Homelessness is Big Business in Oakland. And like all massive businesses, its stakeholders—the bureaucrats who make their living in it, and the politicians who campaign on it—will fight to preserve the business that sustains them.
If you want to determine, even approximately, how much Oakland spends on homelessness and related things, like anti-violence, good luck. It’s impossible. Between Federal, state, county and city government grants and expenditures, private industry grants, parcel taxes, the General Fund, and other sources of income, Oakland is awash in money for homeless services. Nobody keeps track of it. When we interviewed Mayoral candidate Loren Taylor to ask him if he knows where all the money goes—or even how much there is—he conceded that no one knows.
How much money are we talking about? I spent hours on Google, trying to find out. It would take a committee of CPAs weeks to come up with a figure, but here’s mine: $492.5 million, spread out between 2019 and 2021. That would make Homelessness, Inc. one of Oakland’s largest businesses.
Much of that comes from two parcel taxes: the Violence Prevention Tax, which is $246 a parcel, and Measure Q, which is $325 per parcel. There are 171,749 “parcels” in Oakland (including condos). Do the math. That comes to $97 million from those two parcel taxes. If you exclude the parcel taxes and consider only other sources of income, Oakland has received $395.5 million since 2019. And that’s just what I was able to find. Here are some of the biggest:
2020-21 budget: Federal American Rescue Plan Act (“ARPA”): $192 million.
$78.3 million from the State of California to Oakland Community Homelessness Services Division for 2019-2021 budgets, according to City Auditor Courtney Ruby
$37.5 million (2020) from Project Roomkey
$24.8 million from HHAP (California Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention Program)
$25.9 million (2022) Project Roomkey
$37 million from the CARES Act, 2021 (partly for homelessness)
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Now, with all that money, you’d think we’d be getting better results, but you’d be wrong. Ruby, the Auditor, herself slammed Oakland government last month. She found that Oakland “did not meet established performance targets” for single homeless adults. The city did even worse with youths. The RV Safe Parking program is a shambles. Even Ruby, with all the city’s resources at her disposal, couldn’t figure out where the money is, or what we’re getting for it. “The City lacked access to timely, accurate, and complete data to fully understand service provider performance, bed utilization, and participants’ returns to homelessness.” Even the contracts the city signs with third parties are hard to parse. “Improvements are needed in the monitoring, oversight, and administration of the City’s homelessness services contracts.” In other words, money is hemorrhaging out to persons of unknown caliber, and no one knows what they’re doing with it. Ruby called for “additional oversight,” but you’ll have a better chance of meeting a unicorn than in getting honest, transparent oversight of rogue programs in Oakland.
The fact is, the Homelessness, Inc. cabal in Oakland is corrupt. Everybody knows it—but politicians are afraid to admit it, because they’d have homeless advocates like Cat Brooks screaming at them, accusing them of selling out to racist, corporate haters. And then they’d have naïve do-gooders accusing them of not caring about homeless people. This is what Oakland has sunk into—a cesspool of graft, grifters, payoffs, secret deals, sketchy programs, shady characters, wasted taxpayer funds and cover-ups. And the progressives want still more money! Let’s face it, Oakland’s Homelessness, Inc. more resembles a banana republic than a legitimate enterprise, and will remain so as long as voters keep electing the “progressives” who got us into this mess in the first place.
Steve Heimoff