I must admit, Loren Taylor has been an emotional roller coaster for me. I wrote earlier that, while his approach to the issues leaves much to be desired, I’d hoped that, once in office, with his intelligence and beneficent spirit he would find the confidence to do the right things. What are those right things? If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know.
And I vowed to support him.
But now, Loren has come out with a campaign email in which he describes his “Keep Oakland Housed” plan—and it’s nothing more than a thinly disguised confection of the same progressive failures of the past. Here are its key elements:
• “Prevent displacement by expanding rental assistance, legal support, and eviction prevention programs” [This is Steve again] It’s not right for the government to pay people’s rent, and to pay for their tenant protection lawyers if they choose not to pay their rent, nor is it right for the city to hire an entire bureaucracy to expedite that process. We live in a free market, and if people don’t pay their rent, they have no right to expect to be able to remain in their current residence. This is patently unfair to property owners, many of whom are elderly and depend on income received from rent. It’s also rather racist: many property owners are Asian Americans, whereas many people who refuse to pay their rent are Black. We cannot permit government to help certain groups of people while harming others. That is discrimination by legal sleight-of-hand.
• “Accelerate and reduce the cost of affordable housing by streamlining permitting and building on public land” High-flown campaign promises have little to do with the realities of actual development. Loren Taylor cannot “reduce the cost of affordable housing” by snapping his fingers. These costs are determined by the marketplace (and in these inflationary times will continue to rise), which neither Loren (nor anyone else) can control. This is just another airy-fairy promise of the kind we always hear from candidates who sucker the public into believing in pie-in-the-sky solutions. It’s reminiscent of Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War. This kind of cynicism only further erodes voters’ confidence and trust in politicians.
• “Support unhoused Oakland residents with housing-first and Oakland-first solutions and real accountability from service providers” The so-called “housing-first” model has been thoroughly discredited. It’s one-size-fits-all approach cannot distinguish between, say, a criminal drug addict, on one hand, and a well-behaved person who’s just poor. Both individuals are placed into (taxpayer supported) public housing. The model repeats the catastrophic public housing efforts of the 1960s and 1970s, which resulted in slums that were breeding grounds of criminality and dysfunction. Loren’s plan once more turns to taxpayers to pay for schemes that simply don’t work. And what does “real accountability from service providers” mean? In its ambiguity, it likely cloaks its real goal: for taxpayers to pick up the tab for things like PG&E, water and garbage collection, property maintenance, insurance, and possibly even healthcare. The real goal of wokeism is to give selected groups (determined, of course, by woke bureaucrats) as much money as they feel they need to lead a middle-class life, without actually having a middle-class income.
• “Preserve existing housing by keeping longtime residents in their homes and bringing vacant properties back online” Sounds great, doesn’t it? But where are the details? How do you “keep residents in their homes”? By paying their rent, of course. So is government now getting in the business of paying—forever—some people’s rents? That is not the business of government. It is, however, a way of bankrupting our already straitened city and chasing legitimate taxpayers out of town. Why don’t progressives ever realize that Oakland can’t continue going down the path of trying to make poor people middle-class? Morally, it’s not defensible, because each of us is (or should be) responsible for our own actions. Economically, it’s not feasible, because Oakland is by and large a rather poor city whose residents cannot and should not be expected to foot the bill for thousands of people who can’t afford to live here. It’s the road to serfdom, whereby people with even a little disposable income have it seized from them to give to the poor. That authoritarian approach has never worked anywhere in the world in all of history. Nor can it work in Oakland.
I have to tell you, when I read Loren’s email, my heart sank. I had thought that fundamentally he was different from the others. I thought he was not a confirmed Sheng Thao-Barbara Lee-Carroll Fife-Nikki Bas socialist or crypto-communist. Apparently, I was wrong. His Keep Oakland Housed plan is a disaster. It will not work because it cannot work. Loren has torn off his mask and revealed himself as he truly is: woke. It makes me sad, and dreary, that Loren would put a sham like this out there. He’s just not the man I thought and hoped he was.
Steve Heimoff