Dena Aslanian-Williams is Mayor London Breed’s latest nominee to San Francisco’s homeless commission, but she’s getting major blowback from pro-homeless advocates who are questioning her “credentials and understanding of homelessness” over something she wrote on nextdoor.com.
The topic was what to do with all the RVs and other vehicles parked near Lake Merced. Under heavy pressure from neighborhood residents, the city has supposedly been searching for someplace to relocate them, but no neighborhood wants it, and the situation hasn’t changed in years. Aslanian-Williams ran into trouble when she “liked” a comment on nextdoor that claimed the city was “inviting everyone from all parts of the US to come live here. We will pay for food, housing, anything you want.” Aslanian-Williams commented on that comment, “yep. And discard your trash too. Just come to paradise a spot right by the Pacific, reserved just for you.”
The pro-homeless lobby immediately took offense and is opposing Aslanian-Williams’s nomination. According to the Chronicle, “…critics said they worried that [Aslanian-Williams’s] comments and background indicated that she would oppose solutions the city has supported.” In fact, one critic alleged that the comments proved that Aslanian-Williams is not qualified to sit on the homeless commission. The blowback has been such that Aslanian-Williams has since “apologized for the tone” of her comments.
We’ve seen this kind of thing before. An American citizen uses her right to free speech to express an opinion about a controversial topic. That citizen in turn is attacked by political opponents, who try to shame her into just the kind of humiliated retraction and apology Aslanian-Williams was forced to perform.
It’s a question of rights. Aslanian-Williams has the right to speak her mind. The Lake Merced neighbors who are sick and tired of the RVs have the right to ask the city to do something. And, yes, the pro-homeless critics have the right to try to shame Aslanian-Williams. But in the midst of all this back-and-forth, let’s not lose sight of the essential issue: Having hundreds of RVs, many of them in a dilapidated condition, jamming the streets is incompatible with a neighborhood’s attempt to restore cleanliness and order.
A normal city would recognize this and years ago would have told the RV dwellers they can’t stay. But San Francisco is not a normal city. Too long in thrall to its political activists, San Francisco city government has become dysfunctional to the point of, well, exactly what we see happening there: encampments, open drug use, rampant retail theft, entire neighborhoods (the Tenderloin, South of Market) destroyed—and any time any city official tries to do something about it, leftist activists yell and scream and make such a commotion that the problems never go away but simply mount.
We see exactly the same thing in Oakland, which is why it took years for the city to do anything about Wood Street. It’s also why our parks, underpasses and sidewalks continue to be littered with tents. Again, a normal city would inform tent dwellers that they’re not allowed to live anyplace they want; but Oakland, too, is not a normal city. We keep electing encampment apologists, who refuse to do the slightest thing to manage these unsightly camps, and then we throw up our hands when nothing changes and every year everything gets worse.
Well, I wish Aslanian-Williams all the best. I hope she wins her spot on the homeless commission. What we need on all these commissions—including the Police Commission in Oakland—are common-sense individuals who will vote to uphold the values of law, decency and order, instead of trying to impose woke nonsense on us. We need, desperately, to get rid of the cancel culture that the left is subjecting Aslanian-Williams to, and that is probably the most poisonous aspect of wokeness.
Steve Heimoff