Editorials

It's Groundhog Day Again in Berkeley

Becky O'Malley
Friday March 20, 2015 - 01:28:00 PM

The most colossal waste of time for many people who have better things to do took place at the Berkeley City Council meeting on Tuesday. I include myself among them. 

You can get an approximately factual rundown of what happened from berkeleyside.com or the Inside BayArea site of the Bay Area News Group. But the whole performance was so chaotic and badly managed that the usually competent Tom Lochner, a reporter for BANG, got the outcome wrong in his lead. (Or perhaps his editor should be blamed.) 

Here’s that lead: 

“A set of new rules of conduct on commercial-area sidewalks and other public spaces was approved Tuesday by the City Council.” 

That would have been a sensible outcome, at least procedurally coherent if not good public policy. But what seems to have actually happened was more complicated and less rational than that. 

Here’s what the also-competent Emile Raguso reported that new District 8 Councilmember Lori Droste thought was going on: 

“I don’t think this particular measure is criminalizing homelessness. I don’t think it’s draconian. And if it was, I wouldn’t support it,” she said, adding that, in her experience, many people who have struggled to overcome homelessness, addiction and other problems have needed to face consequences before getting help. “There’s nothing wrong in analyzing these issues.” 

So, did the council approve the new rules or did they ask the city manager to study them? And do they or don’t they criminalize homelessness? 

Here’s what opponents reported in a press release after the meeting: 

“Last night, Berkeley City Council voted six to three to instruct the City Manager to produce recommendations on eleven different proposals concerning homelessness. Six of these would be criminal sanctions for everyday activities. No new law has been passed, or can be passed prior to a future City Council vote on the City Manager's recommendations.” 

That’s what I saw myself. I think the SAFEBerkeley group (which includes some smart folks, U.C. professors and several excellent lawyers) got it right. 

But I can’t blame anyone for being baffled by what came down. 

The council hasn’t criminalized homelessness YET.  

On the other hand, the majority did vote to study new and better ways of criminalizing homelessness. You might call that a distinction without a difference. 

Quoted Councilmember Droste, recently elected, seems to think that legislation about facing consequences might cure the mental illness or the poverty which are at the root of a sizeable percentage of the unappealing street behaviors which the small number of complainers (preponderantly commercial real estate agents) at Tuesday’s meeting referenced. With all due respect, that’s a naïve point of view—it’s a lot more complicated than that, as the journal articles quoted by a couple of the academics present at the meeting document. 

It would be a good idea for the council majority to read these two papers before further opining on the topic: 

California's New Vagrancy Laws: 

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2558944 

No Safe Place the Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities: 

http://www.nlchp.org/documents/No_Safe_Place 

Instead of blaming the victims of poverty and inadequate mental health treatment, councilmembers might question the city manager about why laws already on the books are not being enforced. 

A major complaint on Tuesday was about smoking on the streets: tobacco, marijuana and methamphetamine. Regardless of the substance, smoke is annoying or even dangerous to the non-smokers who are exposed, and it’s already illegal. Why can’t the city of Berkeley simply enforce the existing laws against smoking in places where others are affected? 

Another complaint was that street people have been observed urinating and defecating in public places. Again, it’s already illegal, folks. State law. And also, almost no one, in whatever mental state they might be, chooses to defecate in public if a private alternative is available. Common sense. 

We just don’t have enough public restrooms. Why can’t that just be taken care of by our city government? Even porta-potties would be an improvement until real public restrooms (clean and well-maintained) can be built. 

I have heard no convincing explanation for why these particular six silly proposed rules came directly to the City Council from the Downtown Berkeley Association, bypassing the Homeless Commission and the Mental Health Commission altogether. Or why Arreguin and Maio agreed to carry them for the DBA. 

One way you could tell that Councilmember Linda Maio is completely clueless is that when she was interviewed on the radio she repeatedly cited the Downtown MERCHANTS’ Association as the source of the proposals which she proferred. The “merchants” are the victims, not the cause of Downtown’s ills. 

The Downtown Berkeley Association (it’s not “Business” Association either) is now dominated by the big property owners these days: the commercial landlords who are squeezing the small businesses out of existence with insanely greedy rents. That’s why there are so many storefront vacancies now. 

Their obvious goal is to maximize their per-square-foot return by building towers of expensive condos for out-of-town investors—the same kind of thing now going on in San Francisco, New York and all sorts of other cities around the world, as the 1% looks for entertaining places to park their excess money. These are the same interests that funded the recent “No on R” campaign at the rate of more than 10 to 1. 

They would like the little guys to go away. Example: the ongoing struggle over the displacement of the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas for a monster condo building. 

I went to the council meeting on Tuesday with a single goal in mind, not as a reporter but as a citizen. I’d been a faithful voter for BCA-backed candidates for many years, too busy in our family software start-up to pay much attention to what the people I voted for were actually doing. When I learned in 1994 that our so-called “progressive” council majority and then-Assemblymember Tom Bates were pushing two ballot measures (N and O) aimed at prohibiting asking for money on the street in Berkeley, as an ACLU member since before I was even old enough to vote I was outraged. 

Measures N and O won at the polls that year, but lost in federal court for violating the First Amendment, just as we warned the city council they would. When the same crowd (including Maio) tried it again with Measure S a couple of years ago, we beat them at the polls, thanks to the Downtown area voters. 

From the berkeleyside.com article: 

“(In 19 of Berkeley’s 101 precincts, over 60% of voters supported Measure S. Strong support for Measure S came overwhelmingly from the hills and North Berkeley. Precincts with large numbers of students voted heavily against Measure S, as did many precincts in South Berkeley; in three precincts, fewer than 30% of voters supported the measure.)” 

I could hardly believe that they were trying it again, at enormous cost of time and money, yours and mine and everyone else’s, but they are. 

Did anyone see the movie Groundhog Day, where the day’s events kept happening again and again and again? We’re living it. 

What we have in Berkeley is primarily a management problem, and City Manager Christine Daniel ought to be held to account. We have enough laws on the books, city and state both, to deal with the major annoyances if they were enforced—we certainly don’t need to waste time blue-skying new ones banning trivialities like reclining on planters and tying things to bike racks. 

The monumentally confused discussion of the DBA’s witless proposals on Tuesday represents hours lost from the lives of more than 100 Berkeleyans who were there that they’ll never get back. I resent it, and you should too.