The Sacramento City Council has reached a new low in its anti-homeless demagoguery

Here’s a useful guideline for assessing government responses to homelessness: If your representatives are talking about where your homeless neighbors are but not where they’re going, they’re probably lying to you.

That is certainly what the Sacramento City Council did this week by unanimously passing a ban on encampments within 500 feet of schools. The council’s absurd new homeless-free school zones will be about as effective in addressing homelessness as drug-free school zones were in solving substance abuse. And yet the city and county alike appear to be cursed with a bumper crop of politicians who never tire of finding new ways not to solve the region’s most pressing problem.

Rather than setting about providing the supportive and affordable housing units and shelter beds needed to bring thousands of people indoors, they keep devising new ways of rousting them from whatever marginal outdoor accommodations they have found. They can’t be in the parks, they can’t be on the sidewalks, they can’t be anywhere near “critical infrastructure” (whatever that is) and now they can’t be in the same neighborhood as a school.

It has to be acknowledged that no one wants to see squalor or suffering or chaos or madness near the schools their children attend — or on their sidewalks or in their parks or, if you’re a really compassionate sort, anywhere. It’s also worth noting that at least hundreds of homeless children attend the city’s schools. The way to deal with this is to enable children and adults to live indoors, not to move them — or, as often as not, merely threaten to move them — to other parts of the outdoors where their presence will inevitably be unwelcome to someone else.

The council’s latest iteration of its long-standing failure to do anything effective in this regard is the brainchild, to use the term loosely, of members Jeff Harris and Angelique Ashby. Harris was last seen standing up to one of the most oppressed groups in U.S. history, Native Americans, so sticking it to his city’s dispossessed was a logical follow-up. And it doesn’t take a high-priced political consultant to notice that it’s late October and that Ashby is running for election to the state Senate.

Ashby’s colleague Katie Valenzuela offered some appropriate criticism of the measure and asked for a reasonable amendment excusing camps that aren’t causing disruption, which Ashby haughtily refused. Valenzuela joined the rest of the council in voting for it anyway, which is a hallmark of a skillful pander: Even politicians who know it’s wrong are forced to get behind it based on the sheer power of its dishonest populism.

Maybe this base bit of demagoguery will win the councilwoman a few more votes toward her coveted seat in the Capitol. If it does, that will be the underwhelming sum of its achievement.