Bee Opinionated: Neighborhood homeless complaints + Becoming Californian + Sacramento women
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Happy first night of Hanukkah, it’s Robin Epley here again with The Sacramento Bee’s Editorial Board.
“Say a homeless man had run into your yard with a machete, yelling that he was going to kill you. To chase him away, ‘I helped him over the fence with my shovel,’ said Ron Jellison, a 73-year-old former special education teacher who grew up just behind Sacramento’s Del Paso Regional Park and lives there still. This wasn’t a one-time thing, either. ‘I’ve been attacked three times on my property.’”
Metro columnist Melinda Henneberger wrote last week about the neighborhood just behind Sacramento’s new Outreach and Engagement Center on Auburn Boulevard, which opened in late September.
“None of these incidents occurred since September, though. And it’s hard to say whether things have really gotten worse since then, or whether preexisting problems in the area are easy to pin on a program that neighbors never wanted and can’t help seeing as a magnet for more trouble,” Henneberger wrote.
Since September, though, there have been “many more complaints” to the city from neighbors, according to Hezekiah Allen of Sacramento’s Department of Community Response.
Neighbors seem to expect the center to be doing more to get homeless people already living nearby off the street. But since the program is voluntary and referral-only, that’s not how it was set up to work, Henneberger wrote. And just as many homeless people are where they are as a result of past trauma, so have the neighborhood opponents been traumatized.
“The clash between these neighbors and the desperately needed center, run by other compassionate people, is the kind of conflict that continues to keep programs across the country from ever opening at all. So somehow we have to figure out how to make situations like this work. Which is what neighbors and officials from Hope Cooperative, which operates the city-owned center, are in theory going to try to do at a community Zoom meeting on Dec. 13.”
Feeling Minnesota
Editorial cartoonist and columnist Jack Ohman wrote last week about his 10th anniversary at The Bee and in California.
A Minnesota native, Ohman will soon have lived in California longer than he was “home” — but in a way, he wrote, all Americans of a certain age grew up in California, thanks to California culture:
“Americans of a certain age — my age — experienced California by watching ‘The Brady Bunch,’ ‘The Streets of San Francisco,’ ‘Dragnet,’ ‘L.A. Law,’ ‘CHiPs’ and ‘The Rockford Files.’ We are all virtual California natives — even Ron DeSantis. (OK, maybe not him. He looks more like a Minnesotan, with his flat, dour affect and off-the-rack suits.)”
Despite also living in Oregon for nearly three decades, Ohman says he never called himself an Oregonian — they would never allow it — but in California, it’s as easy as watching TV:
“I became a Californian with an ease that is impossible in any other state. Do you think you can live in Texas for 10 years and then call yourself a Texan? No, Bubba, yew cain’t. You can’t put on being a New Yorker or a Vermonter either. But you can ease into being a Californian. Have a pinot. Get the curb feelers on your wheels. Grow your hair surfer-length (I did).”
Two Opposing Truths
“I can be excited that the city of Sacramento now has a female-majority council and simultaneously furious that it has taken my entire lifetime to get back to that point. Because the last time this happened was in 1989: The year the Berlin Wall fell, protests erupted in Tiananmen Square, the first Bush was president, ‘Seinfeld’ premiered — and I had just been born.”
I wrote last week about the new female majority on the Sacramento City Council, a feat accomplished only once before in our city’s long and illustrious history, and that was more than three decades ago.
In cities with a population of more than 10,000, women make up about 31% of officeholders, according to a study by the Center for American Women and Politics. In California, that number is closer to 39%. In West Sacramento, all five council members are women.
It is something to celebrate, but thanks to an increasingly hostile political environment, these new councilwomen will also now be targets for misogyny, harassment and assault:
The Threats and Harassment Dataset is a new national database developed by Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative and the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. They found that women who are public officials were targeted at a higher frequency than others, accounting for nearly 43% of recorded incidents between January 2020 and September 2022.
Studies by the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue have comparable findings, suggesting increasing rates of violence, harassment and threats toward women in politics, especially women of color.
“These gradual gains, carefully woven together over decades like a piece of lace handed down from mother to daughter, are still too fragile. They are a reminder that progress is not inevitable. I wish I could celebrate these wins without feeling the weight of their lateness. I wish I could express my joy at the election of (Caity) Maple, (Karina) Talamantes and (Lisa) Kaplan without the heavy knowledge that they will be targeted and harassed solely on the basis of their sex.”
Opinion of the Week
“You know what’s sad? No Americans ever come to our rallies.” — An Iranian friend of Henneberger’s on the lack of support Iranians experience from feminists and American progressives. Despite protests and rallies occurring regularly to protest conditions in Iran, Henneberger wrote that she and a Bee photographer were the only non-Iranians in attendance at a recent sit-in — and the absence has been noticed.
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Chag Sameach!
Robin Epley
