A safe camp site for the homeless on a golf course? One California county's answer

STOCKTON 12/11/2024 "SJ County Supervisors: Where Opinions Collide"!
Here’s a deep-dive video from yesterday's county supervisors meeting where the purchase of Oakmoore golf course was approved. Like watching a heated game of golf with people taking sides and swinging their opinions left and right. The purchase was given the green light, but not without a lively debate on the proposed safe camp site for the homeless. It was like a real-life mosaic coming to life, a rollercoaster of opinions and emotions from local residents and business owners. Let's just hope this decision doesn't land us in the rough.
BACKGROUND: Part of this plan of action is to use a part of the massive acreage as a safe camp site for unsheltered people, aka the homeless. Since this site rubs shoulders with a local business community literally right across the street those businesses as well as others have raised some serious questions and concerns about this project.
No strangers to being victimized by meth-fueled members of the vagrant population, the business owners should never be victimized while both tempers and insurance rates rise by way of busted windows, break-ins, theft, fires, public defecation and harassment of customers all leading to loss of business. The businesses here provide needed goods and services as well as jobs for the city and pay a lot of taxes that keep the lights on at the County Admin Building and city hall.
DATA POINT: Business owners are by nature and definition VALUE CREATORS, risking their own capital to provide goods, services and jobs to a city. Politicians are by nature VALUE DESTROYERS via over-regulation and excessive taxation in choking a business's ability to expand, provide more jobs, etc.
Now the county has issued public statements about the matter, stating that doing nothing is not an option and their goal is to make homelessness “rare, brief and non-recurring”. This would include having the campsite monitored with support services located onsite. A question now is exactly how many of these homeless campers would this site be able to handle properly with the estimated unsheltered population around 4,000? Would this even put a dent in the problem? And exactly how is the security issue going to be handled? Considering that rehabs and halfway houses in L.A. that operate in smaller environments with fewer clients still require an around-the-clock security team speaks to the legitimacy of the concerns raised by our local business community about a several-acre campsite in their backyard.
#Stockton #SanJoaquinCounty #homelessness