I told you a week or so ago I’d let you when whether Measure O, in Sacramento, passed or not. Well, the official result is still ambiguous, but “O” at last count had nearly 55% of the vote, and the Sacramento Bee reported that “O” is “very likely [to be] approved.”
But this doesn’t mean that the full measure of “O” will be felt anytime soon. The Measure’s wording is broad and ambiguous; although it has been portrayed as a “tough on encampments” policy, it contains enough loopholes to drive a truck through, and already, there’s quarreling among stakeholders as to what “O” actually mandates. Like similar policies elsewhere, “O” likely will result in the same Whack-a-mole we’ve seen at Wood Street, with homeless campers merely moving their tents from one side of the street to the other. The issues are likely to wend their way through the courts for years, in the manner typical of such things, and the people of Sacramento have very little reason to think that encampments will be reduced anytime soon.
However, the reason behind O’s passage is clear enough: Sacramentans are sick and tired of encampments. People complain of being accosted on the streets, of being afraid to go out at night, of concerns for the safety of their children. They read about homeless people like Timmy Stephens, who says that no matter how nice a shelter the city offers him, he’ll never move into one. “Myself, I can’t do shelters,” he declared, throwing down the gantlet to the city and daring them to come and get him. Indeed, this recalcitrance on the part of many homeless people has been seen over and over again: They believe they have the right to set up their tents wherever they want, and are determined to resist efforts to remove them.
Sooner or later, of course, this anarchy has to end. Cities have ordinances and laws, and if officials are not prepared to enforce them, then the rule of law is threatened, and Mad Max-style dystopia ensues. Measure O pretends to address this issue by “making it a misdemeanor if someone refuses to leave public property after they’ve been offered available shelter,” but this is an absurdity. No one is going to be arrested for refusing to leave public property, and even if a person is fined, they likely have no money. So nothing will be done, nothing will change, Measure O is just the latest example of a city pretending to do something about homelessness when, in fact, they’re doing nothing except kicking the can further down the road.
I hate to be the skunk in the garden party, but Oakland’s homelessness problem is not going away. It’s going to get worse. The progressives on the City Council (and it looks like they’ll continue to dominate it in 2023) will make sure that nothing gets done; they’ll continue to demand ever more money, raised through ever more parcel taxes; and as State and federal funding dries up when the COVID pandemic has formally ended, the progressives will literally have no place else to go for money, except to further raid homeowners.
It’s with some satisfaction that I’m witnessing Trump apparently nearing his sell-by date; many of us have wondered what it would take for those Republicans who remain sane to see through his greed and lust for power, and finally abandon him. In the same way, many of us wonder what it will take for the good people of Oakland to realize they’ve been conned for years by progressives who promise them Utopia, but end up plunging Oakland into chaos and deterioration. One might almost conclude that you can fool most of the people most of the time.
Steve Heimoff