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A Letter to the Mayor Arreguin and the Berkeley City Council on the Homeless Crisis

by EmilyRose Johns
Persons chronically unsheltered are our neighbors. They are our community members. They contribute in many ways: financially, artistically, and culturally. They deserve the respect and consideration that we would grant any neighbor. This shift in our thinking about unsheltered Berkeley residents must drive our thinking about solutions.
Mayor Arreguin:

I write regarding Council Action Item 39, Emergency Measures to Address Homeless Crisis. I commend this effort to address a crisis that has long been poorly considered by the city of Berkeley.

I am an attorney who has worked with encampments in Berkeley for years. I meet regularly with residents of various encampments. Many of my resources go to defending individuals whose attempts to sleep safely and warmly have been criminalized. Through my time working with encampments and seeing a law-enforcement led model, one thing is starkly clear: the law enforcement-first modeled employed by the City of Berkeley has resulted only in further oppressing an already vulnerable part of our community. And as a measure to address a housing crisis, it is wholly insufficient.

As the Council considers the appropriate measures to safely and ultimately permanently house unsheltered residents, I urge the Council to keep several things in mind.

The first is that persons chronically unsheltered are our neighbors. They are our community members. They contribute in many ways: financially, artistically, and culturally. They deserve the respect and consideration that we would grant any neighbor. This shift in our thinking about unsheltered Berkeley residents must drive our thinking about solutions.

The second and related point is that persons who are chronically unsheltered are the primary stakeholders in these decisions, and there must be an understanding that their voices may differ from one another and from sheltered residents of Berkeley. There is no one solution that is going to work for every person who is unsheltered and no one way that will create harmony among the community. But a person’s agency in their living conditions and a person’s model for safety and security must be respected. Sustainable models for resolving this crisis must have flexibility built in.

The third is that this problem is not unique to Berkeley. Berkeley is not the first city to address a shelter crisis, and there is much to be learned from looking at solutions in cities across the nation. There are models of actual success that we can draw from, and we should focus not specifically on replicating those but on engaging the people who built those models to see what components of it can work for a unique community like Berkeley.

EmilyRose Johns, Attorney At Law
Siegel & Yee
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