Page One
From Quebec City to Berkeley
Editor:
Today at 4:30 p.m., a mass rally calling for an end to the criminalization of homelessness will be held on the steps of the Berkeley City Council Chambers, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way.
The council is slated to vote tonight on the Homeless Human and Civil Rights Resolution, as well as, to consider thousands of dollars in cutbacks in homeless services.
It is not coincidental that today's rally will occur just days after 30, 000 protesters gathered in Quebec City to denounce the negotiations of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas.
It is not coincidental because the corporate-dominated globalization against which protesters in Quebec rallied themselves, the neoliberal economic order which the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas seeks to expand, is a large root cause of homelessness and poverty in our community.
It is the flight of thousands of high-paying manufacturing jobs overseas during the last three decades; the withdrawal of subsidized housing, welfare, and other social safety net spending; and the growth of the prison industrial complex – all three of these hallmarks of corporate globalization and neoliberal governments around the world – which has left so many disenfranchised poor and homeless on the streets of Berkeley.
What is fundamentally at stake both in the struggle for homeless human rights in Berkeley and in the struggle for fair trade, workers rights, and environmental protection represented by the broad coalition of protesters in Quebec City; what is fundamentally at stake in both cases is the claim that human life is more important than profit; the claim that equality, justice, and democracy should be the pillars of human society and not merely words we inscribe upon buildings.
In Quebec City, protesters decried the creation of a new global governance system devised for, by, and of representatives of multinational corporations and elite trade officials; a governance system which excludes the vast majority of civil society.
In Berkeley, homeless people are decrying a legal system which not only excludes them from its governance process, but criminalizes their very existence with laws such as California Penal Code 647j, which says that sleeping outside – and hence homelessness itself – is a misdemeanor.
What is at stake in Berkeley and Quebec, on a local and a global level, is a fundamental questioning of the distribution of wealth and power in our world. We live in a world where some few individuals own billions of dollars and vast quantities of land; while billions of our brothers, sisters, and children live in poverty – in various states of oppression and disenfranchisement.
We live in a world of horrendous inequalities which are growing larger every day. We live without democracy, with a government on all levels that responds more to corporate interests and the lure of those few with money, than it does to fundamental human values and rights.
And so the struggle continues, as it has for 508 years upon this continent. The struggle continues as the memories of our ancestors – of Martin and Gandhi, of Malcolm and Zapata – urge us forward: forward into the light of hope, towards the dream of a world where no one is deemed a second class citizen; a world where no one has their very existence deemed illegal by a repressive state – not homeless people, not immigrants, not African-Americans, not natives, not gays and lesbians, not Jews, not pagans. And so we struggle forward into the light of hope, towards a world of democracy, justice, and liberty.
Darren Noy
Lead Community Organizer for Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS)
Consultant didn’t address breadth of parking problem
The Daily Planet received a copy of this letter originally sent to Interim Planning Director Wendy Cosin, edited for length.
I am writing on behalf of the First Congregational Church of Berkeley and of the churches or church-related organizations whose names are appended below.
Representatives of many of our neighboring institutions and I attended the final workshop you convened on March 19 at Trinity Hall to hear an informal report on the Southside/Downtown Transportation Demand Management Study.
We were all very concerned to hear the city had commissioned and was accepting a report on traffic management in our area that only addressed part of the problem.
Traffic in our area is a seven-day a week, morning, afternoon and evening problem. Yet we were informed that the consultants had only considered the issue of commuting and thus traffic from 6 to 8 a.m. and 4 to 6 p.m. weekdays. Yet as we, who have our organizations based there, must provide parking for our members and visitors, such a limited study hardly addresses the problem of traffic.
The main arterials, e.g., Bancroft, Durant, Piedmont, College, Dana, Fulton, are congested throughout the day. Parking is an all-day problem. Our church lot, which has 55 spaces, is often filled on weekdays and officers like myself who visit it frequently on church business arrive to find the lot full, in many cases by commuters, and we have to look for parking in the street or paying lots. The consultant merely stated, out of ignorance rather than study, the church lots were underutilized! That is hardly the case.
Evenings can be especially bad with event parking in the Haas Center, Zellerbach Hall, Hertz Hall, and our churches, which also function as community events centers. The First Congregational Church of Berkeley, for example, seats 750 people and often has capacity or near capacity crowds for such events as the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.
When asked about non-commuter traffic, weekend traffic and event traffic the consultant said he had not studied and had no idea of the numbers. And he was only doing his job.
We believe it would be irresponsible on the part of the city, and negligent to property owners, to ignore this traffic created by the busy social, cultural and sports calendar of Southside institutions.
These very events are an essential part of what makes Southside a distinct and vital part of Berkeley. And they were ignored! The street vendors on Telegraph bring surges of traffic on the weekends. These vendors are licensed by the city. How can it encourage and support this business and not consider parking for the visitors who patronize the vendors?
Sunday church services for the Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist and Methodist churches now fill not only our own lots, much of the city parking facility between Durant and Channing, but, most importantly, the university Stiles lot bounded by Bancroft, Dana and Durant, and the tennis court lot between Channing and Haste. Yet we are told by the university that the former lot will be built on in two to three years and that the latter lot will probably be built on in five years.
Our parishioners will have no place to park. The city has refused the offer of the Presbyterians to add the two floors to the municipal parking facility, which it was designed to accommodate.
We urge the city to complete the study, to develop accurate figures on current traffic throughout the day and evening on the number of parking spaces needed to accommodate this traffic.
Henry Snyder
for the FCCB
Rev. Esther Hargis
First Baptist Church of Berkeley
Mary Ann Peyovich, General Manager, Berkeley City Club
