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So said Jeffrey Lebowski to The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” and the phrase will apply to Berkeley next month. A group of volunteers patrolling Shattuck and Telegraph Avenues will try to help the homeless on said streets by providing literature on housing and city services. According to KCBS, the Cody’s Books on Telegraph closed (not the most recent closing, but an earlier one) due to a degradation so massive, it effectively kept anyone from shopping at Telegraph stores. Which would be a fine theory if, you know, people actually stopped shopping on Telegraph. But they didn’t stop then and they keep shopping now.
So why did it take this long for the foot patrols to organize? Perhaps rising food costs kept restaurant patrons from leaving their houses, and the homeless were unfairly blamed for a decline in business. It’s a bit of a stretch, but we couldn’t think of any way to fault the tree-people instead.
Image Source: PixelAlibi under Creative Commons
Foot Patrols to Discourage Homeless in Berkeley [KCBS]
Tags:homeless, misplaced blame, rising food costs, the big lebowski
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Sep 8, 2008 at 9:41 am
As a former property manager that’s been forced into homelessness by scofflaw slumlords, I’ve come to realize what an oft-ironic euphemism “homeless services” actually turns out to be. And just how much money is being spent characterized as purposed with “helping the homeless” when it’s anything BUT that.
These “foot patrols” which ostensibly are funded to “patrol”… what? For whom? To do what?
Well, it turns out that main activities will be to “coordinate” with cops to “enforce” AGAINST homeless people, perhaps with a concession of handing them some cheap flyer of “services’ which demonstrably are already insufficient to prevent anyone from being there on the street in the first place. It’s NOT that no one knows about these “services” so much as it’s simply that they are few, inadequate and now funds are going to pay for these “patrols” instead.
For the obvious reason of forcing the homeless away from businesses. Period.