Public Comment

"You know how to keep a wage slave? Scare the piss out of them." - Mike Zint

United Nations representative Leilani Farha and a recording crew dropped by Berkeley's Old City Hall on Sunday, January 21st, 2018. But they didn't want to talk to Berkeley officials or politicians. They wanted to talk to the people living in tents on the front lawn.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing Leilani Farha is including housing conditions in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley for an international human rights report documenting the crisis of people living in poverty on the streets. The UN crew sat in the midday chill on the Old City Hall steps surrounded by tent dwellers, local advocates, and concerned community members to hear their stories.

First They Came for the Homeless is the group nearest Old City Hall steps, the group the City of Berkeley has chased repeatedly from location to location in sweeps well-documented with video, news stories, and photographs. Berkeley has easily a dozen tent groups or more, but this group is committed to documenting and confronting Berkeley's cruel and unconstitutional responses to the human necessities of sleep, warmth, food, and shelter. 

As much as the City of Berkeley likes to console itself with the amount it spends on "homelessness", an amount inflated by the extraordinary cost of middle-of-the-night overtime police sweeps, its current capacity and future proposals are for a minimal ratio of the people currently in need. The city often offers only temporary housing or shelter which puts people right back on the street. 

But the group in front of Old City Hall is brimming with brilliant, practical, cost-free ideas. Walk by and note the bank of solar panels available for anyone to recharge electronics. Note the donation boxes, the information tent, the array of literature. There are ingenious fixes to the problems encountered in outdoor living being shared freely among the group which meets and checks in regularly to create, if possible, practical, collective responses to the challenges they face. 

The tent group's speakers and legal representative were clear and concise as they recounted the years of battling with the city under the previous Mayor Tom Bates administration and the new one under Mayor Jesse Arreguin. The middle-of-the-night raids have resulted not only in obvious disruption, but have injured people often unable to move to gather their belongings as quickly as ordered by police, such that crucial property such as medications and electronics are confiscated and often destroyed. Even the legal obligation the city has to "store" items for a fixed period of time was revealed to be a dumpster under a tarp where one's phone might sit in the rain while one attempts to get through to a phone message line which no live person ever answers and where one can only-- leave a phone number.  

Berkeley, Oakland, and even Santa Cruz are showing a few signs that they recognize decades of chasing homeless people from site to site is not solving problems for anyone. It has not reduced the exasperation of townspeople baffled at the seeming eternity of homelessness, even with "Housing First" rhetoric finally surfacing here and there in written policy. The determination in Berkeley in particular to house only a minimal ratio of people and to ignore the more creative use of currently empty commercial and residential space is only modestly vulnerable to at least one pending court challenge. 

The UN's inclusion of Berkeley is recognition, according to UN representative Farha, that California's response has been to generate a mountain of anti-homeless ordinances aimed at forcing often disabled, vulnerable people to move endlessly from location to location and master a court system designed to trap and catch anyone who misses a court date long before any technical conviction of a crime. Other countries, she notes, are not necessarily as dedicated to criminalizing the conditions of people in crisis. 

But there is no need to look to the United Nations for solutions. They are right there in every tent city. The articulate, measured voices of those who have experienced living and working out problems together often know their rights and also the simple measures any city can take to improve outdoor living when shelters are full, such as port-a-potties, wash stations, and trash pickup. They know that the cost of providing these simple measures is far less than circling people through courts and fending off lawsuits over family photographs and bibles. 

The cost, per person, of Berkeley's proposed Pathways project, a tent city near the dump, is easy to determine with simple math. And if one takes that cost and looks at empty houses to rent currently in Berkeley at market rate you'll find a cheaper option. There, on the front lawn of city hall as well as elsewhere in several other tent groups you'll find people who work and eat together, who share responsibilities, who cooperate, and who can articulate the true portrait of Berkeley's failed policies better than any politician. It's time for the larger community to reject the stereotypes popular in most media coverage of people in need, and make sure both they and myth-busting common sense solutions are included in the dialogue.