As a cafe owner on Telegraph Avenue, I’ve been following and supporting Measure S. When I learned that the ASUC Senate was about to vote on a bill to oppose Measure S, I wanted to observe the process. Senate Bill 64, which is against Measure S, was on the agenda for Oct. 3 and was presented by its co-author, Senator Nolan Pack. With no real opposition, it passed the senate easily. However, it is riddled with errors and misleading statements, in my opinion. You can read SB 64 with our responses at berkeleycivilsidewalks.com/students.
The main theme of the meeting was that Measure S criminalizes sitting and the homeless, who have no place else to sit. This is untrue on all counts.
Nobody needs to sit on commercial sidewalks in Berkeley. We have public parks, benches, libraries, shelters, public buildings and numerous public places people can sit. Measure S doesn’t even apply to the majority of sidewalks in Berkeley, only those zoned as commercial.
Measure S doesn’t criminalize sitting or homelessness any more than an expired meter ticket criminalizes parking or owning a car. Its goal is to change behavior and direct people into services, not to write citations. If Measure S passes, there will be almost eight months of planning and outreach before it goes into effect on July 1, 2013. Police must give a warning before a citation is written.
The opponents of Measure S do a disservice to the homeless by lumping them all together. The great majority of Berkeley’s homeless don’t camp on the sidewalks and don’t disrupt the commercial life of the city. They aren’t homeless by choice, and they deserve our best efforts to help them.
The problem that Measure S addresses is the groups of street youth that camp on the commercial sidewalks on Telegraph and Downtown — along with their dogs of variable breeds, backpacks, sleeping bags, blankets and litter. They are made up primarily of two groups: nomadic youth (often called “travelers”) who come from all over the West Coast to sit on Berkeley’s sidewalks and young adults who may look homeless but are not. They commute from homes in Berkeley and nearby cities to sit on the sidewalks with the travelers in order to deal drugs and to panhandle.
In both cases, camping on the sidewalk is a lifestyle choice, not a necessity brought on by poverty. The city of Berkeley effectively enables this behavior with a laissez-faire attitude toward drug use, and a public that contributes generously to panhandlers and liberal laws that permit camping on the commercial sidewalks.
Merely adding more shelters and services will not solve the problem of getting travelers and commuters off the sidewalks. They want to be camped on a commercial sidewalk, not in a shelter. Dozens of cities, when faced with this dilemma, have passed civil sidewalks laws similar to Measure S. Without exception the laws have been successful in dramatically reducing or eliminating the sidewalk encampments that cripple commercial districts. For evidence, look at San Francisco’s Haight Street, Santa Cruz’s Pacific Avenue and Santa Monica’s Promenade. They haven’t solved all their homeless problems by any means, but the large encampments are gone from their commercial sidewalks.
If there were ever any doubts that encampments of frequently drugged and drunk youth with dogs deterred customers, the 2011 Graduate Assembly survey put them to rest. About 65 percent of the more than 1,800 respondents, 90 percent of them students, said that they would frequent Telegraph more if there were fewer people sitting on the sidewalk, fewer panhandlers, the area was cleaner and more inviting and they felt safer. This survey clearly describes a commercial district that is not viable without some new guidelines for sidewalk behavior.
The small family-owned businesses on Telegraph and Downtown provide a valuable service to the campus community that goes far beyond shopping convenience. They offer both part- and full-time jobs to students and those who are currently out of school. While it is easy for residents and visitors to choose other shopping destinations, it is not easy at all for hundreds of Telegraph and Downtown small merchants to move their businesses. Their livelihood and that of thousands of their employees depend on you feeling that their street is safe, comfortable and attractive.
The current sidewalk situation subjects thousands of Berkeleyans to genuine economic hardship and the loss of welcoming public spaces. Compare that to the relatively benign requirement that people sit somewhere other than on a commercial sidewalk from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.
We need to create a safe, welcoming environment of mutual respect. Berkeley is justly proud of its vital schools, social services and environmental programs. Only with vibrant and welcoming merchant and business districts will we be able to fund them.
I invite you to join us — merchants, residents, Options Recovery’s Davida Coady, State Senator Loni Hancock, Mayor Tom Bates, City Councilmember Laurie Capitelli and other city council members who endorse Measure S — to stand up for civil sidewalks and sustainable commercial districts.
On Nov. 6, vote YES on Measure S!
Craig Becker owns Caffe Mediterraneum at 2475 Telegraph Ave., is the president of the Telegraph Business Improvement District, lives in the Willard neighborhood and has served on the city of Berkeley Homeless Commission.
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for anyone thinking this will save jobs, please read this report.
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/1023sit-lie2.pdf
Once again the Measure S proponents cite their own unrepresentative “push” poll which was discredited as having no scientific value to support their claims. Becker tried to cite that same poll in the ASUC Senate meeting, and was laughed off by the majority which, unfortunately for him, had taken basic statistics.
Having 2/3 of students say they’re bothered by people panhandling is such an obvious result (of course panhandling bothers people, I would have expected a bigger number actually). It’s like a poll where 90% of students say they’d like to pay less tuition. No shit.
BOYCOT and picket Caffe Mediterraneum like we did to the Chick-Fil-As.
Actually, I think I’m going to be getting coffee over there a little bit more frequently.
“Commercial sidewalks” is a revealing turn of phrase. It indicates a sense that sidewalks should be for customer use only.
Those sidewalks are public sidewalks. They go past apartments as well as merchants. They go down major thoroughfares that people use as they get from their homes to campus, parks, or the library.
In our modern city, they’re the closest thing we have to a public square.
The central assumption here is that those sidewalks, paid for by taxpayers, somehow belong to the landlords who own the property behind them. To privatize them with a law that puts money first and explicitly aims to put enforcement in the hands of the “Ambassadors”–employees of a private corporation–is to surrender our claim to our own city.
Sidewalks are not for customer use only. They are for everyone, rich or poor, to use. A thriving community means more people on the sidewalk, not fewer. It means the ability to stop and be with friends, to say hello to passers-by, and to keep an eye on what’s going on in your neighborhood.
Measure S would be disastrous for all of us. It deserves a resounding No at the ballot box.
A city has every right to zone certain sidewalks for certain purposes. Consider sidewalk curbs. There are blue zones, yellow zones, green zones, and white zones. Handicapped drivers may park in the blue zones, but not yellow zones, unless they happen to have a commercial license. You may drop off a passenger at a white zone, but long term parking is prohibited. If a city values the tax revenue from its small businesses, it can zone public sidewalks in front of those businesses any way it wants. Citizens have right of access to public thoroughfares but don’t own those thoroughfares. Businesses also don’t own those thoroughfares, which is why some cities prohibit cafes from putting tables and chairs on sidewalks.
20 or 30 years from now when today’s Cal students come back for football games or reunions, the only thing that will be different will be Cal’s tuition and possibly some campus buildings. Everything else will be the same. The city never evolves. The city around Telegraph and Shattuck will still look dreary, and there won’t be any improvement for the homeless. The city could make itself into a place that helps people, but it seems to prefer to pretend that it is a place that helps. Instead it is mostly a suburb for liberal talk but not-in-my-neighborhood action.
What is more “not in my neighborhood action” than shushing homeless people away from our view?
Making them sit at your feet as you ignore them and walk by, and not doing anything to actually help them. The homeless are already out of your view. The real homeless don’t waste time sitting on the busy streets. You just have the travelling folk who sit on the sidewalk to collect money and hang out. Berkeley’s homeless are ignored and thus invisible to just about everyone, and that is why their situation never improves. If Berkeley actually took some steps to make the city a place where business would locate or tourists would visit and spend money, then the city would have enough revenue to actually help the homeless.
You have a choice. You can pretend to care about the homeless by voting against Measure S, or you take the first step in making Berkeley a place that actually helps the homeless. It may sound backward, but you aren’t helping the majority homeless population of Berkeley by allowing some to sit and collect change.
The “real homeless” (a.k.a. anyone who is homeless) in Berkeley include people coping with mental illness, veterans who haven’t been able to find jobs, youth who have aged out of foster care and don’t know where to go, and countless other people like you and me who’ve fallen on hard times.
Can you explain exactly how Measure S helps the homeless? It sounds backward because it IS backward. Measure S contains no provisions for actually helping the homeless in Berkeley find services (proponents of S don’t even seem to understand what services are available in Berkeley and just how scarce those services are).
Regardless of whether you think homeless people should be on the street, Measure S is a vague, lazy policy that will have no real effect except to exacerbate the problem and victimize people who are already suffering.
I look at Measure S as the first step in making Berkeley a city that generates enough money to help the homeless. It will make a couple areas of Berkeley more desirable to people who will want to spend money just like it is doing in Santa Cruz. From there the city has to continue to make itself into a place that attracts tax revenues that will give the city the money it needs to provide more services. However, I know that Berkeley is not up for actually doing anything to help. That is why my initial post says in a couple of decades, nothing will have changed. The homeless will still be stuck in the streets suffering like they are now while we pretend that we are doing something for them by letting the travelling folk sit on the sidewalks. Talk to any alum from a couple decades ago, and you will see that nothing has improved for the homeless in Berkeley. And nothing ever will improve until the city takes action to raise the money needed to provide services, and I don’t mean tax residents more.
Also, you can’t even read the entirety of SB 64 of the Measure S proponents’ Website: They only post the first part of it. I’d like to link to the bill, but the ASUC Website is currently down. (I hope not part of a storm-struck East Coast server farm!)
The bill passed with an 18-1 majority after almost three hours of debate. It initially faced very meaningful opposition. (Not, it’s worth noting, from its proponents: Craig Becker and I debated the bill in the Senate’s External Affairs Committee. Mr. Becker began his comments by telling the senators that they had already made up their minds about the bill!) What’s impressive is that supporters of the bill were able to bring opponents within the senate around.
An easy, easy point which the proponents of the sitting ban refuse to recognize is that this law does, in fact, criminalize. The term “criminalization” is a standard term in criminology, and it’s used without qualms by the Obama administration to refer to laws exactly like Measure S: When you establish criminal sanctions against a particular act, you are criminalizing that act. The California Penal Code is very clear that both the smallest and the largest sanctions against sitting on the sidewalk, under Measure S, would constitute crimes. Measure S criminalizes sitting on the sidewalk: That’s not an opinion. It’s not debatable. It’s fact.
(This is also radically different from a parking ticket, which does not carry criminal penalties. You can’t go to jail or get a bench warrant for a parking ticket.)
But the fact that proponents of Measure S treat this as if it’s a matter of opinion is demonstrative of their entire attitude toward the matter: As Roland Peterson said in a story on Measure S in the Daily Cal yesterday, “It doesn’t need analysis.”
Every piece of research that exists suggests that a sitting prohibition will have no impact on small businesses: The data shows that it didn’t work in the Haight, it didn’t work in Santa Barbara, it didn’t work in Modesto, it didn’t work in Santa Monica, it didn’t work in San Bruno, and it didn’t work in Palo Alto. What proponents of Measure S have to respond to that is anecdote from city administrators who already supported these policies.
There is only one service provider in Berkeley who supports Measure S: She gets her clients from the courts, and her job placement program is funded by the Downtown Berkeley Association and the Telegraph Avenue Business Improvement District. Almost every other provider of homeless services in town opposes Measure S. It is insulting and misleading to characterize them as “doing a disservice” to homeless people. No other provider of homeless services supports the measure.
Measure S has also seen opposition from homeless people themselves, from different parts of Berkeley. The notion of “homeless by choice” is a ludicrous one, and could only come from a person who hasn’t slept outside, or spent serious time working with poor people as equals. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty has found that 40% of homeless youth have been beaten by caretakers; 25% have been sexually propositioned by caretakers; 20% left home over conflicts with their parents concerning sexual orientation. Others have aged out of the foster care system, or are escaping dangerous home lives. To characterize these situations as choice is damned cold. There’s no provision in the law that would establish whether a person gets cited or not depending on whether or not their path to homelessness was one approved by Craig Becker.
Are we really to believe that service providers care less about the people they spend every day serving than do the commercial landlords and real estate developers who have spent over $100,000 to make the Yes on S campaign the most expensive measure campaign that Berkeley has ever seen? Are we to believe that homeless people are advocating against their own interests?
Vote for facts. Vote for compassion. And don’t let your vote be bought. No on Measure S.
> Measure S has also seen opposition
> from homeless people themselves
So freaking what? Once again, the lefties value the whims and preferences of professional bums and derelicts over the productive members of society.
So freaking the claim that this is in the interests homeless people is pretty clearly bogus. That’s all.
I’m not trying to claim that their opinions should be given equal weight in democratic processes as should those of commercial landlords or developers, or any crazy, radical leftist jive like that!
Why should parasites be given equal weight with people who actually work and pay taxes?
if you are referring to commercial landlords and developers as parasites you are correct.