Why creating a homeless accountability commission is the epitome of what’s wrong with San Francisco
San Francisco Examiner
By Adam Lashinsky | Special to The Examiner
Oct 14, 2022
Pretty much all ballot initiatives and city commissions are bad ideas. At their best, they are perversions of representative democracy and vehicles for political patronage. At their worst, they are buck-passing, ass-covering diversions by elected and appointed officials who aren’t getting their jobs done.
The Nov. 8 ballot offers a particularly useless referendum that oozes sclerotic political governance on both counts. It is Proposition C, a measure to create a Commission on Homelessness that would provide oversight of The City’s hapless Department of Homelessness and Housing Services.
Its creation would be the epitome of what’s wrong with San Francisco: a toothless layer of bureaucracy that would give the illusion of accountability, but instead would gum up an already convoluted and ineffectual city agency. The ballot maneuver also offers a prime example of how a dysfunctional “city family” of government employees and their business partners takes care of itself without solving The City’s most pressing problems.
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