Wait, what? There was a line in the Berkeley Municipal Code from 1946 that made it “unlawful for any person to loiter about any school or public place at or near which schoolchildren attend”? Apparently so, and although it doesn’t seem loitering laws matter to Berkeley very much–the 1946 code did cause one policeman to recently ticket a disabled homeless woman, Kim Nemirow, as she sat on a blanket in Willard Park.

Thanks to Nemirow’s case, however, the law has been repealed for being vague and potentially discriminatory. After all, as one attorney put it, “What the heck are parks for, if not for loitering?”

Image Source: dannyman under Creative Commons
Outdated Berkeley loitering law repealed [Oakland Tribune]

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]

Many of you Cal students love, loathe or perhaps live in People’s Park. If you feel strongly about the place and have a few years to spare–then now is your chance to contribute to its painstakingly deliberated future!

Drama went down at the People’s Park Advisory Board early this month when five members of the board collectively resigned. In short, the five wanted to get cracking on park improvements by holding a student design contest (because the College of Environmental Design doesn’t have enough of those), while the university–which owns the land–needs to think about that a little bit. What if they don’t want a park anymore? What if they want to build housing? No, not for the homeless people, but for graduate students (who are probably just as poor).

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Despite conspiracy theories about Berkeley trying to get rid of the homeless, Mayor Tom Bates’s Public Commons for Everyone Initiative has made it through the red tape to the green light.

Cliches aside, the Clog seems to find the well-intentioned initiative at least partially redundant. Last time we checked, sex on the sidewalks isn’t totally legal anyway, so why raise parking meter prices 25 cents per hour to enforce its apparent uber-illegality?

Ah, because the initiative also increases homeless services–you know, some phone tree to make finding space in homeless shelters efficient and more public toilets to replace the current failed public health experiment on the sidewalks.

But despite pumping parking meter revenue (from all 12 working meters!) into the problem, others, including Councilmember Dona Spring, found the initiative “immoral and also illegal” on grounds that criminalizing homelessness worsens the problem of limited space in homeless shelters. Apparently she missed the part about increasing services for the homeless.

We suppose the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative won’t solve homelessness or really make any marked difference in our lives other than raising the price of parking meters–so, no, we have no spare change–but at least Berkeley’s plan doesn’t include a shuttle bus to Brentwood.

Image Source: Shayan Sanyal under Creative Commons
Council OKs Public Commons Initiative [Daily Cal]
Curb Your Aggression [Daily Cal]
Episode 1107: Night of the Living Homeless [South Park Zone]

As exhausted as we at the Clog are by the seemingly endless protest at the Nuclear-Free-Vegan-Save-The-Trees-Zone (satirical and probably factual representation here, thanks to the SF Chronicle), we found this surprising parallel to the rude, crude and socially unacceptable– in anywhere but Berkeley – behaviors of the tree people: the homeless.

It makes sense to us – neither appear to have jobs, homes or showers, so they do what they can: squat on someone else’s property.

The Chronicle’s article points out just how little security guards at San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal actually do to serve their employers’ interests – unless ignoring the de facto homeless shelter is in the Transbay Terminal’s interests. The homeless who reside there aren’t cited for defecating or urinating on the building’s floors, nor for loitering or spending the night: only for letting their feet leave the floor.

And while toilets for floors are certainly a good enough reason for us to take BART to San Francisco instead of using the free (with AC Transit Class Pass) F line bus, the vagrant population seems eerily familiar to those who reside in privately-owned public places on our side of the bay, like the oak grove at UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium.

The odd community the tree people have formed with the UC police officers isn’t quite as passive as that of the Transbay Terminal, but maybe that’s because the homeless, unlike the tree people, aren’t fighting for anything other than a warm place to rest.

Either way, both parties are–for the most part–equally irritating, equally unsanitary and equally taxing on the communities who have to deal with (or ignore or take pictures of) them every day.

Image Source: Shamim Pakzad, Daily Cal
Guards, homeless form odd kind of community at Transbay Terminal [SF Gate]
Meyer’s Take: Thursday, September 20, 2007 [SF Gate]
Campus sideshow overshadows facts [SF Gate]
Friends in High Places [Daily Cal]

A few weeks ago, the City of Berkeley announced that it approved some parts of the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative—sending most of it back to the city manager to figure out before a fall meeting decides the initiative’s fate.

But not everyone likes this idea.

On IndyBay.org, someone has come to the defense of the homeless, whom many think that the Public Common for Everyone Initiative targets directly.

This complainer writes:

bq. More anti-homeless proposals are being scheduled to come up for another city council vote sometime soon during the fall. The proposals being considered include strict enforcement of laws against noise disturbances such as yelling, parking a bicycle against a window or on a parking meter, smoking near buildings, unauthorized possession of a milk crate, obstructing or restricting use of the sidewalk, reducing warning provisions for sitting or lying down on sidewalks, littering, hitching animals to fixed objects, unauthorized possession of a shopping cart, increased fines for using the great outdoors as a lavatory, public drunkeness or drug abuse, and anything else that city officials can dream up as an excuse to run the homeless out of town.

Um, getting rid of some of those things, if not all of those things isn’t beneficial to the city? Yeah, why don’t we continue to litter and make Berkeley look like a third-rate dump. Yeah, why don’t we use the local neighborhood park as a bathroom. Seems very draconian to us for the city to not want these things (read: we’re being sarcastic).

And apparently even talks about the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative have already spooked some of the city’s homeless population into leaving. Osha Neumann, an attorney who defends the city’s homeless said:

bq. “The homeless know what is going on, they feel frightened and some are already talking about leaving town. The downtown police bike patrols get to know the homeless hot spots and get to know the homeless on a first name basis, making it very easy to target them for removal”

We’ll let you decide whether or not the homeless population leaving Berkeley is good for the city. But for now, we’ll be quietly waiting for that Summer Orientation issue to come out tomorrow.

Earlier: City Council Going to Clean Up the Streets
War on the homeless heats up in Berkeley [Indybay.org]

It seems nowadays nobody likes a smoker. You’ve got to stand 20 feet away from buildings before you light up a cancer stick. In some cases, 20 feet would leave you standing in the road, puffing away. Now just being on the street may leave you facing a citation.

Actually, Mayor Tom Bates is focusing on the homeless, not smokers in general. His parking-smoking-homeless plan may earn him some brownie points, the Chronicle reports.

Bates hopes to take on the homeless problem by citing those who light up, because (as he puts it) the homeless “almost always smoke.” However, we’re not sure this is going to solve the city’s problem.

We mean, we’re thinking back to CalSo when that officer dude taught us to seek the source of the problem. Correct us if we’re wrong, but we don’t think that a two-pack-a-day habit put most of these people on the street.

The Chronicle attached a picture to the story with the cutline:

bq. Two young people on the Telegraph Avenue sidewalk could be cited by police under the mayor’s plan — if they were smoking.

Apparently the smoking problem with the homeless is so prevalent that the Chron can’t even get a decent picture of the troublesome smokers in action.

Mayor Bates also wants to crack down on the homeless sleeping on the sidewalks during business hours. He proposes to fund his general homeless program by increasing the parking rate by an extra 50 cents an hour and by adding parking meters to heavily trafficked areas.

As if parking isn’t enough of a problem.

Berkeley’s homeless plan: a new smoking law [SF Chronicle]