I have said over and over again in this space that there’s simply not enough money to house all the homeless people in Oakland, and there never will be. Not even close. And yet, the “pro-homeless” elements on the City Council and elsewhere continue to demand Housing First; they will not stop their activism, they say, until every one of Oakland’s 5,000 homeless people is permanently sheltered.
That this is patently impossible should be clear to anyone who lives in the real world. Across the Bay, our friends in San Francisco are upset by Gov. Newsom’s requirement for cities to meet their State-mandated housing totals, including affordable housing, or risk losing billions in State funding. One S.F. Supervisor, Mandelman, complained that Newsom is providing “no direction on how to generate $1.5 billion a year for additional revenue to fund affordable housing.” According to another Supervisor, Melgar, even if the money could be found, “the city right now lacks the builders to create enough affordable units.”
What’s true in San Francisco is true in Oakland.
As I’ve pointed out here, the cost of building a single below-market housing unit in Alameda County in 2019 was $726,469. (Of course, it would be considerably higher today, due to inflation.) That’s one unit, mind you: a single one-bedroom or studio apartment. Now, Oakland’s homeless population swelled to more than 5,000, according to the last point-in-time homeless count.
Get out your calculators, kids, and do the math: 5,000 times $726,469 equals $3,632,345,000. More than 3-1/2 billion bucks. That’s roughly ten times the amount of money--$3.85 billion—contained in Oakland’s last two-year budget, for 2020-2022.
In other words, for ten consecutive years, you’d have to defund every single service and department in the city to build that many affordable housing units. Police. Fire. Roads. Parks. Schools. Violence prevention. Street sweeping and garbage. Libraries. And on and on. Let that sink in. No services at all, period, end of sentence. And even then, do you think that would solve Oakland’s homelessness problem?
It’s important for all human beings to live in the real world. People who don’t are, at best, harmless fantasts, smoking their favorite flowers and waiting for that golden unicorn that never seems to come. But when fantasts, driven by radical ideologies, have elected power, their delusions make them no longer harmless, but actual threats to society. People such as Carroll Fife, who has many nice qualities, are banging, not only their own heads against a wall, but our heads, as well, keeping us chasing the rainbow of “housing for all” when that is an impossible dream that is not even worthy of discussion.
These housing-for-all advocates need to understand that their demands are driving us all crazy. It’s not going to happen, not in this world, not in our lifetimes. All that demanding 100% housing will accomplish is to waste our precious time in endless ridiculous political wrangling, in divisive racialism, in babble, in ever-higher taxes, and in continued insistence, on the part of progressives, to bleed the police department of desperately-needed funding. Let’s drop the myth that all the homeless people can be housed. They can’t and won’t be. As to what to do with them, that’s another story; it starts and ends at the Oakland Army Base.
Have a wonderful weekend! Maybe we’ll know who our next Mayor is by Monday.
Steve Heimoff