The Empty Promise of Banning Homeless Camping
Statewide effort dies in committee, again
A proposed statewide crackdown on encampments near schools, transit stops and other areas is, for now, going nowhere following a Senate Public Safety Committee hearing.
A couple of San Diego area Senators co-sponsored the measure, GOP leader Brian Jones and Democratic Sen. Catherine Blakespear, which would have made camping within 500 feet of a school, open space or major transit stop a misdemeanor or infraction. It also would have banned camping on public sidewalks if beds were available in local homeless shelters.
From CalMatters:
Despite the fact that cities up and down the state are grappling with a proliferation of homeless camps, legislators said they oppose penalizing down-and-out residents who sleep on public property.
“Just because individuals that are unhoused make people uncomfortable does not mean that it should be criminalized. And this bill does that,” said Sen. Aisha Wahab, a Democrat from Fremont and chairperson of the Senate Public Safety Committee. “The penalties will just be added to their already difficult situation of paying for things.”
Senate Bill 1011 would have amounted to cruel and unusual punishment for people with no place to live and only amounted to sop for people concerned about appearances. It had no provision requiring localities to provide alternative spaces because funding was unavailable, according to Jones.
This performative nonsense was being considered because San Diego’s camping ban has “worked” so well; only there’s no proof the act of getting people “off the streets” either through temporary shelter or incarceration is effective at “solving this problem.”
Our city’s camping ban is good at moving around people with nothing; the downtown population may have decreased; nobody knows where they’ve gone.
How can politicians be so stupid?
The “problem” isn’t solved when the number of newly unhoused humans exceeds the number of people ending up with a place to live every month for two years. Or when an unhoused human dies every 14 hours in San Diego County, a more than fourfold increase in a decade.
Camping bans make for good sound bites. Poway, with its single digit homeless population, passed a ban; the Union-Tribune says Chula Vista may be next.
San Diego’s attempts at increasing shelter capacity (not a solution) have run into difficulties. Indignant NIMBY-types, encouraged by former Mayor Kevin Faulconer, have organized around opposing a site not far from Liberty Station.
It was also under Faulconer –who’s now running for County Supervisor– that the city’s sub-par practices regarding real estate acquisitions began. The scandals surrounding 101 Ash Street and a former skydiving center have generated negative reverberations affecting a proposed site at Kettner & Vine Streets.
This is not to say that the current mayoral administration is blameless.
It was Mayor Gloria and Councilman Whitburn who pushed for the local no-camping ordinance. A state audit of spending on homelessness in San Jose and San Diego released last week concluded that local officials did not clearly define performance measures related to much of that spending or make sure that service providers properly monitored outcomes for the work they were paid to perform.
The audit also highlighted the fact that San Diego is sitting on more than $52 million in unspent state and federal funds; $21 million in state Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention grants and $22 million earmarked under a permanent housing program.
Oh, and get this, via the Union-Tribune coverage (emphasis mine):
In response to the audit, city officials generally agreed with the state findings but said they already comply with much of what the audit recommends.
“The city already has existing spending plans already in place, but will publicly report them in a single location,” Chief Operating Officer Eric Dargan wrote. “The city already requires performance measures, and an overall review and assessment of the effectiveness of service providers is in progress.”
Dargan recently told The San Diego Union-Tribune he aims to eliminate the city’s homeless services department and rely more heavily on private philanthropy to address homelessness.
Claims about local government already addressing shortcomings brought to light in outside audits strike me as an “off-the shelf” response used to tamp down public concerns.
Anybody remember the Justice Department audit of the SDPD?
Mayor Kevin Faulconer and Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman, who was hired in the midst of the misconduct scandal last year, pledged to implement the 40 reforms recommended in the report and emphasized that many were already being implemented.
It’s the same old, same old at the SDPD years later. In case you missed it in 2023, via Inewsource: Some officers escape discipline despite new police transparency laws
How about this word salad in response to an audit of County Sheriff practices in operating local jails?:
Department officials said they continuously review jail incidents for violations of policy or the law.
"We do not wait for an outside review, and it is not accurate to state that the CLERB has discovered something that we have not already reviewed and handled in the appropriate fashion," the department said in a statement.
"We will continue to critically assess our performance, holding ourselves to the highest standards, and change and adjust processes and policy when it makes sense."
Getting back to the “illegal” camping issue, the existence or creation of “legal” encampments has not proven to help its occupants nor will it satisfy the Hillcrest bar owners wanting the shit stains off their sidewalks. Only housing will do that; the government can either get into the housing construction business (that might require a tax increase) or significantly reduce existing barriers for private sector construction (which triggers NIMBYs).
In fairness, the city of San Diego has made it easier to build housing; the simmering rage at accelerated construction threatens political careers, and that is the same emotion running in the background of all the bad apples when it comes to standing in the way of having a place to live.
One thing we all can do for housing is to refute the misinformation spread by cynics, nihilists, and other purveyors of distrust. A few hundred people (maybe) living on Point Loma, for instance, shouldn’t have an outsized say about a proposed camping area. Nor should a candidate for office get away with fanning those flames.
I know sanctioned encampments aren’t a solution and they can be problematic, but real solutions won’t come overnight. Decades of government favoritism for a market driven society won’t be undone quickly.
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Wednesday News to Peruse
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Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S. via the Washington Post
The document for the first time provides official confirmation and codification of what many in the Moscow elite say has become a hybrid war against the West. Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies, according to Kremlin documents previously reported on by The Post. It is also seeking to refashion geopolitics, drawing closer to China, Iran and North Korea in an attempt to shift the current balance of power.
Using much tougher and blunter language than the public foreign policy document, the secret addendum, dated April 11, 2023, claims that the United States is leading a coalition of “unfriendly countries” aimed at weakening Russia because Moscow is “a threat to Western global hegemony.” The document says the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine will “to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order,” a clear indication that Moscow sees the result of its invasion as inextricably bound with its ability — and that of other authoritarian nations — to impose its will globally.
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3 Smart Responses to the Mess at NPR via Parker Molloy at The Present Age.
On April 9, NPR editor Uri Berliner wrote a piece at Bari Weiss’ Substack The Free Press titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” For the past week or so, I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about it.
In it, Berliner, a senior business editor and reporter, argues that NPR lost conservative listeners in recent years, making vague accusations about biased coverage and an unsupported claim that the organization “tell[s] people how to think” — something that would have benefitted from even a single example.
As one Democratic House staffer noted on X (fka Twitter), few of Berliner’s claims held up to scrutiny. Whether claims about NPR supposedly ignoring “Russiagate” stories that made Democrats look bad (they didn’t), claims about NPR not covering Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 (they did), or claims about NPR brushing off the “lab leak” theory of the COVID-19 origin (they didn’t) — these simply didn’t hold up to light scrutiny.
I’ve struggled to put together anything worth sending out on this subject because I don’t have any insider information about NPR. Luckily, others with more insight have written on the topic, so I’m going to direct you to their work on the subject.
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‘Home is just a distant memory’: War and safety in Gaza by Lyz at Men Yell at Me
Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, in which some 1,200 people were murdered and about 250 taken hostage, tens of thousands of Gazans have been killed, the majority of them women and children. Far more now face food insecurity, even famine.
Half the population of Gaza is under the age of 18.
In February, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Humanitarian Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine released staggering death toll projections that underscore the cost of the conflict. This is a humanitarian crisis that the United States is helping to fund.
These are more than just numbers and statistics. The cost is human lives.
Nada Hammad is a single mother in Gaza who also cares for her siblings. She wants to leave for her family’s safety, but the cost of getting out is staggering.
