Photo / Cathleen Williams
SACRAMENTO, CA – At its December 14 meeting after the widely publicized towing and displacement of the unhoused community at Commerce Circle, the Sacramento City Council considered Mayor Darrell Steinberg’s “Resolution on Protocols for Encampment Enforcement Actions” that would have banned the towing of vehicles where unhoused people live unless alternative shelter was offered.
In addition to the mayor, two others voted for the resolution – newly elected councilwomen Katie Valenzuela and May Vang, part of the wave of young, grass roots candidates who are winning elections across the country as voters and activists enter the political arena to fight for the very survival of poor and working constituents.
The resolution, even if it had passed, would have had little practical effect. It did not change existing laws or mandate new practices. Some have suggested it was a form of political theater. This is not surprising. Most council members – with the exception of the two new council members who voted for the Resolution – have been dominated by the priorities of multimillionaire property owners and their organizations, who contribute tens of thousands of dollars to local campaigns. Their opposition to rent control is only one sign of their alignment against the needs of poor and working residents.
According to the podcast, VOICES: River City, “campaign contributions from explicitly anti-rent-control political action groups to Sacramento’s city council members and Mayor Darrell Steinberg for their 2018 and 2020 campaigns near $54,000. … Council members also received thousands in campaign donations from real estate developers and property managers.” Among the actions that have reflected the power of these forces are the following:
- The council has refused robust rent control during the housing crisis.
- They have saddled the city with decades of debt (half a billion dollars and counting) to build a downtown sports arena like in other “entertainment cities” to bring up property values to benefit the few who own neighboring venues.
- They subsidized development that impacted whole neighborhoods and speeded up gentrification and displacement.
- They have flatly refused to make developers build low-income units as a condition of permitting luxury housing construction.
- They made no plans to preserve “naturally” affordable housing before it was snapped up by investors.
- They have made few attempts to site and secure the housing that is needed by tens of thousands of housing-insecure or homeless people, funding squalid, underserved encampments, and “emergency” shelters instead.
- They have sat back while thousands have been subjected to traumatizing police raids and sweeps.
- Their pursuit of development in the city has failed to invest in the neighborhoods where most poor and working people live.
Even though the resolution would have been limited in its effect, it is an important sign that the housing crisis and the resulting explosion of tent and vehicle encampments on every street and park is changing the political narrative in favor of the unhoused. The need for housing has become plain.
This is clear in the headline articles by the gifted local reporter Theresa Clift which exposes hardship and death in the unhoused community. It is clear in the growing organizational unity and mobilization among activist groups across the region. There is a groundswell of awareness and concern.
At the same time, there are more verbal attacks on unhoused people in order to push them outside the conversation and abandon them to police “management.” For example, at December’s city council meeting, members of the “business community” expressed their horror that the resolution recognized the cruelty of taking away vehicles used by the unhoused.
Perhaps Mark Friedman’s comments were the most revealing. He was born wealthy. His family owns a mall and property all over the region. He recently bought the most expensive house ever sold in Sacramento. No doubt he starts each morning by slipping into the swimming pool that shimmers outside the glass doors of his bedroom.
Friedman has no problems. He says his life is “charmed.” His goal for Sacramento is to transform it into “the Silicon Valley (meaning tech hub) of agribusiness. His investments have reshaped our city in his interests without regard for the need for low-income housing, quality education and other public services. As far as he is concerned, unhoused people are simply like rats, worthless undesirables who stand in the way of the full realization of the wealth and property his life exemplifies.
Friedman began his testimony by evoking fear of encampments with dangerous and demented criminals, drug abuse, theft, prostitution, violence and murder. “We must not shrink from the reality we are dealing with,” he commented. We are “losing control of the city,” he said as he called for pure class war on the poor.
There are couple of problems with his narrative, which is now being advanced with new fervor in the face of a rising public consensus that people need housing.
First, it is unseemly – inappropriate, improper, disgusting – for a multimillionaire to attack those in dire poverty.
Secondly, vilifying – demonizing, degrading – poor and powerless people is a despicable tactic, the same one that has been adopted by the most rabid, racist, and hateful forces in American politics today.For example, Ashli Babbitt, the QAnon adherent[AH1] , in her media posts repeating right-wing propaganda about immigration, said: “This immigration thing, I guess I’m taking it personally, because I am here and you see the effects, you see the crime, you see the drugs … you see the rapes, you see all the gangs.”(Los Angeles Times).
Thirdly, the narrative is demonstrably false, because it disregards and denies the economic deprivation now inflicted upon masses of people, subjecting them to hardship and homelessness on a scale not seen since the Great Depression.
Who are the real criminals, the multimillionaires or the vulnerable, shattered families trying to survive?
