I went for a walk around Lake Merritt yesterday, for the first time in months; and I’m pleased to say Lakeside Park is cleaner and more tent-free than it’s been in years. Granted, every once in a while there’s a dirty little tent, and at the Athol Plaza Tennis Courts, which we finally cleaned up after years of demanding the city do it, the courts themselves remain clear. But they’re surrounded by another growing tent city.
The thing about these tents is that you really have to stay on top of keeping them out. If one goes up and remains, then a second will follow, and a third, as word goes out among drifters that the area is safe for squatting. And the next thing you know, you have another Wood Street. For example, there’s a patch of lawn at the Senior Center/V.A. Center on Harrison Street, near my home. For more than a decade, that lawn was the sorry sight of one of the ugliest encampments in the city, a sprawling mess of garbage. Many of us in the neighborhood tried to get it cleaned up, but to no avail. The city didn’t care, especially after Madame Councilwoman, Carroll Fife, came to represent the district. Things got worse and worse until, one day, it was cleaned up. (Vincent Williams, from Urban Compassion Project, claimed responsibility.) The area remained clean for six months, until, a week ago, I saw a brand-new tent there, and I thought, “Here we go again.” Who do you call? Carroll Fife? Don’t be ridiculous.
But then that tent, too, disappeared overnight. Whoever was responsible for getting rid of it, thank you! The take home lesson is that, like I said, you have to jump on these tents as soon as they erupt; if you don’t control them, they metastasize. In this case, all is well (for now), but if you walk to Lake Merritt’s western end, across from the Henry Kaiser Convention Center, you’ll see a horrible slum on either side of the walkway along the estuary creek. That slum had been cleared a year or so ago (for which Nikki Bas took credit), but it filled right up again. Bas as it turns out is too busy praising Carroll Fife to be bothered with cleaning it up, and so a lovely promenade—restored to its natural beauty at great public expense—is now a dirty, menacing place of garbage piles and druggies, where people don’t go anymore. Well, I don’t. Maybe Nikki Bas does.
Again, it’s one thing to clean these messes up; it’s another thing to keep them clean. Oakland could do it. We’re not lacking resources. What we lack is the will, the leadership and the self-respect to keep our city clean. There’s one other thing I should mention about my walk around the Lake, and that’s that the number of psychos wandering around seems higher than ever. Among others, I saw a shirtless Black man screaming obscenities (among which was the “F”-word: Faggot). He walked into the middle of Lakeside Drive and started attacking passing cars with a plastic bag filled with something that gave it weight and heft. And once again, I wondered what we’re supposed to do about this. We either accept it as the new normal, or we realize that it’s an unacceptable outrage against civilization. But what options do we have? As I wrote last week, we’re not supposed to call the cops anymore; they don’t care. MACRO? A joke. What’s the phone number? What’s the website? There’s no way for you or me to get in touch with them. There will be more and more psycho-druggies desecrating our city’s streets and there won’t be a thing we can do about it.
So, to sum up, fewer tents at Lake Merritt, but more crazies. What the public should know is that no elected official in Oakland has any plan to get rid of encampments, or intervene with psychos. What you see is what you’re going to see for many years to come—unless we elect sane people to office and get rid of the grifters who allowed Oakland to plunge into this crisis.
Steve Heimoff