We’ve been so concerned the last few weeks about the police budget here in Oakland that we’ve largely overlooked the city’s other major challenge: homeless encampments. Now that the budget battle is over—temporarily—let’s see what’s going on.
The political atmosphere around the State is moving decisively against encampments. We see this in places as varied as Sausalito, where last week police bulldozed an encampment, to Los Angeles, where the City Council just enacted a ban on sidewalk tents, to Santa Rosa, where police have conducted multiple sweeps of homeless camps.
It seems clear that public sentiment is increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress in cleaning up and managing these encampments. That’s happening in Oakland, too. Much of the evidence is anecdotal, from comments on nextdoor.com and other social media sites. But there are news reports suggesting the same phenomenon. The New York Times wrote of a “backlash against those who live in the streets.” The article was bylined in Oakland, and highlighted an Oakland property developer who “suggested luring the thousands of homeless people in the San Francisco Bay Area onto party buses stocked with alcohol and sending them on a one-way trip to Mexico.”
I doubt that many people share that particular approach, but the point is that ordinary Oaklanders are fed up with homelessness. The City Council isn’t particularly interested in ordinary Oaklanders (to them, ideology is much more important than public opinion), but every once in a while, they do have to throw a bone to us, and that’s what they did with their Encampment Management Policy (EMP).
Adopted unanimously last October, it was reported to be a fairly aggressive plan to get rid of camps in “high sensitivity areas” and restrict them to “low sensitivity areas” where, presumably, they won’t be eyesores and threats to public health and safety.
EMP never went into effect, because the City Council got pummeled by homeless advocates, and so they conveniently forgot they ever voted for it. But even if it had been implemented, it suffered from a fatal flow. Here are the EMP’s closing words, kept from public scrutiny to the end of the very long document:
“The City cannot require any individual to accept any offered form of shelter and/or alternative housing, even if such acceptance is strongly recommended for public health or public safety reasons. Instead, an individual offered shelter and/or alternative housing who declines the offer may continue to camp without risk of being issued a citation or arrested for remaining encamped…”.
This get-out-of-jail-free card effectively mutilates the EMP and assures homeless campers that they can remain where they are—in a park, near a playground, in the middle of a sidewalk—for as long as they want, and public sentiment be damned. Let’s face it: until campers face real penalties, including jail time, a lot of them are going to remain on our streets forever, because Oakland government as currently constituted doesn’t have the cojones to do anything about it.
Steve Heimoff