Homelessness: We Only Say It's Our Top Priority

A recent poll found Californians' top concern to be homelessness, and the Chronicle offers only a perfunctory solution: [bold added]

San Jose homeless encampment (Mercury News)

Their two other top issues — jobs and the economy, followed by housing costs — are closely related to homelessness.

...No city in California can do it alone, in fact. The magnitude of the state’s intertwined problems on housing and homelessness has outstripped the resources of any one local government. Judging from the Public Policy Institute poll results, voters appear to be realizing this. Now they just need their state and local governments to work together on a solution.

For the Bay Area, that means a regional solution, with each city doing its part to increase all housing in general and very low-income housing for the homeless population. Because too many cities have failed to do their fair share, it makes sense for the state to take on a strong enforcement role.

All of our elected leaders need only look at voters’ top concerns to see the wisdom — and the necessity — of this course.

Commuters in stopped traffic trying to get home on the
Hayward-San Mateo Bridge 10 mi away (Mercury News)

The Chronicle editorialists are correct in saying that the problems are "intertwined" but their solution--adding a layer of regional bureaucracy and more power to the State for "enforcement"--is pedestrian, slow, costly and likely to produce reports that would be obsolete as soon as they're printed.

A far more pragmatic approach would be for individual cities to free up housing development on the many thousands of acres of open space in the Bay Area. These lots could be as highly regulated as the cities want to make them and could be developed on a pilot basis. Less bureaucracy, more property tax dollars, less traffic congestion and pollution would be the benefits.

But of course this approach wouldn't even be considered, since we Peninsula property owners prefer the open spaces that we visit 1-2 times a month over our East Bay neighbors who sit on the bridges, cars idling, for hours every day.

So let's get yet another regional planning board going. At least it will create more government jobs, though that's not what the California poll respondents had in mind.