“It has reached the point now where it is an actual humanitarian crisis,” Greg Gurnick, a Berkeley property owner, told the San Francisco Chronicle this week. He’s talking about Ohlone Park, where tents, needles, and human waste now crowd out the dog walkers. The crisis is real — but it isn’t just in the tents. It’s in the nonprofits and agencies that are supposed to help.
Gurnick and others formed a group called Save Ohlone Park, bombarding — as the paper put it — “the Berkeley mayor, City Council, city manager, police and fire departments with emails and calls about what they describe as unsafe and unsanitary conditions in a public space.”
Their concerns include “rising crime and loud fights involving encampment members, rodent droppings and rotting food littering the grass, and campfires they worry could spark a larger blaze.”
“It is not good for anybody,” Gurnick continued. “The dog park users, the neighborhood, the tenants, the residents, the businesses, or the people camping in the park. I feel really bad for them.”
Well, yes — Gurnick is right to “feel really bad for them,” and he’s also right to call homelessness in California “a humanitarian crisis.”
But if there’s anything worse than what Californians won’t do to help the homeless, it’s what they do instead.
Last year, the very same Chronicle reported that one of the city’s largest homeless housing providers misused taxpayer funds. Auditors found it lacked key financial controls and engaged in practices that “heightened the risk of fraud.”
Translation: Very little help reached the streets, but plenty of pockets got lined.
In Los Angeles this year, “the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to pull more than $300 million out of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county agency that oversees contracts for an array of homeless services.” According to the same Los Angeles Times report, the decision followed “two scathing audits which identified lax accounting procedures and poor financial oversight at the homeless authority, also known as LAHSA.”
Now even the feds are getting involved with forming a criminal task force to investigate potential fraud and corruption involving local homelessness funds — and warning that arrests might be coming.
California might be the worst, but it’s far from alone. The New York Post recommended in December that the city “Cut off the shameless nonprofits making bank off NYC’s homeless services.” In D.C. last year, the founder of a group for “homeless LGBTQ+ youth” pled guilty “for moving COVID-19 relief money to private offshore accounts.”
The Homeless-Charitable Complex doesn’t exist to get people off the streets but to suck up tax dollars.
Yet the real crime is what we don’t do.
Temporary homelessness will always be with us, as bad times, bad luck, or the occasional bad decision catch up with some of our most vulnerable. We often do a decent job of helping those people get back on their feet, but we certainly could and should do better.
And Another Thing: It would be nice if certain jurisdictions didn’t allow male sexual predators into the women’s shelters. If there’s one thing that’s going to keep a homeless single mom from getting “help,” it’s the threat of a man in a skirt in the cot next to hers. But I digress.
The real humanitarian crisis is that chronic homelessness is almost always the result of mental illness, drug addiction, or both. One condition tends to feed off the other, particularly for PTSD sufferers forced to self-medicate with whatever they can find on the streets.
“Letting drug addicts, of which most homeless people are, pee on sidewalks and camp under overpasses isn’t helping them,” is how my RedState colleague Bonchie put it on Sunday. “It’s certainly not helping society.”
What’s required is simple, if not easy: institutionalization for the truly mentally ill and real rehab for addicts who aren’t.
Berkeley residents have taken the first step and admitted that the city has a problem. But are they willing to get serious about it? Or will they just shuffle people in need to treatment from one city park to another?
Recommended: WaPo’s ICE Hysteria: All Panic, No Nannies
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