Public Comment

I'm terrified to sleep tonight. We've had five fires in as many days lit right next to our building by people who are outside and are freezing cold. Our apartment building is within half a block of the former Premier Cru building which the city bought to create low-income housing and then just left empty. 

There is space in there. There are bathrooms in there. More bathrooms and even showers could be situated in there, and If ever there was a need for that building to just save a few lives by being used as a community shelter, this is it. I worked construction when I was younger, and it would take a crew, a couple of weeks, and some money, but the city has money, if not common sense. 

All city systems seem oriented toward the inevitability of keeping the former Premier Cru building locked and letting people burn down our building, one of the very few models of tenant-owned and tenant-run nonprofits in existence. The irony should startle eggI sleep next to my fire extinguisher, which I have had to use to put out one of the fires the fire department dismissed as "permitted" since it was a "warming fire" during this cold snap. This assessment came over the phone after it put out a fire an hour earlier. You can see the fire's scars on the wall under my window. 

If you live in West Berkeley you get used to discrimination. Nobody in the hills who had their property repeatedly jeopardized by fires built against their walls by freezing people trying to keep warm in thirty degree weather would get such a response. Nobody in the hills or in the new, unaffordable apartment buildings would have to live night after night watching for the inevitable result of city neglect with a fire extinguisher by their bedside. 

California is experiencing the worst conflagration in its history, a fire still uncontained with weather patterns never experienced before, winds so strong that fire fighting tools and expectations are in complete revision. The weather pattern is holding with Santa Ana winds expected over and over. The city dysfunction appears to have endured the election. 

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