Public Comment

As the elected leaders of one of the world's great small cities, you are confronted by a rush of awesome and rapidly evolving challenges.

Sometimes, as the actions taken by Council wend their way through the complex machinery of the City government and make their way out into the greater society, the weight of their effect grows. Your choices may acquire such profound human significance that every now and then it must take great courage for you to act decisively and quickly.

Or so one hopes. It is only appropriate, then, that sometimes your decisive hand should be stayed. There are times when contemplation should displace action. On certain problems, you must step back and try to see a bigger picture, and to seek out the the counsel of others who can help you find that greater perspective.

The human tragedies and the civic disruptions associated with homelessness are large, urgent problems. Even as urgent as the problems are, they are also persistent: Berkeley has had a significant homeless population for decades. You must feel under intense pressure to take bold steps quickly. Nevertheless, my counsel to you is to slow down and reconsider the "Step up housing" Initiative: 

A Utopian clinic sprung from an architect's imagination? 

Following a suggestion from architect Patrick Kennedy, the "Step up housing" Initiative proposes 100 micro-units of "supportive" or "assisted-living" housing for some of the "most vulnerable members of our community". 

What is proposed, then, is a sort of treatment facility: a new form of residential clinic or hospital; a new form of sanitarium or asylum. 

What Kennedy and now council propose is radical. At 160 square feet, each micro-unit will be smaller than most patient rooms in conventional hospitals. Yet, unlike patient rooms, these units must contain all of a resident's possessions and her kitchen. 

Is it practical for professional care providers to do their job in such close quarters, when they need enter these units? Can emergency medical professionals or the police operate well in this environment? 

What of the cognitive effects of such small quarters? Can they cause further harm to substance abusers or those with mental illnesses? Can such confinement add mental illness to the problems of someone who is initially merely down and out? 

Yet even before any serious medical evaluation has been made of the proposal, Council is asking the City Manager to get to work finding money in the budget, streamlining the permitting process, deisgning contracts for service providers and, remarkably: asking city employees to design admission criteria for the micro-units! 

Where are the neutral, disinterested residents and the care providers to evaluate this proposal? Are there any besides the architect, the politicians, and potential contractors who, after study, would choose this design for a care facility? 

A sucker's loan? 

Fiscally, the Initiative would seem to have potential to create a disaster. 

Kennedy proposes, in effect, a 10-20 million dollar loan to the City of Berkeley, delivered "in kind" as these units. Though the details are vague, in return the City would guarantee payments of $100,000 per month ($1.2 million per year) to Kennedy, apparently indefinitely. 

Those are certainly solid terms for the lender but are they good for the City? Is the City getting a fair deal when what it gets is a structure for which the natural rate of depreciation is unknown? When the upkeep costs are unknowable? When the usefulness - or non-usefulness - of the structure is the topic of an expensive social engineering experiment? When Berkeley hopes to scrounge most of the $100,000 per month from welfare subsidies that appear likely to be slashed by austerity policies? 

Where are the voices on council with the good sense to be wary of becoming the bag holder on a bad loan? 

Genuine help or legalistic prop? 

In light of the City's history of police actions against homeless people, and in light of policies advanced by City Council, a certain conclusion can not be avoided: 

If these units are built, the City of Berkeley is likely to eventually use their existence as a policy excuse for policing unhoused people more harshly. The excuse will be deployed even when there are not adequate alternatives for many who remain on the street. 

That conclusion is unavoidable because it is firmly grounded in history, including recent history. Similar legalistic policies characterize the repeated raids on the First They Came For The Homeless protest camps and the recently (partially) repealed sidewalk ordinance. This pattern of inadequate carrot plus harsh stick is deeply rooted in Berkeley's practices. 

Glib promises will not do: why should anyone believe this project would be any different? 

Conclusion 

Whatever the root causes of a person's homelessness, one thing is near certain: he is crushingly poor. 

In our society, to be that poor is either to receive welfare or not eat. To either receive subsidy or not sleep indoors. 

Ours is a society in which, for the non-wealthy, anyone who can not sell their labor must become a dependent or die. 

The societal compulsion to work is vestigial. It comes from a time when collective survival required labor from all who were capable, and growth occurred only on the backs of slaves. Punishing the idle had at least this logic to it: there was always a collective need for their work. 

Today the situation is radically different. Today we live in a society that can not usefully employ many millions of people. We live in a society that exhibits the famous contradiction of an enormous mass of wealth and productive capacity at one pole, and an enormous mass of unemployment, poverty, and need at the other pole -- the two kept apart by an unsatisfiable logical of profit. 

And we know how all corners of excluded society react to these conditions -- every subculture, every ethnicity: Systematic and crushing deprivation engenders the social disfunction of dispair, hatred of others, hatred of self, substance abuse, mental illness, fiscal collapse, and criminality. 

Further, for all the good intentions of well meaning politicians, the inexorable fiscal logic of capital compels our society into a steady reduction of welfare and other subsidies to subsistence. 

In short, we live in a society that simultaneously casts out millions whose labor is not needed, and punishes those who are cast out. 

The phenomenon of mass incarceration in the United States and the large and persistent homeless population are two horrific expressions of our outdated social habit of punishing those who are blocked from income by the blind processes of capital. 

Council is not confronted by the need for a new concept in clinic design. Nor by the need to borrow $20 million dollars from an eager lender. 

Council is not really, in spite of its tendencies, confronted by a need to construct further legalistic excuses to harshly police homeless people. 

No social engineering experiment by an eager lender and architect can address the problems of capital. 

City Council, please do not bother staff or yourselves at this moment stuggling to implement the "Step up housing" Initiative in a rush. Instead, step back work with the Citizen Commissions at your disposal and the public to clarify your thinking about the nature of the problems, and the possible policies that might speak to those real problems, in light of Mr. Kennedy's kind offer. 

Yours in community,
-t
Thomas Lord <lord@basiscraft.com>, Berkeley CA