Our colleague at the Coalition for a Better Oakland, Jack Saunders (who’s active on our Facebook page), sent me this link to an article in the Texas Observer. Life and Death in a Texas Homeless Camp makes for grim reading. It left me depressed, because I was forced to conclude there may be no solution to the plague of encampments, at least anytime soon, here in Oakland.
The encampment in question is in Austin, the state’s capital. While Austin is often referred to as “San Francisco in Texas” due to its liberal bent, its citizens passed an anti-encampment proposition in May by an overwhelming vote of 58% for, with only 42% against. The new law bans camps “in any public area not designated by the Parks and Recreation Department; to sit or lie on a public sidewalk or sleep outdoors in and near the downtown area and the area around the University of Texas campus; and to panhandle at specific hours and locations.”
Pro-encampment apologists usually paint folks who are against encampments and sidewalk sleepers as racists, uncompassionate, greedy NIMBYs who support conservative causes and Donald Trump. But the Austin vote proves that slur is a lie. Travis County, where Austin is located, voted for Biden by an overwhelming supermajority of 71.4%. Its slogan has long been “Keep Austin Weird,” but in recent years, the tendency to “keep Austin woke…is becoming contagious.” The city’s liberal mayor, Steve Adler, and City Council have repeatedly been punching bags for Texas’s ultra-conservative Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who tweets things like “Austin leaders must answer for their perilous policies.” So it’s emphatically the case that Austin is blue, blue, blue—as blue as, say, Oakland.
And yet here you have nearly 60% of these leftwing voters demanding that their city get rid of camps!
It’s not just Austin that finally decided to get real about encampments. Last month another blue-blue city, Los Angeles, “passed a sweeping anti-camping measure Thursday to remove widespread homeless encampments that have become an eyesore across the city.” As L.A. City Council member Paul Krekorian, who authored the measure, said, “I can’t think of any reason why we would not unite in support of what the people of Los Angeles want us to do. Restore order to our streets, while also uplifting and providing services to those in need.”
If Austin and L.A. can do it, so can Oakland. But our current leaders, especially on the City Council, seem determined to prove that they can out-woke even the most liberal cities in America. What can possibly be their motives in protecting the disgrace of encampments? Is it simply an idée fixe in their brains—that they have a greater moral obligation to homeless people than to the rest of us? Yes, Christ said, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” and this is often used by pro-homeless advocates as a cudgel to guilt-trip the majority who wish to see encampments managed. But I don’t believe that, if Christ came back today and looked at Oakland, he would feel the same way. More likely he would denounce the dysfunctionality rampant in homeless camps, the drug dealing and criminal activity, the sociopathic behavior, and, yes, the filth.
But we don’t live in a theocracy, thank goodness, and so these speculations about “What would Jesus do” are pointless when it comes to matters of public policy. The fact is, the nation is moving against tolerance of these encampments. Democrats are mobilizing against them, leaving only a fragment of far-left recidivists to protect and nourish them. Unfortunately, Oakland has more than its share of such dead-enders, but this is something voters can address in upcoming elections.
Steve Heimoff