We’ve been so preoccupied the past few weeks with Oakland’s budget that we’ve neglected to write about homelessness; but the problem is worse than ever. In my neighborhood alone, a brand new camp popped up overnight, just a block down the hill from my home. At least it’s a neat camp. A few hundred feet away, across the little creek that runs adjacent to the Senior / Veterans’ Center, is an older camp, far filthier: a garbage heap of soiled clothing, rotting organic matter, twisted shopping carts, wrecked bicycles, broken bottles and fast-food containers, in the midst of which humans live. This site also is where at least six fires have been started in the last four years, scorching trees and threatening nearby homes. Both sites are on public parkland; school children play there, and Seniors as well as Veterans come and go.
Situations such as this would not exist if the City of Oakland had implemented its Encampment Management Policy (EMP), which was unanimously passed by the City Council, with strong support from Mayor Libby Schaaf, last October. The policy represented the first concrete, responsible approach to encampments ever taken by Oakland. Under massive public pressure to “do something,” our Leaders sensibly identified “high-sensitivity areas,” such as “parks and other public lands,” or places within 50 feet of a playground, or within 150 feet of a school, where encampments would be strictly prohibited. The EMP’s language was quite clear: “Encampments that do not comply with the standards outlined above…are subject to… intervention.” The policy was set to begin on Jan. 1, 2021.
Citizens living in a normal city—one that actually lives by the laws it passes—might expect such a policy to be enforced. But Oakland, in its current mania of wokeness, is not a normal city. It is a city that has lost its mind. “Government’s first duty and highest obligation,” noted former California governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, “is public safety.” His remark is identical in spirit to something Vice President Kamala Harris said: “What we all want is public safety. We don’t want rhetoric that’s framed through ideology.”
The “ideology” Harris referred to was rightwing Trumpian ideology, which identifies people of color as “the other.” But she might have been talking about a similarly destructive ideology of the Left, the Social Justice Warrior wokeness of most of Oakland’s elected officials. These people talk and act exclusively through the lens of their own hardline ideology; and, according to them, the homeless have every right to live where they want and how they want, including in parks and next to childrens’ playgrounds.
That the homeless do not have such rights was evident when the Council passed the EMP—again, unanimously. But no sooner had the ink dried on the policy than the woke crowd arose in righteous indignation. They demonstrated in front of the homes of City Council members, banging on pots and pans and chanting, “HOW DO YOU SPELL MURDER? EMP! HOW DO YOU SPELL RACIST? EMP! HOW DO YOU SPELL FASCIST? EMP!” The pro-homeless group, Street Spirit, called EMP “disastrous.” Predictably, under such a concerted assault, the City Council knuckled under to intimidation; its president, Nikki Fortunato Bas (who just spearheaded the defund-the-police budget) did a mea culpa on Twitter, promising to introduce “amendments” to the EMP that would appeal to the homeless advocates.
Needless to say, the EMP did not go into effect on Jan. 1, 2021, as promised. To this day, it has not been implemented. And, as I say, the encampment situation grows worse all the time. What we have in Oakland is a government powerless to lead, rudderless to set policy, too enfeebled even to enact its own policies. It is a government ruled, not by the will of the People, or by law, or even by common sense, but by the insane ideology of woke extremists.
Steve Heimoff