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Take a local tour of Trump policy in action in the East Bay where building a wall isn't just a laughable Republican pipe dream. If you live close to Berkeley or Albany, it's something you can see in all its comic finery mid-construction without the inconvenience of any election, without any public or community hearing or vote, without any community involvement whatsoever.

Start with the Gilman Street underpass next time you're on your way to the Berkeley Kite Festival or picking up greens at Whole Foods. Little by little, the underpass is being fenced off so that no one can take shelter underneath it. The bare square footage best sheltered from the wind and rain is now fenced off as securely as the Chancellor's mansion on the University of California's Berkeley campus at a similar cost to the public purse. 

You may have noticed the same phenomenon at the Berkeley Main Post Office on Allston; a fierce black fence surrounds...nothing at all, unless you count some creative sidewalk chalk. It would seem to be a reaction to the "First They Came for the Homeless" protest as well as a pre-emptive strike against potential violations of 647(e), which states: 

Except as provided in subdivision (l), every person who commits any of the following acts is guilty of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor: 

(e) Who lodges in any building, structure, vehicle, or place, whether public or private, without the permission of the owner or person entitled to the possession or in control of it... 

You'll find the same pre-emptive architectural phenomenon on old City Hall's lawn, which now sports "protective" green plastic fencing just about anywhere one could conceivably place one's pillow. The constitutionality of a law such as 647(e) in a world without adequate low-cost housing or shelter continues to lumber through various courts, of course, but your public servants are content to assume, given convention and tradition, that by the time the horror of this cruel policy is fully exposed they will be long gone. 

Were members of the public asked to weigh in on such absurd and inhuman expenditures? Not at all. If you're a member of the public sympathetic to those who have suffered the effects of skyrocketing evictions and plummeting wages or even a member of the public watching this happen to your neighbors, family, or friends, your public servants are nonetheless busy fencing off public space whether you find it ridiculous or not. 

Should they be getting the public's permission? Of course. But as long as the public is relatively silent, they enjoy an uneasy protection if they stand next to the towering mountain of anti-homeless and anti-vagrant laws both old and new which take acres of time and money to battle. The constitutional challenge to such laws generally requires so much organized time and money to fight that entire eras of public policy will elapse unscathed by constraint; moral, legal, or otherwise. 

If you're offered an opportunity to ask the candidates for local political office whether or not they approve of not only the fences and walls, but of the processes, if in fact there are processes, which allow the public to be completely circumvented in their creation by all means do so. Whether they style themselves as from the right or the left, ask they where they expect people on the streets to go. And if they start tossing the usual platitudes around in the air, lean in, interrupt, and say, I'm sorry, what I meant was, where do you expect people on the streets to go right now, today. Otherwise our silence becomes not only complicity; it also becomes just another very real brick in the wall.