[Author’s note: If I argue with someone in a public Facebook group, and if I think that the conversation sheds useful light on the issues of the day, I reserve the right to port the interaction over here where more people can see it and it will last, in searchable form, for much longer. Whoever I’m arguing with does not, and need not, consent to the publication of such an exchange: that’s what “public” discussion means. So our past occasional contributor and commenter Gabriel San Roman, now squire to Gustavo Arellano at the OC Weekly, has had no role in planning the publication of this post onto this blog other than (a) taking part in a public discussion on Theresa Smith’s “People for APD Accountability” Facebook Page and (b) being smart enough and eloquent enough, in my estimation, to hold a productuve conversation where he can defend the cynical view he takes of almost all politicians and formal political activities, as part of his “above it all” public stance, with someone like me — who often agrees with him about desirable social justice goals but is much more willing to get one’s hands dirty engaging within the system. We welcome Gustavo’s almost inevitable entry into the discussion so that he can defend his squire and call me a “bloviator.”] Gabriel’s comments will be rendered in revolutionary-proletarian-of-color mahogany red, and mine in sad-Democrat indigo.
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[The topic is, again, whether Anaheim’s unanimous approval of Kris Murray’s “Runner Beats the Throw to the Plate and Scores!” resolution last Tuesday represented a betrayal of the homeless by Jose Moreno, Tom Tait, and however many allies they might have had in opposing it if it had been left in unamended form, or if it was appropriate (and in any event, far preferable to seeing her resolution pass in unamended form, although GSR seemed to think that the issue was much less complicated.]
Gabriel San Román
I hope something like this doesn’t happen at the Riverbed with enforcement patrols ramping up.
Anaheim still chooses enforcement first over compassionate solutions. Helluva issue for the council to “unite” on.
Greg Diamond Yes, Gabriel, that is indeed a good hope to have. I doubt if anyone here disagrees with that.I believe that you’re misconstruing what the Council “united” on. The City Attorney specifically stated that they were incorporating the amendment that the city recognizes the constitutional limits on policies the requirement enforcement of these policies in the absence of adequate resources to defeat a “necessity defense” — and noted that the City’s policies were proceeding on the presumption that the federal judge with control over there issues would issue the same injunctions against Anaheim that he had issued in similar previous situations if they tried to do otherwise. So at the Staff level, even if not the entire Council level, the city has not chosen the “enforcement first” policy regardless of how Murray (or you) would like to spin it. Go listen to that discussion about Tait’s amendment to the resolution again if you need to.
Without that explicit recognition by the City Attorney, I think that this proposal would have lost at least 2 — and probably 4, maybe even 5 — votes.
Gabriel San Román Enforcement is being ramped up. The infamous camping ban remains. There’s no real housing solutions.
Greg Diamond (1) I don’t have a problem with enforcement of people in the camps not committing crimes (or harassing children), as has been alleged, in the nearby neighborhoods. Do you?
(2) On the other hand, I’m not convinced that it’s as large of a problem as the neighboring homeowners assert, in which even I would not expect there to be arrests on that basis, especially if activists are there with their cameras, which I presume we both want to see.
(3) My sense is that most of the talk of “criminal activities” refers to people using drugs — and is intentionally conflated with violent crime, property crime, etc. for political purposes. Whatever you or I may think of such laws, they ARE existing laws, and it’s legitimate for the state (in the broad sense, including cities, counties, etc.) to enforce them. That doesn’t mean it’s wise policy: the effect of enforcing such laws is to end up housing people in jail or prison, an expensive solution that is good for prison guards and not much good for everyone else (including taxpayers.) At some point, common sense should kick in and people should conclude that the less expensive solution — find some places to house them and leave them alone to engage in these sorts of victimless crimes, if they’re intent on doing so — is better than the legal alternatives of arresting them or killing them on a legitimate pretext, and much better than the illegal alternatives of killing them without legal justification or “deporting” them to other cities, states, countries, etc., which is unconstitutional.
(4) A camping ban WITH EXCEPTIONS FOR NECESSITY THAT RENDER IT INOPERATIVE IF ALTERNATIVES ARE NOT PROVIDED is tolerable — meaning that if the polity chooses it, activists have to respect it. It may not be smart and you and I may not like it, but a polity can decide in the course of normal political processes to declare such behavior illegal and pay to house people without cost in exchange for the right to restrict their freedom. (This is contrasted with INTOLERABLE policy choice, such as allowing extrajudicial killings and unconstitutional arrests, which activists are not bound to respect. Activists certainly can and should protest the tolerable chosen policies with which they disagree, but you can’t say that they can’t be implemented in case you want to argue that we ought to set up a dictatorship controlled by the vanguard (which so happens to be you), in which even you’re a bigger fool than I think you are and you have been negligent in not stockpiling the arms needed to overthrow local (and ultimately state and national) government to impose your will. (Seriously, Gabriel — if you want people to go Clive Bundy behind your leadership, you’d have to prepare better than just writing a column in the weekly and some Facebook commentary.)
(5) If, by contrast, you are willing to leave our current democratic processes in place (as if you have a choice about that), then you want to keep people who are at least somewhat sympathetic to your views in office, which in turn means either having a public inclined to elect them or enough money to bamboozle them. (We have neither, and little chance of getting either; the former is more attainable, but NOT by writing about how the entire Council is worthless when a majority still want to see meaningful enough availability of alternatives to defeat a necessity defense — the significance of the City Attorney’s position in my previous comment, which you ignored — prior to mass jailings and expulsions to nowhere. So in a situation where the reactionaries have out-organized the lefties and moderates, as with the present petition drive and Kris-Murray PR offensive, you are going to have to give up on some symbolism in order to maintain a victory on substance. Murray gets the “victory” of branding the response as her own initiative (which won’t fool people in the long run) and while Sheriffs will be there to keep the peace you STILL have to have places for people to go before you round ’em up and head ’em out, or else the judiciary will come in and put it’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus-sized foot down on the enforcement efforts. It’s all in the Council meeting video, watch it again, or for the first time.
As for the lack of “REAL housing solutions” — no shit, Gabriel! Those will take time, planning, money, and the will of the people behind them. (I don’t read you regularly: have you written recently about what those solutions would be, taking note of the “takings clauses” in the constitution in case you have expropriation in mind?)
But they don’t NEED to have “real” ( which I conceive up as being “permanent and expandable” housing solutions in place in order to move people out of the riverbed: they can do it even with “temporary-but-reasonably-adequate” solutions. And City Staff RECOGNIZES that, which IS a victory, and which is NOT what the petition-signing mobs wanted. That’s about as good a victory as could have been had last Tuesday night — and I’d say better than most observers expected.
So come off your high horse and come down here into the policy weeds with the rest of us soft-hearted adults. So far, the best solutions I’ve seen proposed are these:
(A) Nancy West’s nascent “Al Fresco Gardens” idea, for those homeless who are at least somewhat “service-resistant” and don’t want to be shipped to distant indoor lodging,
(B) my even-more-nascent “mutualization” notion that — on as grand a scale as possible up to the federal level — those locales (states, counties, cities, neighborhoods) that want to NIMBY their way out of direct involvement with housing the homeless should by law have to subsidize those locales who ARE willing (or forced) to address the homeless housing problem, including providing funds for lawsuits for negligence etc. that arise from providing homeless services, and
(C) the “Housing First” idea that works well in Utah but that may be of limited applicability in a place like OC where (1) housing prices are already high enough to drive those middle class and below either OUT altogether or INTO below-code residential options; (2) resources (from water to roads) are too limited to allow a population expanding without limits; and (3) scamster developers are slavering for ways to get approval for new building projects that cannot be approved otherwise, due to opposition to untrammeled growth, that, when political winds shift, can be sneakily transformed into the high-end housing that they actually WANT to build.
This is usually where you accuse me (apparently ignorant of the actual definition) of “bloviation,” and then I accuse you in turn of either being (or just pretending to be, for rhetorical reasons) too stupid to understand what I’ve written, because you’d rather fight your easy chair revolution in proposals that would fit on bumper stickers, as with your three-bumper-sticker-length comment above. You avoid taking your next customary dance-step and maybe we can have a useful conversation.
In terms of the results it is interesting the reaction of the promoters of the petition. Cunningham who started the hysteria when the camps were moved from the Honda center is not saying much about the limitations of SAFE HOME pointed out by the City Attorney.
The Nextdoor crowd has been quiet , perhaps celebrating privately messaging, but they must be pondering about the quagmire of their position. If no suitable place is found within a reasonable time, the sanitary conditions by refusing the two freaking toilets may worsen.
Murray and her advisors must have known about these limitations, but they decided to over-politicize this divisive issue.
Before knowing the final interpretation of the resolution , it was not easy to swallow that the entire council had supported the “SAFE HOME Emergency plan”.
“Murray and her advisors must have known about these limitations, but they decided to over-politicize this divisive issue.”
Murray doesn’t have advisors. She has handlers who tell her what to do. It’s been painfully obvious that the Kleptos® have been determined to turn this into a political issue in order to go after Jose Moreno in 2018 and try to make Tait look feckless and weak.
Last winter they mined the Trump-style “get off my lawn or I’ll shoot” theme for possible political ore, but the “homeless are lawless” issue is what they’re going with.
Next year PringleCorp® is going to roll out a pro-law n’ order slate and that’s all we’re going to hear about. And the vicious homeless ranging in our parks will be the pictorial.
Speaking of trumped up falsehoods designed to attack Tait . . .
Nary a word about Anaheim’s firework sales this year.
*Another Teletrumpster? Their ideas must grow on trees…. “Homelessness?”
Who has “that” problem….anyway?
This hard up for content? ::laughing emoji::
I like people seeing how feeble of a thinker you are. ::honest truth emoji::
By the way — anytime you want to do a decent job of addressing these issues in your larger publication, rather than tearing people down on grounds of lesser hipness, that would be most welcome, if you can muster that energy.
BTW–you’ve ruined this once okay blog.
By the way, you’re a poseur who, without the patronage of Gustavo, would read by no one except that NSA — if they’d even bother with you.
All conflicts aside: my condolences. Gustavo didn’t deserve such shabby treatment.
GD: “— find some places to house them and leave them alone to engage in these sorts of victimless crimes, if they’re intent on doing so —”
CW: When one is so whacked out of their minds that gainful employment is a non-starter, the druggies end up stealing from those of us who worked our arses off for what we have, and that is far from a victimless crime, sir. What I do find highly interesting is the substitution of reporting crime to the proper authorities vs reporting it to NextDoor or facebook or emailing one’s Council member with threats to throw them out of office for failing to fix a problem that history shows existed in the earliest years of our fledgling nation. Go look up any of the publicly available crime mapping programs, and see if you can identify the homeless hot spots based on the concentration of petty crimes. Go ahead, we will wait here. Back already? Do you see the place where anecdotal reports claim over 100 bicycles were stolen? No? How about reports of needles, public elimination on private property. security lights being busted out? Now I don’t doubt these things are happening, we have had our own run-ins with those I am assuming lacked a permanent address given the timing of missing items coincided with the increase of those in our immediate vicinity pushing their worldly goods around while talking to invisible friends. I lost something of immense personal and historic value, which in all likelihood landed in a dumpster when the miscreant who helped themselves to it from storage realized my note to my kids in case I died that read, “extremely valuable, do not throw out, priceless, give to Jane Newell” turned out to not relate to monetary value, because my kids understand the shorthand I used, which means, “old and some of us crusty dinosaurs value this so do not sell for a buck at yard sale after my demise.” I do not doubt the crimes are happening, but I wonder WHY they are not showing up on the crime maps. Any ideas?
BTW-these are almost always crimes of opportunity, and can be largely alleviated (not eliminated) with the usual tools of increasing Neighborhood Watch etc. so when a punk cruises on bike or skateboard at 3 am checking car doors for one open they are met by a series of car alarms, porch lights going on, people yelling out their windows, and they net exactly zero in drug money from doors locked and valuables not in sight for the easy smash and grab. This does not minimize the frustration of residents and business owners, but there IS a way to deal with a good portion of the bad behavior which does NOT involve clearing the riverbed. Indeed to say we can only eradicate the criminal behavior if we eradicate the encampment indicates belief all the homeless are involved with the lawless behavior which tells us the person posing such a theory sucks as a human being and should never be permitted to own a dog. BTW-I believe it was the great Ancient Philosophers Sonny and Cher that opined on the idea of clearing the woods of “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves,” and as I recall, the townsfolk did not get the more favorable end of that PR campaign.
“But they don’t NEED to have “real” ( which I conceive up as being “permanent and expandable” housing solutions in place in order to move people out of the riverbed: they can do it even with “temporary-but-reasonably-adequate” solutions.”
And this is indicative of Murray’s amazing inability to think strategically for the long-term win. Which actually makes me question how much Pringle is behind her since NOBODY on this freaking ball of green and blue of ours can long-con strategize like Der Pringle. So…what happens when Murray succeeds in getting a bunch of temporary (and largely dehumanizing) shelter beds to pull folks in off the riverbed or out of the riverbed, and THEN…has no place to put them for the long term? instead of the visual blight and health hazards of a concentrated area that can at least be avoided for the short term by those who wish to look the other way rather than extend a hand, we instead get a return of the homeless to the dispersal pattern of under freeway bridges, tucked into the shrubbery around libraries and edges of parks, etc. And then the electorate gets to see the failure to truly lead with the innovative ideas Anaheim was once known for, before we scored leaders who want us to be “just like CITY XX” as shown in staff report example for latest spending spree project.
Speaking of spending sprees, read the Resolution. It essentially reads,
Whereas the County is sitting on a pile of cash, doing as little as possible to implement their own 10 year plan to end homelessness despite the diligent efforts of Shawn Nelson to build shelters without the support of his colleagues;
Therefore, we will use this artificially created crisis to help our developer pals shove their snouts into the public trough and inhale that roughly 700 MM in homeless funding, by using the least cost-effective models that compound the waste and inefficiency by producing the most dehumanizing form of shelter available, in such a violation of privacy, and loss of basic comforts of a mate and pet which are known to increase the odds for successfully exiting systemic and situational poverty, that excreting into a bucket on the riverbed seems like a viable alternative.
Let it be resolved that this combo-platter of enriching our pals while failing to provide long-term solutions to human beings some see as sub-human will provide the added benefit of proving the homeless the incentive to decline our questionably generous offer of “shelter” and therefore permit our own self-justification for claiming “they want to be out there,” and “they want to be homeless” and “they don’t want to follow the rules,” and “they just want to sit around doing drugs all day.” Any questions?
As far as all 7 voting for it, what else can they do? It’s a “when did you stop beating your wife” thing. Vote no, and you hate the homeless and don’t want to give them aid and will be voted out by constituents convinced you side with heroin addicts leaving their needles and excrement on the lawn of hard-working stakeholders. Question Murray’s fuzzy facts (as did Dr. Moreno) and be accused of “bringing a 2 x 4” to the meeting (because “accountability” is not differentiated from “attack” at Anaheim City Hall–go team!)
As if I have not sucked up enough reader time, here is a tidbit from my history nerd self; I am (currently reading a book on the “poor houses” and “alms houses” of New England and the later quaint Victorian habit of locking up anyone disembarking from the train in search of work/food/new beginnings, in a “tramp shed” at the railroad, where they are minimally protected from the elements by a literal shed, fed water and perhaps bread, maybe some real food by the more generous, but kept under padlock until the next train leaves, when they are put on it and told not to return. Ever. Even with money. In OC, I have news articles back to the 1907 Santa Ana Register discussing what to do with the “indigent” and from 1914 to the Depression, we ran a County Farm that grew food for the County Hospital, on what is now the campus of UCI Medical Center. Once upon a time, we housed our extremely poor people in a gorgeous building designed by the revered architect Frederick Eley and today we don’t even offer them the option of the “tramp shed.” Go team.
You may now return to the Tuesday already in progress, as will I.
*One last thought balloon: Do they still have the Homeless Issue going on around
the Board of Supervisors building in Santa Ana? Wonder how often the Supes look out their windows…..Anaheim? Try Bakersfield and Fresno….that should work for you..eh?
The Hep outbreak should be reason enough to rid our public places of these vagrants. They are NOT homeless. There are plenty of resources.
I’ve made this offer to people before — never gotten a taker — but if you or others would be so kind as to call all of the place with these “plenty of resources” so we can publish what is available on a given day (as well as what strings or eligibility limitations are attached) I will happily publish that information every morning, and some others can also call around to verify that you and whoever else does so is telling the truth.
“But why should I do that sort of work?” you may ask. You don’t have to. Just understand that one problem with people making the convenient (for them) argument that the problem is already fully taken care of is that many of us, likely including the courts, simply don’t believe your airy dismissal of these people’s needs. So, having heard homeless people say that what you assure us is true simply ain’t so, until people start ponying up with reliable information I will join the throngs who say “sorry, I am just not confident that that’s true.”