At some point in history, people will look back on this country’s responses to homelessness during the ‘80s, ‘90s, and early 2000s, and most assuredly will wonder, “What the hell were these people thinking?”
The notion that local governments can protect downtown business interests from having to witness the realities of poverty by simply criminalizing the presence of poor people harkens back to the days of Jim Crow, Anti-Okie laws, and almshouses.
But from Portland’s Sit-Lie law to Berkeley’s Public Commons for Everyone to LA’s Safer City Initiative to San Francisco’s, business-directed, but voter-opposed, homeless court, we are seeing a resurgence of the premise that public space is the purview of the business community, and that the only people that have any right to that space are those seen as potential customers or condo tenants.
This concept has advanced to the stage of class warfare. In California, businesses are able to create self-taxing zones usually called Business Improvement Districts (BIDs, or sometimes Community Benefits Districts). BID members use the tax money they collect to directly lobby government and hire security officers who are authorized to function in public areas—even though they are not under public oversight or monitoring.
You have heard talk about “letting no crisis go to waste,” talk that within our current economic meltdown there is opportunity, but opportunity for whom?
Not for poor people. Not for people without housing, for families living in cars, or for individuals in single-room occupancy hotels who are being criminalized out of their communities. It’s the BIDs who are finding more and more opportunities to expand their agenda of displacing poor people so they can enhance profit margins and advance downtown gentrification.
Los Angeles and San Francisco and Berkeley are cities that pride themselves on being enlightened and progressive. But our self-image does not reflect reality.
Homes Not Handcuffs, a report just released by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty and the National Coalition for the Homeless, ranks these three California cities among the 10 meanest in the country. Los Angeles comes in on top, San Francisco is seventh, and Berkeley ranks tenth among the 273 cities listed.
Bob Offer-Westort, civil rights organizer for the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco, says that the report does not exaggerate the meanness of that once famously openhearted city. “Over the past couple years, we’ve seen cops shoot and kill a panhandler who was charged with no crime, rough up youth living on Haight Street on a routine basis, and fail to seriously investigate a string of potentially related stabbing murders of homeless people in Golden Gate Park. Last Fall, the Department of Public Works sprayed down sidewalks in the city’s poorest neighborhood every night with water cannons, regularly soaking and freezing the people sleeping on those sidewalks.”
Coalition volunteers stress that while these are the most dramatic examples of cruelty and callousness, more subtle and systemic assaults on homeless people have been at least as harmful. Outreach volunteer Lance Walker added, “The Mayor and Board have amended the Park Code to increase the number of hours per day during which it is illegal to sleep in our parks by 50 percent. At the same time, they’ve had the police conduct ‘sweeps’ of Golden Gate Park, Union Square, and the South of Market neighborhood. There’s nowhere they want it to be legal to sleep in San Francisco. And then they go and open a special, focused court where two thirds of all defendants are homeless, and the number one charge is sleeping outside.”
Berkeley’s Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS) notes the Berkeley City Council’s passage of the Public Commons for Everyone initiative in 2007 as one of the meaner efforts of that city’s government in recent years, which merits the city’s ranking as tenth meanest in the country. Seeking to “clear the streets of aggressive and disruptive behavior,” the initiative includes behaviors such as “lying on or blocking the sidewalk, smoking near doorways, having a shopping cart, tying animals to fixed objects, littering and drinking in public.
Targeting behavior of people without homes has been taken to extremes in Los Angeles, pushing that city to the top of the list as the meanest in the US. The City of Los Angeles pays more money every year for extra police officers to crack down on poor people in Skid Row than it budgets on homeless services. Harassment in Skid Row focuses on homeless people and in large part is conducted through citations for jaywalking and loitering. At times, police harassment has escalated to police brutality. The Los Angeles Community Action Network has filed a complaint with the Department of Justice concerning targeted harassment and racial profiling in Skid Row. It is no coincidence that Skid Row borders the Fashion District BID.
Homelessness is a spreading and deepening crisis in all of our communities. To deal with it by criminalizing people is inhumane, ineffective, and incredibly expensive. It is also just plain mean.
WRAP has launched a civil rights organizing campaign to challenge these inhumane trends. The campaign combines the strategies of street outreach, organizing, documentation of civil rights violations, and legal defense. It organizes with and ensures legal representation to people at the original point of police contact. It also brings pressure to bear on local governments to stop and dismantle the discriminatory programs they have initiated. This model has curtailed the level of criminalization locally. WRAP members handle close to 3,500 cases a year with a dismissal success rate of over 80 percent.
