What could possibly go wrong? A new multi-billion dollar regional housing bond, paid for by parcel taxes, and overseen in Oakland by Libby Schaaf and Sheng Thao—two of the most incompetent mayors in our history, who gave us our homeless crisis and other disasters on a silver platter.
Anyone who entrusts ten cents to either of them is mad. But beyond that, the scheme itself in unworkable. It’s supposed to be the first-ever nine county Bay Area-wide housing bond, raising up to $20 billion, and it will be on the ballot in all nine counties next year.
The Bay Area has never cooperated on anything. It’s never proven that it can cooperate on anything. City agencies can’t even cooperate with each other to build housing. Now, they’re expecting nine completely different counties to work together?
Forget about it.
As for basing it on parcel taxes, I’ve been saying for years that homeowners—who vote in outsized numbers—are fed up with being the piggy banks for these extortionate schemes. Anytime woke politicians want money for anything, their fervid brains come up with the same conclusion: parcel taxes. All homeowners are rich, goes their reasoning. Therefore, they can afford to pony up.
Oakland would get one of the biggest shares of the pie, if the measures pass: $383 million. I can’t wait for the City Council to get their hands on that. Money will be lavished all over the place, under the theory that everything is connected. Violence Prevention? DEI programs? Direct payments to people of color? Free childcare for the poor? It will all get rolled in—and Thao and Schaaf will brag about it.
But make no mistake: This is Murphy’s Law gone amok. There will be scandals, hush money, horse trading, payoffs, grifting and enough pork to fill ten Olympic stadiums. A lot of unqualified people will be on the receiving end of the payroll, paid by their cronies in city government. The City Council will impose (possibly illegal) racial and income quotas on who’s eligible. Consultants will make out like bandits. The deals that go down in back rooms will never be reported to us, the peasantry. All we’ll ever know is that this scheme will be merely the latest scam to pick our pockets—but it won’t be the last. Oakland’s $383 million will build, at best, a few hundred apartment units at the current cost of construction ($1 million per unit), but before that can happen there will be endless battles over NIMBY issues and construction details. Homeless people will demand wifi, cable TV, security guards and a host of other amenities—and the pro-homeless crowd will sympathize with them. I’ve never heard of a project replete with more possibilities for corruption—and this is Oakland, with a history of corruption going way back.
We cannot build our way out of this mess because, frankly, too many homeless people are drug addicts and/or mentally incompetent. It makes no sense to tax healthy, contributing citizens and give the money to people who have proven they’re unable to take care of themselves. If we build anything, let it be containment facilities, where we can restrain the worst of the worst wandering our streets and offer them whatever treatment we can afford. Otherwise, we’re just rewarding irresponsibility. It’s morally wrong. We cannot have a society in which the competent endlessly sustain the incompetent.
So I’ll be voting NO. But the measure is likely to pass, given the naivete of Bay Area voters, who never saw a housing measure they didn’t like. So I have this advice for the geniuses behind this measure: 1) require all tenant beneficiaries to hold down jobs. (2) ongoing drug tests for all beneficiaries, on a regular basis. One positive result, and you’re out. (Pot will be excluded.) (3) If a beneficiary is convicted of a felony, they lose their apartment immediately. 4) Any beneficiary who willfully ruins, wrecks or harms their unit will be evicted. This includes damage caused by pets.
We got into our current mess by refusing to be tough and compel everyone to play by the rules. The only way out is to start enforcing codes of moral and ethical conduct.
Steve Heimoff