Public Comment

Dear Mr. Kapfer,

I'm writing to you to address the illegal construction at Pathways, which is in violation of federal law and the city code meant to bring us into compliance with federal law. I'm copying and pasting the problems, which I've already raised with Council, the Mayor, the City Manager's Office, Mr. Burroughs, and Mr. Buddenhagen, as well as the Disability Coordinator and the secretaries of the Homeless and Welfare Commissions, and I'm trying to find out what the path to approval looked like so that we can avoid problems like this in the future, both in terms of the humiliation and injury they are causing to residents at the center and in terms of wasted taxpayer money and the possibility of lawsuits that this is opening up. I would like to know who issued the final approval; whether or not there was a CASp certified consultant or inspector involved, and what the process was from the design stage to approval. I'm hoping that you can share that with me as soon as possible, but hopefully no later than Wednesday afternoon because it will be a topic of discussion at the HWCAC meeting.

The prior messages show the crux of the issue. I was referred to you by the Planning Department.

Thanks for your prompt attention to this matter. I left you a phone message earlier, and you can also reach me by phone at (510) 526-7259 during regular business hours, but this is a landline so no text.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards,

Mary Behm-Steinberg 

Prior emails:

to tburroughs, pbuddenhagen, Brittany, Dominika, Mary-Claire, Helen 

Dear Mr. Burroughs and Mr. Buddenhagen, 

I hope this finds you well. I'm writing to follow up on a phone message I left earlier, so that you'll also have my email address. I'm writing to you because your names are both on the contact list for the public hearing on June 12, 2018 regarding Local Adoption of Emergency Amendments to the 2016 California Building Code Governing Emergency Housing. 

Can you please tell me if the STAIR Center has or had an ADA consultant or CASp licensed consultant, and who checked off that ADA requirements were met at the STAIR center? I'm writing to you as a private citizen, though I also serve on the city's Homeless and HWCAC Commissions. I'm hoping to find this out before Monday night's Homeless Commission meeting. 

Thanks in advance for your help. I very much appreciate it. 

I hope this finds you well. I toured the Stair Center before I left town last Wednesday, and I was really disturbed by what I saw and heard there. I wish I had remembered to bring a camera and tape measure, because simply slapping an ADA accessibility label and a wheelchair icon on something doesn’t make it so. These aren’t nit-picky things: they are actually causing damage to peoples’ mobility equipment and preventing them from using the bathrooms at all at times. I wanted to get this done as quickly as possible, so please excuse the lack of better editing. 

The catalyst for this is doors without push buttons, though that is far from the only serious problem. While there are ramps to get into the buildings, without push buttons on the doors, you still can't safely access the buildings. Other people on the tour kindly opened them for me, and staff were certainly friendly and personable, but the group became quite diffuse, and the first time I tried to open one of those doors myself, I found out how heavy it was, and that it slams shut the minute you let go of it. My shoulder is still cursing at whoever signed off on this being accessible. I wondered how someone with a wheelchair might handle that. I soon found out--as well as finding out that while staff was very friendly and personable to me, and promised to work on my suggestions, their responses to the people who actually live there are allegedly quite different. 

I was allowed to take a look in each of the dorm rooms. There were a couple people home in one of them, and while staff were busy with the other visitors' questions, I got to chat with them for a few minutes. One was in a chair and said he couldn't walk, the other was a single mother who, as an aside from access issues, had been separated from her son. The lady's son has a job and is couchsurfing, and Stair is trying to push her into a shared housing arrangement with a stranger instead of her own family, who wasn't brought to the Stair Center with her. She said she's just using it for a roof over her head while she looks for housing herself, since staff isn't responding to her needs. 

Art Saldana was the man in the wheelchair, and he told me he can't walk. He informed me that his chair has been damaged more than once by those doors slamming on the control mechanism. Easy Does It can't always just run over for an instant fix, and even if they could, it is horrifying that someone would have to risk bodily injury to use the facilities, and from a budget standpoint, it is beyond stupid to keep paying for repair fees that should never have been necessary in the first place, had common sense accessibility been in place. So when someone in a powerchair is even able to wrangle the door open and it slams shut, it damages the joysticks on the chairs, leaving the person without any means of reaching the bathrooms or showers. Art told me he had asked repeatedly for a backup manual chair to be available, and BACS staff ignored him. He also stated that staff would use the ramps as a place to leave things out of convenience, so access was often blocked anyway. When I mentioned this to staff, they were open to getting another chair and tried to make it seem like they were doing a great job from having obtained a chair for Art in the first place, but I wondered why it took someone like me, who isn't a client, to have them make that promise when there had been such humiliating problems happening there that they had been informed of, repeatedly. One of them said "Oh, you've been talking to Art. He's my favorite. We get along great." Funny, but that's not what Art said. 

Art also said he was told that they were allowed to bring electrical appliances that were less than 13" high, and that he had brought a new microwave that he bought himself. They said it was a fire hazard, which I understand, but he claims they took it away and won't tell him where it is. He doesn't think he'll get it back when he moves. 

Art has a speech impediment, and I had problems understanding everything he said, so I wanted him to write me a note to confirm that I had heard him correctly on all points. He promised to do so. He told me that BACS had placed him in an accessible place, then stopped paying for it and moved him to two other places, both with access issues. I would like to sit down with him and write things down to confirm that I understood him right, but if staff is doing things like this and what the single mother mentioned above was saying, they need to be removed. 

The bathrooms themselves also had accessibility issues. The only gender neutral bathroom is in the office. Sadly, simply hanging a sign on the door with a wheelchair icon and an ADA accessible sign doesn't make it so. There was maybe 12" of clearance between the front of the toilet and a shelf they put in front of it to hold toilet paper and cleaning supplies. Even without the walker, I would be concerned people would hit their knees on it. Staff first made excuses that that's really a staff bathroom, and clients only come in there to talk about housing options, but anyone with even rudimentary training in access issues would know that people in chairs frequently have neurological issues that make easy and immediate access to a bathroom essential. Not having an accessible bathroom also precludes BACS from hiring staff with mobility issues, and clearly, they need someone with that expertise. They promised to move the shelf, but even if they do, I don't think there's adequate room to turn a chair in there. I'd like to go back with a camera and a tape measure when I'm not constrained by time and find out. 

The showers I saw also had a hard lip on them that was at least an inch high, presumably to block water getting out, and I was having a hard time imagining how someone who couldn't get up would be able to get in and out by themselves. 

As an aside, there were no gender neutral shower facilities, and the only gender neutral toilet was in the office, not accessible, and not available at night. Staff stated that gender non-binary and trans people were just expected to use the facilities for the gender they most identify with. Men and women are kept together in the dorms. which is a recipe for fear in a place that has had fights break out. 

There were also problems they hadn’t even considered with access to medications. 

*If you need to refrigerate a medication you need 24 hour access to, the only possible place right now is in the communal refrigerators in the dining area. Insulin-dependent diabetes is a good example of how this could be a recipe for disaster. There are only a handful of insulin types, and people frequently reuse their own needles (I did when I was uninsured, I can see people doing it if they’re running low and not able to get out to resupply). Grabbing someone else’s bottle is a recipe for spreading contagion. 

*Marinol/Dronabinol is a Big Pharma synthetic THC that is prescribed instead of cannabis for some people and must be refrigerated or it melts. Anyone who knew what that was and had access to it might be tempted to steal someone’s prescription for a little recreational fun. The same is obviously true for things like opioids. 

*There is no locking storage next to beds for things like needles, or other prescriptions (like opioids, which could also be targeted for recreational theft) that have to be available 24/7. Again, if someone needs cannabis for neurological issues, those issues are often worse at night, when circulation slows down. Nausea from digestive disorders and chemo can also necessitate 24-hour access. Where can someone store it where they don’t have to worry about being shaken down by someone who just wants to get high? 

*I didn’t see any sharps containers. Staff told me they were behind the trash cans in the dorms, but I didn’t get a chance to go back and confirm that, and for obvious reasons, I’m not just ready to take staff’s word for it at this point. 

Other problems that came to light via Carole Marasovic but aren’t necessarily access-related included violence in overcrowded conditions. It’s also worth noting that men, women, and trans people are all expected to bunk in the same rooms, and that according to staff, 75% or so of Stair residents are male. Carole had a lot of very useful input on this and regularly follows the incident reports. One such fight involved someone using a lead pipe as a weapon. Talking about problems I encountered at Stair yesterday, one activist on condition of anonymity told me that one of the reason people don’t want to accept shared placements is that staff is completely insensitive to who people are being paired with, and one person allegedly turned down a placement because they were trying to pair the client with someone who assaulted them. As the example of the single mother mentioned above would seem to illustrate, they certainly have no problem with separating families. 

Carole had a lot very useful questions regarding this visit that I'd like to hear more about. We got separated during the visit, and I haven’t been able to sit down with her yet and compare notes for a larger report. I will be sending her my notes, but have already gone over the broad strokes with her. This is not looking good for expansion before some very fundamental problems are addressed. 

I will be refining this report further as I follow up at the Stair Center, hopefully with an architect with expertise on ADA issues (I have someone in mind who I hope will be available and has no bias or connection with city politics). The bottom line is that I see a lot of reasons for people not to feel safe here, and I’m hearing a lot of excuses for what never should have been designed this way in the first place. I hope that these things can be rectified in a timely manner. 

Thanks so much for all you do—I know how difficult all of this is, and I realize that options are limited with the available funding. All the more reason that hiring a professional grant-writing team to go after our share of the $4.5 billion dollars pledged regionally by Big Tech to provide VLI housing and combat homelessness is so essential. Priorities like permanent subsidies and keeping Dorothy Day House open shouldn’t have to compete with each other and leave us all arguing over crumbs, and it is scandalous to me that we aren't aggressively pursuing that money so that we can make places like Dorothy Day earthquake safe and no one has to take their life in their hands to access it. There’s no excuse for not doing everything we can to gain resources in a humanitarian crisis. 

As long as we're discussing access and poverty, I'm hard pressed to understand why, after the HWCAC already recommended it, we aren't using the Ed Roberts Campus for emergency shelter as well. There is no greater need among people with disabilities than from those who are already struggling just to survive on the streets, and it is embarrassing to me personally to live in the so-called home of the disability rights movement and have the poorest and most desperate among us left behind by the the very institutions that are supposed to be looking out for our best interests. Repeated calls and showing up in person have not gotten me calls back or a response. When I show up in person and wait in line (which is very difficult for me to do at present), I'm told by the front desk that they only want to deal with people registering for some event or other, and I should just leave a message (which is of course, never responded to). If it's a matter of inadequate funding for sufficient staff, then they should be speaking up and advocating for this issue even as they make their case for more resources. To ignore it and ignore advocates (who are part of their cohort, and have not gotten personal help when necessary from them either) seems really unconscionable to me, but I remain open to dialog (if anyone ever bothers even acknowledging my requests for coffee, information, help, etc.!). 

Thank you for all your time and hard work on this--I know there are far more access issues in the city than are reasonable for one person to have to address, and I also realize that the city took far too much time to hire you at all, so I know you're playing catch up. I hope that with clear, frank, communication on all sides, people in leadership roles can address the challenges we're facing head-on, without deflection, and engage in a productive, collaborative process with stakeholders that gives everyone the respect they deserve and the services they need. 

Thanks again for all you do. I look forward to speaking with you further soon.