Remember Bill Walton, basketball great and homeless policy expert – OpEd – Eurasia Review

When Bill Walton died on Monday, fans remembered the UCLA star, a two-time NBA champion and one of the greatest centers of all time. Walton became a broadcaster and last year punished the erroneous government policies in San Diego that are now causing misery throughout California.

“I love San Diego and it breaks my heart what is happening to it right now,” Walton said in a 27-minute speech last October. The dream became a “nightmare” and the city faced an “existential challenge”.

Balboa Park, near Walton’s residence, is “dangerous” and “downtown for the same reason.” The bike paths were strewn with garbage and the Embarcadero was a “travesty”. According to Walton, this was because the homeless didn’t understand “the first thing you learn in life – how to clean up after yourself.” Walton saw that homeless people were also involved in crime.

“They steal everything,” Walton said, including water, electricity and “our mail.” This forced Walton to “call the police every day.” In his speech, he called out career politicians who “have never had another job,” especially San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria. He “preached a lot” but had “no plan.”

Gloria “instructed our police not to enforce homeless laws. This is unacceptable.” On the other hand, it wasn’t entirely true that Gloria didn’t have a plan. He was a supporter of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s housing-first policy.

“Housing First does not work, never has, and will never work,” Walton said. If Californians have doubts, economist Lawrence McQuillan shows why Newsom’s plan doesn’t work.

Only Hawaii surpasses California as the most expensive place to build a home, and it takes about five years to go from idea to move. This spending, largely driven by excessive regulation, saddled California with a “serious housing shortage.”

Housing First places few demands on the homeless themselves and displaces both shelter space and treatment solutions. For every person housed under the current plan, “up to four more become homeless.” Simply providing a home for people with drug addictions and mental illnesses “does not address the root causes of homelessness and may worsen the situation.”

“Housing first,” McQuillan explained, is “a misguided, budget-busting, Sisyphean dream of the state political class that has led to the creation of concentrated urban areas suffering human misery such as the Jungle (San Jose), Skid Row (Los Angeles), the Tenderloin (San Francisco) and Wood Street (Oakland).”

Poverty also persists in many parts of Sacramento and San Diego, once called “America’s Greatest City.”

Like McQuillan, Bill Walton supported modern shelter tents as a temporary measure, but there was no “political will”. With Walton’s passing, the city, state and nation have lost an eloquent advocate for common sense policies. Still, people should know more about him. Walton was a big fan of Lithuanian center Arvydas Sabonis, “a combination of Kareem, Larry Bird and Pete Maravich.” Before 1991, Lithuanians were forced to play for the Soviet Union. They wanted to send their own team to the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992, but their country was in ruins. Golden State Warriors assistant coach Donnie Nelson sought out the Grateful Dead.

The group’s foundation charged the Lithuanians a large sum of money and commissioned a logo designer to send a box of tie-dyed T-shirts in Lithuania’s national colors, with an image of a skeleton dunking a basketball. Lithuanians defeated Russia for the bronze medal, and the winners posed in their T-shirts.

In 2011, when Sabonis was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, he asked Bill Walton to be his broadcaster. Before the ceremony, Sabonis slipped Walton one of the original T-shirts from 1992. For Walton, a huge Grateful Dead fan: “It was the most emotional and powerful moment I’ve ever experienced.”

It was a life like no other. Rest in peace, big guy.