Editorials

We could call it the Vampire Ordinance. In the 45 years since I came back to Berkeley the attempt to get poor people out of our civic face has surfaced, Un-Dead, what, three, four, five times under different guises. As I’ve said all too many times, I still have in the rafters of my garage a sign that proclaims Assemblymember Tom Bates’ support for Measures N&O, a particularly pernicious incarnation of this vampire which attempted to ban asking for spare change.

I suppose there’s been some progress—the implementation of that version was stalled in federal court on First Amendment grounds. But now it’s time to round up the usual clichés to describe the latest attempt to wish away ugly beggars, something that’s been part of our historic culture for centuries and never seems to die.

It’s “Groundhog Day.” (From a long ago movie where the same thing happened over and over again, every day. Like the Vampire Ordinance.)

“Déjà vu all over again.”(Old timey baseball player Yogi Berra emphatically describing an all-too-familiar occurrence. We’ve seen this one before.)

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing all over again and expecting different results.” (This popular aphorism has been attributed to everyone from Albert Einstein to Mark Twain, but it’s an insult to the interestingly insane folks I know, most of whom have more sense than that.)

There’s no possible excuse for dredging up yet another anxious parsing of the various rules intended to mollify Berkeley burghers who are frightened by encounters with street people. The latest round, which surfaced at a special Berkeley City Council meeting on Thursday of this week, would come under the heading of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."

In this case, it’s not even all the deck chairs on the whole ship, but merely a small subset of them on a little part of one of the lower decks.

Last night we heard from just a few of the many speakers yet another iteration of Berkeley exceptionalism: the quasi-religious belief that vagrants and blackgards come from all over to partake of the wonders of Berkeley’s extra-special social services. I follow the civic fortunes of Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and New York City in the online press to a degree, and I’m here to tell you that every one of these cities has the same self-righteous burghers who believe that their town is uniquely burdened by the poor and doufless.

Guess what? There are many, many transient, homeless, mentally ill and/or unemployed (choose your adjectives) people everywhere these days. Not only that, they’ve been here and everywhere for a long, long time. There are global reasons for this, and blaming Berkeley is not the answer. 

Way back in the early 80s, wlhen my family was launching a mom-and-pop startup on Telegraph Avenue in the loft over the building which now houses Rasputin’s, there was an encampment of older African-American men, mainly veterans, some of them drinkers, who lived in the parking lot which is now a big new ugly UC dorm. They swept the lot out daily, saved a parking place for us and greeted us cheerily by name every morning.  

On the Avenue and in People’s Park, then as now, there were hostile transient youths, drug users, religious nuts, and just plain nuts, and yet it was a great place to start a high tech business, low rent being a big attraction with the Caffe Med and Cody’s close seconds. We stayed there until the 1989 earthquake reminded us that the building was unreinforced masonry and we moved to a one-story stucco alternative in West Berkeley. 

This is why the whining of unsuccessful and even successful business people, both for-profit and “non-profit”, annoys me so much. It’s all too easy to make a scapegoat of the down-and-out and miss the forest for the trees. Berkeley hasn’t lost most of its independent bookstores because of homeless people blocking sidewalks—it’s Amazon, stupid. But for a long time bookstore proprietors didn’t see Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane . That scenario has been repeated by small retailers of all kinds of products all over the country. 

My particular bête noir in downtown Berkeley is the Berkeley Repertory Theater, a very successful enterprise, the “non-profit” beneficiary of hundreds of thousands of dollars of civic support, both as tax expenditures and through the use of the city’s bonding capability. Their spokesperson Susan Medak has never missed an opportunity to pile on the street people who hang around Berkeley’s grandly labelled little Arts District block hoping for a handout from wealthy patrons of the arts. 

One source of my pique, I must admit, is that when the Berkeley Daily Planet was making a futile attempt to become self-supporting through advertising revenue, the Berkeley Rep’s ad buyer told our salesperson self-righteously that they were just not interested in our demographic, preferring the bridge and tunnel crowd from over the hill, for whose benefit the City of Berkeley is even now constructing an immense parking garage on Addison.  

And while we’re on the subject of ungrateful non-profits, a spokeswoman for the Brower Center (”We offer collaboration-driven office space to like-minded businesses and organizations”) complained last night about undesirables who lurk near her lovely new building, which was funded in part by public dollars on the site of a former city parking lot.  

I hate to be rude , but she should Get Over It. If the Browerites don’t like Berkeley, which had street people before she was born, they should have set up their camp in Marin or Walnut Creek.  

Back to those deck chairs: last night Mayor Arreguin and Councilmember Hahn, both intelligent and basically kind-hearted people, wasted a whole lot of their time and that of their fellow councilmembers, a passel of well-paid city officials, at least two police officers and the 50 or more equally intelligent and charitable Berkeleyans who showed up to explain what was wrong with their draft. 

It’s rumored that the two named authors of the proposal pulled an all-nighter or close to it to come up with this document. I talked at last night’s meeting with several people for whom I have the deepest respect who participated in an Ad-Hoc Committee on homelessness assembled by the mayor, all of whom felt that their advice had been ignored in producing the ultimate version.  

How much better it would have been to have put forward a unity draft from the committee, perhaps along the lines of the basic principles enunciated by committee member Margy Wilkinson at the meeting.  

Time for another cliché: 

Have you heard the joke about the guy who lost his car keys on the way into his house from his driveway? His wife came out and found him looking all over the street under the streetlight.  

“Why are you looking over there?” she asked. “You dropped your keys in the driveway.” 

“The light’s better out here,” he replied. 

Starting to tackle the massive national problem of homelessness by marking off little squares of Berkeley sidewalks where the disreputable aren’t allowed to be is like looking for the car keys under the streetlight. The city and the state have a plethora of regulations on the general topic of blocking sidewalks so that pedestrians are impeded, but they are mostly unenforced. Against anyone. 

One of the best comments at the meeting, which I hope she will reiterate in this space, came from civic bulldog Carol Denney, who has done exhaustive research into sidewalk-blocking in Berkeley. No surprise to anyone who walks around town, there are café tables and chairs, sign-boards, flower pots and other assorted commercial tchotchkes all over the sidewalks, and almost none of them have gotten the theoretically required permits to encroach on the public right of way.  

This point, at least, got the attention of Councilmember Hahn, who brightened up at the thought that such permits if required of commercial establishments could be a revenue source that might pay for needed services. Councilmember Harrison asked for language to be added to the proposed new rules which would specify non-discriminatory enforcement. At first some of her colleagues thought she was talking about race, but her intention was to include everyone who occupied sidewalk space for any purpose, not just transients. 

A major problem with the draft presented last night is that it conflated lack of housing with blocking the sidewalk. It’s true that some of those who block sidewalks might be unhoused, but not always. The language labored over last night was solving a problem which hardly exists, that of some simply preventing others from passing. 

The discussion at last night’s Berkeley City Council meeting included exactly no data documenting instances of sidewalks being blocked by people who wouldn’t move themselves or their stuff when asked politely. 

(Factual aside: the two people in my home now have lived in Berkeley for a total of 97 person-years, and neither of us can remember a single instance of being unable to walk along a sidewalk because some person was blocking it. Yes, we might have needed to swerve a few inches a few times, but almost never. But don't get us started on the lethal bicyclists who speed down the Ashby sidewalk past our door to avoid street traffic. ) 

In earlier iterations of the Vampire Ordinance, the general term “problematic street behavior” was used to cover more than sidewalk blocking, but that term seems to have fallen by the wayside, so to speak. Here’s the basic problem: nowadays there are a lot of humans (and sometimes their dogs) who have no place to Be. 

What does it mean to have nowhere to Be? 

All humans need: 

A place to stand. 

A place to sit. 

A place to sleep. 

A place to urinate. 

A place to defecate. 

A place to work. 

And also, people need food, drink and sometimes medical and emotional support. 

All of these needs must be accommodated in some specific place. At election times we hear a lot of talk about “housing first”, but even the housed need some place to be during the day if they can’t get jobs. 

Where are people supposed to simply Be? 

The traditional excuse for these periodic revivals of the Vampire Ordinance is that some people are afraid to go to some parts of Berkeley sometimes because some other people are doing some of these things in public.  

I hate to be rude again, but do get over it. 

All people have to Be somewhere, and until civil society tells them where they can Be, they might be in your face. You will survive. 

Here’s another pertinent cliché: The only thing we have to fear is fear Itself. 

Fear causes baristas to kick Black men out of Starbucks and cops to handcuff them for just for Being there. 

Fear causes waitresses to insult a father on the sidewalk talking to his wife in a sidewalk cafe. 

Fear causes policemen to shoot down a rowdy kid in his Grandma’s back yard. 

Fear causes some people in Berkeley to avoid public places where they’d be perfectly safe and could be enjoying themselves. 

Not all fears should provoke retaliation. Many fears are unfounded.  

I hope that the councilmembers who attended last night’s meeting learned something from the wealth of thoughtful testimony from the concerned citizens who showed up to educate them last night. Since comments were as usual confined to one minute soundbites, they didn’t learn as much as they could have. To public viewers in person or online, councilmembers looked a lot like medieval theologians debating how many angels could sit on the head of a pin as they argued about whether beggars could be 25 feet or 150 feet from a BART entrance. Berkeley can do better.