Editorials

Today’s the day the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle has designated for us all to pay attention to the homeless. When this was first announced, I was skeptical, viewing it as mainly a publicity stunt. After all, Kevin Fagan, whose tenure at the Chron long precedes the current management, has been providing compassionate and articulate coverage of homelessness for lo these many years, so what was there to add?

It turns out I was wrong. Today’s Chonicle has been pretty much turned over to Kevin, and he’s done a bang-up job, as he usually does. I urge everyone to read it, online or in print, to get a capsule history of attempts to deal with homelessness in San Francisco accompanied by concrete ideas about better ways to do it. It’s unashamed advocacy, which I applaud.

Here in Berkeley, the predominant way that the Hancock/Bates era councils have tried to address homelessness has mostly been to make it illegal. Oh no, not homelessness itself, but “problematic street behaviors” which are the visible manifestation of being out of sync with society and too poor to do much about it. These include begging, sitting on the sidewalk, defecating wherever, and other actions which more affluent and therefore housed disturbed people don’t need to perform. 

On the Berkeleyside.com website today there’s a valiant attempt to catalogue all attempts in Berkeley since 1982 to, yes, I’d say, to criminalize vagrancy, accompanied by a few pitifully inadequate moves toward providing supportive services. It all adds up in the end to the same thing: the property owners in downtown Berkeley just don’t want to see these people, whatever they’re up to. Often their tenants agree. 

There’s one inaccuracy in an otherwise excellent presentation that I noticed: “1994 – Berkeley residents pass Measure O to ban lying on sidewalks. The ACLU filed suit, but the measure was repealed when a new City Council was elected.” 

The reason the ACLU was involved was part of their traditional First Amendment mandate to defend free speech. Measures N&O attempted to ban street beggars from asking for money in designated areas. However the First Amendment allows regulation of time, place and manner, but not content of speech. Federal Judge Claudia Wilken explained that to the attorneys for the city of Berkeley in her court, and the measures were sent back to the council for a re-do, which the next council decided to forego. 

Last week I was in New York City for the first time in many years, mostly in Manhattan with a brief trip to Brooklyn. I can report that indeed something has moved the homeless part of the population out of the public eye in those places. I was approached for money only twice, both times by fairly well-dressed skillful pitchers of pathetic catastrophe stories—more con artists than beggars, really. I saw just one person with the typical shopping cart festooned by overstuffed plastic bags from the window of my bus on Madison Avenue, passing public housing on the way to Harlem. I have no doubt that there are many homeless people in New York, but they’ve been shuffled out of the “nice” areas to somewhere else. I also have no doubt that Berkeley’s Downtown Business Association would like to do the same thing if they could figure it out. 

I can actually remember way back to the time in the 1970s when the first homeless person appeared in the Elmwood, a decade before the Berkeleyside timeline begins, probably before the site’s proprietors moved here. He was a nice looking tall bearded white man of middle age. Many people in the neighborhood knew his name, John, and gave him food and clothing from time. In retrospect, I think he was mentally ill, most likely schizophrenic, but he was a pleasant fellow and got along with everyone until he eventually disappeared. 

Since then, I’ve had a personal acquaintance with a few Berkeleyans who would qualify as homeless, and they have been a mixed bag. Betty Bunton was a clever, wisecracking street-smart African-American woman who was caught up in the first big crack epidemic. One day she showed up after a few months’ absence in a wheelchair: She’d jumped off a roof while high and lost a foot. We managed to find her an apartment in a subsidized project, but she was evicted after she got high on crack one more time, broke through a skylight and ended up on another roof. Eventually she died of an asthma attack, but not before Wells Fargo cheated her out of most of her disability check. 

Terry used to ring doorbells in Berkeley asking for a little food or money. In those days his hair was tangled down his back in dreadlocks not for style but of necessity. He looked scary but was always polite and pleasant. He said he didn’t know how to read, which is why he couldn’t get a job. He also seemed sometimes to be using some controlled substance, probably not crack. 

One day he showed up in new clothes with a stylish haircut and told us he was moving to Fremont. He said the Berkeley police had told him to stay out of Berkeley, and he was on his way. Somehow he’d connected with some form of social services which recognized that he’s learning-disabled, and he’s now been successfully living in a supported group home with others in the same category for many years. We get a phone call from him from time to time, and occasionally mail him a little spending money, a privilege he never abuses. A success story…a friend who works with addicts claims that the best way to keep people off drugs is to pay them to stay clean, and this seems to be true for Terry. 

One of the very best aids for people on the street is Street Spirit, a newspaper published under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee which is sold for a dollar by homeless people and others who need the money. Mayor Bates once confessed that he found their solicitations unnerving or even frightening, but I like reading the paper and like the vendors I know. My favorites are Van, a tall, powerful Black woman with classy grey dreads and a baseball cap, already ready with a cheery greeting, and another woman who uses a melodious singing call to advertise her wares, both to be found at the Saturday Farmers’ Market.  

Anecdotes all, and data is never the plural of anecdotes, but it’s a good idea to remember that “the homeless” are people, not just statistics. That’s why the “housing first” approach, as documented by Kevin Fagan, seems to me to be a good idea. Those who end up on the street are individuals with individual problems, not all easy to solve, but when the lack of housing is subtracted from their catalogue of woes, other needs are more easily addressed. 

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