PHOTO/SARAH MENEFEE
Editor’s Note: These testimonies are from a hearing at Berkeley City Hall in late April. The mayor and a City Council member have proposed a whole new set of restrictions on homeless movement, involving where they can appeal for help, sit on the sidewalk, how much sidewalk they and their possessions or dogs can cover, along with an attack on independent tent communities and people’s right to shelter themselves in tents. Since the city is failing to house people as the obvious remedy for homelessness, they are trying to further beat up on the victims of this social fail, as part of the raging gentrification and removal of poor people all over the San Francisco Bay Area. These are two of the voices, from those who would be most affected, against this madness and lack of vision. They also suggest a better way, as evidenced in the cooperative communities they have built and live in.
Lindsey Krantz: I’m Lindsey Krantz of Berkeley, homeless. I am a member of ‘First they came for the homeless’ and a class lawsuit member of Sullivan et al. v. City of Berkeley and BART.
I demand that the City Council take no action tonight. These proposed policies come from a recalcitrant, foot-dragging defendant, the City. Council, you make me sick! As in, you exacerbate my mental illness. The only way to come into compliance with the law is to kill myself, or otherwise die. How’s that for justice? How’s that for a final solution? Where am I supposed to breathe, sleep and defecate?
History’s verdict will strike down your proposed final solutions as presented tonight. Don’t make it worse for yourselves in federal court. In the meantime—STOP THE RAIDS!
Stacey Hill: You are doing the same thing as you’ve been doing all along. You need to listen to homeless people themselves. Just like the one guy said, you live in a fantasy. You have ideas about people but you’ve never spoken to them. You’ve never been in their shoes, you have no concept of what it is to be where they are. You need to listen to the people who have the actual problems, and resolve it. You are spending money on nothing, getting nothing. This group of homeless people [‘First they came for the homeless’ tent communities] has cost the city nothing [except the huge cost of the police raids]. Put your money in that kind of thinking. It could be done for next to nothing, and is a solution.
San Francisco poet and organizer Sarah Menefee is a long-time homeless rights activist. She is the Homeless Desk on the People’s Tribune Editorial Board, and a founding member of such organizations as the San Francisco Union of the Homeless, Homes Not Jails and 'First they came for the homeless’. Known for her poetry about the streets, her latest collections are Winter Rose, Sign and Holy Eel.
These homeless people are showing us the way forward. They are leading the fight for a basic necessity of life. These folks in tent cities are creating communities of caring people who support one another, giving us a peek into the kind of world we could have where people work together. They need our support and involvement.