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Indybay Feature

Houseless In Santa Cruz Being Pushed Out of Public Spaces

by Steve Pleich (spleich [at] gmail.com)
Options Considered to Push Back
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Beginning in Mid-May, the City of Santa Cruz has conducted a concerted campaign to drive homeless people out of and away from public spaces and particularly the City Hall grounds and the adjacent Central Library. Since the first Freedom Sleepers Community Sleepout in July 2015, homeless folks have gathered daily at City Hall to socialize and check in with other members of the unhoused community. Fueled in part by the now 104 weeks of the Tuesday night Freedom Sleepers protest, which in turn spawned a nightly sleepout at City Hall by a group dubbed the Survival Sleepers, the Santa Cruz City Manager has unilaterally reduced not only the hours of access to these traditional public fora, but has taken the extraordinary step to strictly limit any activities in and around City Hall and the Central Library “campus”. Hours of park access were reduced from 6:00am to 10:00pm every day to 7:00am to 6:00pm with no access permitted at all on Saturday and Sunday and even during those hours, sitting or gathering at City Hall has been virtually prohibited. These new restrictions are nothing less than an old fashioned “turf war” with the homeless desperately trying to hold onto one of the last public gathering spots available to them since they were deemed persona non-grata in the city’s San Lorenzo Park and river levee. This most recent push has prompted many homeless residents and their supporters to consider several ways to push back, including calls for a council moratorium on the new restrictions, hosting community events and possible legal action.

One such event will be a Know Your Rights for the Houseless Forum sponsored by the ACLU of Northern California Santa Cruz County Chapter and will be held on Tuesday, July 18, at 7:00pm at Louden Nelson Community Center in Santa Cruz. Homelessness has been taken up as a priority issue by ACLU Santa Cruz and this forum reflects the deep concern over the deteriorating landscape of homelessness locally. One ACLU member and long-time civil liberties advocate remarked, “among the rights our federal constitution was intended to protect is the right to access and use of open and public spaces and our City Hall is but one example of historically and legally recognized public space. The recent limitation of access to the area around and including City Hall, and by extension the grounds of the adjacent Central Library, raises serious questions of abridgement of substantive civil liberties.”

Prior to the imposition of these new and wholly restrictive limitations on public access, anecdotal testimony was offered by City Council Members and the City Manager in support of the opinion that continued access between the hours of 6:00am and 10:00pm may adversely impact the safety of city employees working in or passing through the area in the ordinary course of their duties. However, many Survival Sleepers disputed the contention that their presence at City Hall constituted a danger of any kind. Said Survival Sleeper Dreamcatcher, “we haven't seen or are aware of any data, statistics, or reliable evidence that would justify the restriction on public safety grounds. This is simply not the case, nor has it ever been”. Freedom Sleepers are calling for the Santa Cruz City Council to impose a moratorium on the new restricted hours of access, at least until the Council has conducted a thorough investigation into the facts of these claims.

As a third possible option, local advocates for the houseless community have reached out to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty for legal aid in a potential civil lawsuit charging the City Manager with exceeding his executive authority and violation of the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free speech and assembly. Houseless Plaintiffs would allege that “historically, many areas within our city have been recognized as public spaces and among the most historic and notable is our City Hall and its surrounding grounds. The new restrictions are not reasonable as to place, time and manner and are, rather, extreme and unreasonable under the totality of the circumstances”

Not coincidentally, these new restrictions have come at a time when the local Food Not Bombs chapter has been pressured to abandon or scale back its program. For the past several years, Food Not Bombs has provided meals and a gathering place for the houseless every Saturday and Sunday at the Downtown Post Office, serving up to 150 meals each day. Says international Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry, “we do more than just provide a nutritious vegan meal to those in need. We provide support and encouragement because, at the end of the day, the homeless community must stand up for itself and assert their human rights. If we are ever to create real change in our community, it’s crucial that the homeless see us fighting for our space right alongside them.”

ACLU Know Your Rights for the Houseless Forum, Tuesday, July 18, 7:00pm, Louden Nelson Community Center, 301 Center Street, Santa Cruz, CA. Admission is free and all are welcome.
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Comments (Hide Comments)
by indyradio
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Rather than being concerned about oppression elsewhere in the world, the self-proclaimed social activists of Santa Cruz need to take a look at themselves. Public spaces, if ignored by the public will of course be "taken over" by the needy who merely need a place to be. There is altogether too much political apathy among the socially lazy and irresponsible of Santa Cruz and that is why the only people seen in the courtyard of the Government are impoverished.

Jonathan Swift had a Modest Proposal, and it is one for our idle elite to consider today.
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

I surmise the reduced hours are simply because the Royalty can't tolerate a public venue that is not covered with their spies and centurions, even though it is more costly than simple Humanity would dictate.
We have elected control freaks to our government and they won't tolerate anything they can not control, even if that control is costly and requires public expenditure.

What is needed is mass, open defiance of the ban starting at the hours that the space is closed and continuing until the space is open. An occasional sleep-in does not fully address what is wrong here - the existence of unhoused desperation is only a symptom of a larger and deeper problem I may only have suggested in this short statement.

Santa Cruz is small enough for the government and the people to be one and the same, but it has in only a few decades been occupied by a moneyed elite who have fully captured the mechanisms not only of government, but of political control, and by means of real estate speculation fueled by the Reagents of the University of California, have made it impossible for anyone without extreme wealth to have a life without their continuous invasive oversight.

Where is the will for justice?

Hold high your lantern, Diogenes.
http://www.ancient.eu/Diogenes_of_Sinope/

David Roknich
"The Future of Radio Belongs to Us" - indyradio.info
Twitter: @iRadioTube
also http://ch0.us and http://rd0.org
by John Cohen-Colby
Citations issued w/o an ordinance number — like the one on these signs — are fraudulent on their face. The City of Santa Cruz can be sued in court if they continue to issue them. The Santa Cruz Superior Court can be sued if they enforce these fraudulent citations.
by IndyRadio
A late-night fraudulent citation party might be a good idea - collect the whole set.

Have you bathe in the fountain lately?

Frankly, I have walked by there many times and not once have seen this. My guess is that our oh so progressive Mayor may have witness someone wash their face in it once.
btw - her term is up in 2018. It's going to be a fun election.

David Roknich
"The Future of Radio Belongs to Us" - indyradio.info
Twitter: @iRadioTube
also http://ch0.us and http://rd0.org
by Abbi Samuels
Just to be clear...no city official has ever pressured Santa Cruz Food Not Bombs to change anything. We have not been contacted to change anything. Even the Health Dept has said we are a very low risk. The only people trying to pressure us is a petition that was started by Janet Fardette with a small number of signatures, under 190 signatures in over 5 months. Food Not Bombs have a competing petition that has nearly 1,500 signatures with over 1,000 over them in less than a week. So it is a very but loud and vocal group that is trying every which way to stop Food Not Bombs but no city officials.
by indyradio
Janet Fardette of Jeb Bush's "Points of Light" I don't agree that more concrete has "enhanced the natural beauty" of the area - though she was able to bring money in to Santa Cruz
http://www.pointsoflight.org/programs/recognition/dpol/awards/5912
by Sylvia
And the stay-away fence at the post office. And locked bathrooms at Council Chambers. And the removal of two benches at the downtown library so that it would be 'more welcoming'. And the discriminatory permit restrictions to be imposed on the Client Action Network.

Business success prevails over human caring.

I do think staff and council are pulling in different directions and staff (business) is prevailing.
by Pat Colby
What Steve Pleich is calling pushing out houseless people it is outright socio-cleansing of an entire class of people akin to ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. Let's stop sugar coating this! State it for what it really is or stop pretending to be a spokesperson for this houseless people. Let's call it what it is!

The local hater mongers would commit outright genocide against houseless people if they could get away with it. Cleansing people from public places makes it so they have nowhere to go. Not just invisible but gone. This is similar to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Nakba and the WWII murder of Jews, disabled and LGBT people, gypsies, radical thinkers, artists and scientists in Germany along with other countries the Nazis conquered.

Why has Santa Cruz moved so far right in it's campaign to the civil rights of unhoused, disabled and poor people's civil rights? Answer: because people sugar coat the truth and don't report these gross violations of human/civil rights for what they are. Berkeley Copwatchers couldn't believe all the violations of rights that the City of Santa CRuz gets away with. Their illegal actions have already been fought and deemed illegal in courts across California. Not speaking about for what it is: harassment, gang stalking, assaults, property theft, enforcement of unconstitutional laws, threats of violence and death, destruction of property. The hard truth is Santa Cruz hater mongers have become more and more like Nazis!
by watchingabove
I've heard Jim Spring is working with drone companies to develop a system to monitor all the housed activities in and around city hall, initially. It will then expand to downtown then the levee. Apparently, this is integrating with systems from PredPol.
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