders, their attorneys and taxpayer funded campaign consultants continue to write ballot measures and voter material to tout the benefits while glossing over, or even hiding, the true costs.” Almost nobody reads the entire text of a ballot measure in the voter’s guidebook, and even if they did, the average voter isn’t an expert in that area and can’t be making anything other than an emotional choice. And even if voters had expertise, these ballot measures always continue legal loopholes that enable their authors to amend them whenever they want, in more or less secret backroom deals. The backers of BAHFA will present a rosy scenario that has no more chance of ever actually happening than did Alameda County’s 2020 Measure W, which increased the sales tax to provide “housing and services for individuals experiencing homelessness.” You and I and everyone else in Alameda County ended up paying a lot more for everything we buy, but did Measure W do a thing to actually decrease homelessness? Obviously not. Do we know where the Measure W funds went? No. And we never will. Nor will we ever have an accurate accounting of BAHFA money, which will be handed over to grifters like Carroll Fife with little or no transparency or accountability.
And then there’s last week’s report that California “doesn’t have current information on the ongoing costs and results of its homelessness programs because the agency tasked with gathering that data — the California Interagency Council on Homelessness — has analyzed no spending past 2021.” This means that at least $24 billion meant to address homelessness has vanished. Agencies that were tasked with analyzing spending “did such a poor job tracking their outcomes that it’s impossible to tell if they’ve been successful,” according to the California State Auditor. If we don’t have the slightest idea if the money we’ve already spent has been wasted, then why throw good money after bad?
As for those “protections to avoid eviction,” we saw first-hand during the debate in Oakland about ending its COVID-era eviction ban how sleazy renters managed to avoid paying rent for years on end by faking hardship, even though many of them had full-time jobs and appeared to have plenty of money. The result of this rent strike was mom-and-pop small property owners, many of them people of color, pushed to the economic wall. The Oakland City Council, in their progressive-socialist bias against small business, has too often sided with unscrupulous tenants who merely wish for a free place to live. This BAHFA bond simply will give crooked renters more power to cheat.
If all these reasons I’ve summarized above aren’t enough you to vote NO on BAHFA, I don’t know what else you need.
By the way—surprise!--Carroll Fife is on the BAHFA Executive Board. Of course she is. The grift goes all the way to the top. Or, as the case may be, to the bottom.
Steve Heimoff