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Getting a Good Night's Sleep at City Hall with the Freedom Sleepers
After a chilly series of summer nights for people on the street in Santa Cruz, temperatures have increased, and so has attendance at the Freedom Sleepers community sleepouts held at city hall. About three dozen sleepers made it through the night at the sleepout held on August 30, and attendance was nearly as high at the sleepouts organized on September 6 and September 13. Since July of 2015, the Freedom Sleepers have gathered to sleep at city hall one night a week to protest local laws that criminalize homelessness. September 13 marked the group's 62nd sleepout. [Top photo: The Freedom Sleepers at Santa Cruz city hall at the 61st community sleepout organized on September 6-7. Scroll down for more photos.]
Presently, the only location in downtown Santa Cruz where people on the street are able to sleep regularly as a group is at the weekly community sleepouts organized by the Freedom Sleepers. Homeless sweeps conducted by the Santa Cruz Police Department beginning in January of this year have for the most part cleared the downtown area of groups of people sleeping together in other locations, such as at the post office.
The sleepouts have attracted quite a bit of attention from the police. By sleeping at city hall, the Freedom Sleepers, some of whom have fixed housing of their own and some of whom do not, are engaging in a civil disobedience protest that directly violates the city's camping ban, which outlaws sleeping anywhere in public between the hours of 11 pm and 8:30 am.
Many of the organizers of the sleepouts, which are organized as political protests, are hesitant to describe them as a completely safe place to sleep, but one of the founding Freedom Sleepers, Robert Norse of Homeless United for Friendship and Freedom (HUFF), has described them as "safe zones" that are a "safer" place to sleep.
"A lot of the homeless people have come up to several of us and said that this is the only night of the week they can get an uninterrupted night of sleep," said Abbi Samuels, who is also one of the founding Freedom Sleepers.
"To me that's so sad that there is only one night a week they can get 7-8 hours of sleep," she said.
"I have been able to get a good night's sleep too," Samuels said of her own experience of sleeping at city hall with the Freedom Sleepers.
The primary demand of the Freedom Sleepers has been the repeal of the city's camping ban ordinance, but Samuels believes some immediate relief for homeless people could be attained by amending the ordinance.
"I think people should be able to sleep at government and public facilities," Samuels said.
"City facilities should be re-zoned," she said.
Early on during the protests, the Freedom Sleepers attempted to sleep in the large lawn area located in the center of city hall's courtyard, but sleepers in that area were subjected to citation during the many police raids the Freedom Sleepers experienced. The city hall courtyard is a no-trespassing zone and is closed to the public at night between the hours of 10 pm and 6 am.
Additionally, city staff has actively worked behind the scenes to make it more difficult for individuals to sleep at city hall. In October of 2015, the Parks and Recreation department began the process of removing the grass lawn at city hall and replacing it with spiny plants, new pathways, and rock features, as part of a landscaping project that has rendered the area hostile to those looking for a place to sleep.
"It's horrible, it's a subtle way to get rid of homeless people," Samuels said. "I am so livid."
She recalled how soft the lawn area was, and how people could sleep on it comfortably.
Samuels says she learned in October of 2015 that the landscaping changes were intentionally designed to prevent people from sleeping in the area from Don Lane, who was the mayor of Santa Cruz at the time.
The Freedom Sleepers had moved their primary sleep location to the sidewalk before the changes in the landscape were initiated by the city, and the sleepouts continued unabated, but the loss of the lawn area is a constant reminder and sore point for the group.
In addition to those looking to sleep with a group of people, the Freedom Sleepers attract a large number of people who are in need of life necessities and other basic supplies, such as food, clothing, and blankets or bedding.
On August 30, Santa Cruz Food Not Bombs estimates they shared 200 servings of food or more at city hall before that evening's sleepout, which was in addition to food donations made by other organizations that day.
"We had to make more food," said Keith McHenry of Food Not Bombs about the August 30 sleepout.
"I have never seen so many eager for food at a Freedom Sleepers sleep out. It seems like we are getting more people seeking food each week," he said. "America is in crisis."
The Freedom Sleepers have indicated the sleepouts will continue indefinitely at Santa Cruz city hall. The next sleepout is planned for the evening of Tuesday, September 20.
Alex Darocy
http://alexdarocy.blogspot.com/
The sleepouts have attracted quite a bit of attention from the police. By sleeping at city hall, the Freedom Sleepers, some of whom have fixed housing of their own and some of whom do not, are engaging in a civil disobedience protest that directly violates the city's camping ban, which outlaws sleeping anywhere in public between the hours of 11 pm and 8:30 am.
Many of the organizers of the sleepouts, which are organized as political protests, are hesitant to describe them as a completely safe place to sleep, but one of the founding Freedom Sleepers, Robert Norse of Homeless United for Friendship and Freedom (HUFF), has described them as "safe zones" that are a "safer" place to sleep.
"A lot of the homeless people have come up to several of us and said that this is the only night of the week they can get an uninterrupted night of sleep," said Abbi Samuels, who is also one of the founding Freedom Sleepers.
"To me that's so sad that there is only one night a week they can get 7-8 hours of sleep," she said.
"I have been able to get a good night's sleep too," Samuels said of her own experience of sleeping at city hall with the Freedom Sleepers.
The primary demand of the Freedom Sleepers has been the repeal of the city's camping ban ordinance, but Samuels believes some immediate relief for homeless people could be attained by amending the ordinance.
"I think people should be able to sleep at government and public facilities," Samuels said.
"City facilities should be re-zoned," she said.
Early on during the protests, the Freedom Sleepers attempted to sleep in the large lawn area located in the center of city hall's courtyard, but sleepers in that area were subjected to citation during the many police raids the Freedom Sleepers experienced. The city hall courtyard is a no-trespassing zone and is closed to the public at night between the hours of 10 pm and 6 am.
Additionally, city staff has actively worked behind the scenes to make it more difficult for individuals to sleep at city hall. In October of 2015, the Parks and Recreation department began the process of removing the grass lawn at city hall and replacing it with spiny plants, new pathways, and rock features, as part of a landscaping project that has rendered the area hostile to those looking for a place to sleep.
"It's horrible, it's a subtle way to get rid of homeless people," Samuels said. "I am so livid."
She recalled how soft the lawn area was, and how people could sleep on it comfortably.
Samuels says she learned in October of 2015 that the landscaping changes were intentionally designed to prevent people from sleeping in the area from Don Lane, who was the mayor of Santa Cruz at the time.
The Freedom Sleepers had moved their primary sleep location to the sidewalk before the changes in the landscape were initiated by the city, and the sleepouts continued unabated, but the loss of the lawn area is a constant reminder and sore point for the group.
In addition to those looking to sleep with a group of people, the Freedom Sleepers attract a large number of people who are in need of life necessities and other basic supplies, such as food, clothing, and blankets or bedding.
On August 30, Santa Cruz Food Not Bombs estimates they shared 200 servings of food or more at city hall before that evening's sleepout, which was in addition to food donations made by other organizations that day.
"We had to make more food," said Keith McHenry of Food Not Bombs about the August 30 sleepout.
"I have never seen so many eager for food at a Freedom Sleepers sleep out. It seems like we are getting more people seeking food each week," he said. "America is in crisis."
The Freedom Sleepers have indicated the sleepouts will continue indefinitely at Santa Cruz city hall. The next sleepout is planned for the evening of Tuesday, September 20.
Alex Darocy
http://alexdarocy.blogspot.com/
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Thank you, Alex Darcy, for publishing this cogent essay with photographs on the Freedom Sleepers of Santa Cruz. Not having anywhere to keep one's stuff, safely, nor to be able to sleep safely, and not be able to use a bathroom, day in and day out, is a kind of torture. The Freedom Sleepers is an important, legitimate campaign and protest that addresses a certain kind of genocide in Santa Cruz.
Thanks to the Freedom Sleepers and Ms. Samuels, in particular, at least some people in Santa Cruz are fulfilling our necessary duty to the poor and those people without homes and without shelter here. Viva Freedom Sleepers!
The City of Santa Cruz is in the business of killing "homeless people", slowly, and somewhat "under the radar" of the "more regular" people (for lack of a better label); housed, middle class and wealthier people who live in our city and county. The City of Santa Cruz is not the only city in the United States that is in this killing business. This killing business is a slow, strange, hidden even though it is right under our noses, type of killing of a whole group of people.
Years from now, if we humans survive as a species, these years (current times, circa 2016), may become known as the "Time of the Killings", maybe, "The Poor People Killings", or these times might be known as, something like, "The Slow Death". The referent for these times of neglect and avarice for those without homes, may very well be called, something more specific like, "The Homeless People Genocide", much, perhaps, in the same way that we study the Nazi era now and look back on the way we killed the Jews in Germany during the years that we now refer to as, "The Holocaust".
Of course, what is happening now is extremely different than that massive hideous holocaust based upon anti-Semitism. Yet I posit here, that it is another kind of genocide that we are imposing upon poor people and those known as "homeless people". This form of killing of a whole group of people is definitely occurring in Santa Cruz, and we need to examine how and who is "doing" the killing. This type of killing is extremely slow, extremely parsed out among all kinds of agencies and persons, groups and agents. I submit it is housed people, professionals, and an entire web of people, ourselves, and anyone who is not actively working to stop the harming of those without shelter or homes, or warming centers and parks where sleeping would be legal and OK, that are doing the killing of "the homeless".
It is a strange and slower die-off that we, the housed, the more "well-to-do" (though many housed people are also struggling, often struggling to stay housed) are allowing. We are condoning this policy of killing off the homeless by not taking actions that oppose these lethal policies, and the culture of hate of those without homes and the poor.
We need to put a stop to this strange, slow, killing off of people referred to as "homeless people". This type of killing is a sort of undetectable gas, more hidden from view even though it is right under our noses. We see parts of it happen. For example, we see police ticket "the homeless" and get "them" to move on. We see "the homeless" come into our coffee shops and attempt to bathe in the bathroom sink there. Do we actually know that more and more homeless people are dying of "homelessness" every day? Do we know what our part in this socially engineered, out of sight policy is, what our role is, in this networked-way of killing people through a culture of complicity?
It is truly ubiquitous, this imposed-die-off and actually, it really is a kind of mass killing of people. This new kind of killing of people, even though the problem of homelessness has been around for awhile, is precisely what we are fostering, though these deaths take longer than those in the gas chambers did. I believe that, in fact, there are some very real similarities to the Holocaust, in the ways that these current killings of people- who we generally refer to as, "the homeless", are being conducted right under our noses and with our tacit not-quite-approval, yet, our complicity and an ongoing denial by most housed and therefore, more, legitimate people facilitates the death, the killing of those we call, "homeless".
The Freedom Sleeper's actions and protest, in contrast to the rest of us, in our non-action and complicity with the death policies toward "the homeless", are an antidote to this stubborn form of denial, or hatred, this sickness we are suffering from. This sickness is actually a form of prejudice and hate for the poor and those people who are experiencing homelessness (which condition is caused by a plethora of reasons, one of the most significant causal factors is not having any shelter or home).
For one thing, we are stubbornly, staunchly, consistently, maintaining our denial about the real causes and problems that are creating vast numbers of what we call, rather over-simply, "the homeless" or "the homeless problem". In fact, we are allowing the slow killings of people to go on, by refusing to provide services, housing and shelter, by continuing to make being homelessness illegal, by means such as with the camping ban in our city, by refusing to provide more and better services for people experiencing mental illness, substance abuse and trauma, by refusing to house poor people who also happen to be older, and frail and by many various ways of refusing to provide shelter, such as refusing to build transitional housing and shelter for women and transgender people who are homeless due to their experiencing domestic violence, and needing to flee their homes, or being left without housing in a variety of ways and because of a variety of reasons.
This is not a comprehensive list of the causes of what we call, "homelessness". For example, classism is a tremendous force that is almost never really comprehensively spoken about in the mainstream media at all, but the norms and customs to be full of pride and snobbishness, while looking down one's nose upon the less well-to-do, and the poor are vigorously underway in Santa Cruz and the rest of the United States. In fact it is an epidemic and it is sometimes referred to as, "afluenza".
We do have the money in this city to do the right thing, to do our duty. Notice the millions of dollars that were provided for some businesses within the past year, such as Cruzio. Simply, the political will is not sufficient, yet to get the job done here yet in Santa Cruz. The Freedom Sleepers provide us with an excellent campaign base from which to act more for a more humane housing and shelter policy in Santa Cruz. This action, or this reasonable set of actions by sleep activists to change the discussion about "homelessness" and laws, needs more support from all of us in the community. Thank you, Freedom Sleepers, for your hard work and dedication and the risks you have been taking; tickets, arrests, more aspersions to your credit.
While we turn our heads to the slow killing, or death by marginal existence, lack of sleep, and criminalizing the condition of being ostracized while living without a home, "the homeless" die, slowly, just off to the side of our view. Ms. Samuels, I can not thank you enough for your kindnesses in pointing out our absurd failings to do our duty to shelter people, and house vulnerable people, and to do our part in this national crisis. Santa Cruz, let's not duck from our duty. Thank you, again, Freedom Sleepers!
Meanwhile... the homeless die off, slowly, day after day. These deaths happen while we blame "the homeless" for being without the housing and shelter that we refuse to provide, build and we ban people from sleeping anywhere except for in these unavailable homes and shelters. This situation of those who do not have homes not even having a park to sleep in legally, is the basis for a possible/probable lawsuit against the city of Santa Cruz, as some activists have suggested.
There are some initiatives in the works, I have heard, in this direction to sue the City of Santa Cruz. We are in the business for blaming people for existing without providing adequate places for these same people to actually exist, as existence requires sleep. So we are slowly killing people without housing off. This is generally called, generally-speaking, "a genocide". But because it is happening so slowly and so ubiquitously, right under our noses, it is not being recognized as "killing", as such.
We are in denial. We are in the killing business, kind of like Germany circa....1930's through the 1940's, and in so many other times in our history here in the United States. Though we say, "never again", we are actively doing it now. We are killing homeless people as a matter of policy here in Santa Cruz.
Freedom Sleepers is a movement of central importance to the entire issue of housing and shelter here in Santa Cruz, and no political discussion that is centered on affordable housing is really legitimate, or viable without also discussing emergency shelter beds, transitional shelters and subsidized housing here in this growing city. The current establishment in this city does not want, in general, to allow this discussion because it will interfere, so the people who comprise the elites and those of status here think, with their profitable interests. So these established people (many of whom are actually still thinking they are progressively minded individuals) stall and blame the homeless while they refuse to really address the problem in a way that addresses it with anything like a realistic, just and humane sensibility; they are in the killing business. Homeless people are dying, slowly, from a lack of housing, and services and shelter beds.
We so called, "responsible" people here in Santa Cruz, the City of Santa Cruz are slowly killing off people without homes or shelter whether we know it or not with our laws and policies, customs and obfuscations of the truth. With our ignorance of what Capitalism translates into on the ground floor of reality, in terms of housing stock and policies here in our city, county and country. Therefore, I believe that largely we are acting as if we are a very ignorant and prejudicial group of people here, in fact, in our so-called-liberal city by the sea.
The truth is we are veering toward a climate that is Nazi-like and fascistic. The people we are killing are a variety of individuals, many of whom are poor due primarily from mental illness and trauma, family indifference or frustration, hate and prejudice, and our own inability to deal more effectively with difference. However, many of "the homeless" would have been housed long ago if there was a stable stock of emergency shelter that was well supervised, along with seriously affordable and subsidized housing, ...oh, and more jobs that provided a fair living wage. Of course, other cities would need to do the same. Yet, because other cities do not do their duty, this is no reason for us, here in Santa Cruz to not do our duty.
Our policies and laws, prevailing customs, actions and speech toward the homeless, call it the "climate" of opinion toward "the homeless"- people here, is an invisible, and slow form of torture and genocide, of a certain kind, of those who are not housed, or sheltered. I firmly believe this after years of having deeply investigated the matter, profoundly and I think, without prejudice at and from the beginning of my exploration/witness. This is my conclusion after having witnessed the real situation for the homeless in Santa Cruz, and in Berkeley, and (to a lesser extent) other places in California.
We here in Santa Cruz are in violation of human rights as well as actual civil rights by not providing such poor people with options for legal sleeping, such as even a protected park where people could gather and sleep without getting ticketed, and having portable toilets available, or appropriate numbers of shelter beds for the indigent here. For example, the eighth amendment of the United States Constitution, that outlaws cruel and unusual punishment, provides us with the backing that we need to notice that our city is in rogue or illicit status, and actually illegal status, and we, that is our city government actually should be sued, in order to prevent the further killing off of the very poor, and people with other disabilities, such as the actuality of being without a proper home or shelter, or at least a park to be legal to sleep in.
What we actually have, in the way of emergency shelter beds in Santa Cruz, at the River Street Shelter and including the Paul E. Lee Loft, (and these are two different programs, by the way)- is plainly not enough shelter beds for single adults experiencing homelessness here in Santa Cruz, no matter how one evaluates the situation. I have counted, first hand at both places, and the number of beds is terribly paltry compared to the need. Let's ramp up the discussion and come together to face our challenges. Please help me, people of Santa Cruz.
Meet me at the next meeting of the Freedom Sleepers on Tuesday evening in front of Santa Cruz City Hall, across from the downtown library. Or, just stop by to thank Ms. Samuels and the other sleepers for doing our duty for us, sleeping out in protest and in civil disobedience against a terrible set of policies and bad laws. It is an old and venerable tradition in the United States, but then so is greed, classism, and indifference. Whose side our you on?
These comments have been written by "an awful activist", sometimes-know-it-all and coffee shop indolent, not to mention a seat-plopper who doesn't often enough ask politely enough if it is OK to talk about certain issues with people at the next table.
Needs work,
Elise Casby
Thanks to the Freedom Sleepers and Ms. Samuels, in particular, at least some people in Santa Cruz are fulfilling our necessary duty to the poor and those people without homes and without shelter here. Viva Freedom Sleepers!
The City of Santa Cruz is in the business of killing "homeless people", slowly, and somewhat "under the radar" of the "more regular" people (for lack of a better label); housed, middle class and wealthier people who live in our city and county. The City of Santa Cruz is not the only city in the United States that is in this killing business. This killing business is a slow, strange, hidden even though it is right under our noses, type of killing of a whole group of people.
Years from now, if we humans survive as a species, these years (current times, circa 2016), may become known as the "Time of the Killings", maybe, "The Poor People Killings", or these times might be known as, something like, "The Slow Death". The referent for these times of neglect and avarice for those without homes, may very well be called, something more specific like, "The Homeless People Genocide", much, perhaps, in the same way that we study the Nazi era now and look back on the way we killed the Jews in Germany during the years that we now refer to as, "The Holocaust".
Of course, what is happening now is extremely different than that massive hideous holocaust based upon anti-Semitism. Yet I posit here, that it is another kind of genocide that we are imposing upon poor people and those known as "homeless people". This form of killing of a whole group of people is definitely occurring in Santa Cruz, and we need to examine how and who is "doing" the killing. This type of killing is extremely slow, extremely parsed out among all kinds of agencies and persons, groups and agents. I submit it is housed people, professionals, and an entire web of people, ourselves, and anyone who is not actively working to stop the harming of those without shelter or homes, or warming centers and parks where sleeping would be legal and OK, that are doing the killing of "the homeless".
It is a strange and slower die-off that we, the housed, the more "well-to-do" (though many housed people are also struggling, often struggling to stay housed) are allowing. We are condoning this policy of killing off the homeless by not taking actions that oppose these lethal policies, and the culture of hate of those without homes and the poor.
We need to put a stop to this strange, slow, killing off of people referred to as "homeless people". This type of killing is a sort of undetectable gas, more hidden from view even though it is right under our noses. We see parts of it happen. For example, we see police ticket "the homeless" and get "them" to move on. We see "the homeless" come into our coffee shops and attempt to bathe in the bathroom sink there. Do we actually know that more and more homeless people are dying of "homelessness" every day? Do we know what our part in this socially engineered, out of sight policy is, what our role is, in this networked-way of killing people through a culture of complicity?
It is truly ubiquitous, this imposed-die-off and actually, it really is a kind of mass killing of people. This new kind of killing of people, even though the problem of homelessness has been around for awhile, is precisely what we are fostering, though these deaths take longer than those in the gas chambers did. I believe that, in fact, there are some very real similarities to the Holocaust, in the ways that these current killings of people- who we generally refer to as, "the homeless", are being conducted right under our noses and with our tacit not-quite-approval, yet, our complicity and an ongoing denial by most housed and therefore, more, legitimate people facilitates the death, the killing of those we call, "homeless".
The Freedom Sleeper's actions and protest, in contrast to the rest of us, in our non-action and complicity with the death policies toward "the homeless", are an antidote to this stubborn form of denial, or hatred, this sickness we are suffering from. This sickness is actually a form of prejudice and hate for the poor and those people who are experiencing homelessness (which condition is caused by a plethora of reasons, one of the most significant causal factors is not having any shelter or home).
For one thing, we are stubbornly, staunchly, consistently, maintaining our denial about the real causes and problems that are creating vast numbers of what we call, rather over-simply, "the homeless" or "the homeless problem". In fact, we are allowing the slow killings of people to go on, by refusing to provide services, housing and shelter, by continuing to make being homelessness illegal, by means such as with the camping ban in our city, by refusing to provide more and better services for people experiencing mental illness, substance abuse and trauma, by refusing to house poor people who also happen to be older, and frail and by many various ways of refusing to provide shelter, such as refusing to build transitional housing and shelter for women and transgender people who are homeless due to their experiencing domestic violence, and needing to flee their homes, or being left without housing in a variety of ways and because of a variety of reasons.
This is not a comprehensive list of the causes of what we call, "homelessness". For example, classism is a tremendous force that is almost never really comprehensively spoken about in the mainstream media at all, but the norms and customs to be full of pride and snobbishness, while looking down one's nose upon the less well-to-do, and the poor are vigorously underway in Santa Cruz and the rest of the United States. In fact it is an epidemic and it is sometimes referred to as, "afluenza".
We do have the money in this city to do the right thing, to do our duty. Notice the millions of dollars that were provided for some businesses within the past year, such as Cruzio. Simply, the political will is not sufficient, yet to get the job done here yet in Santa Cruz. The Freedom Sleepers provide us with an excellent campaign base from which to act more for a more humane housing and shelter policy in Santa Cruz. This action, or this reasonable set of actions by sleep activists to change the discussion about "homelessness" and laws, needs more support from all of us in the community. Thank you, Freedom Sleepers, for your hard work and dedication and the risks you have been taking; tickets, arrests, more aspersions to your credit.
While we turn our heads to the slow killing, or death by marginal existence, lack of sleep, and criminalizing the condition of being ostracized while living without a home, "the homeless" die, slowly, just off to the side of our view. Ms. Samuels, I can not thank you enough for your kindnesses in pointing out our absurd failings to do our duty to shelter people, and house vulnerable people, and to do our part in this national crisis. Santa Cruz, let's not duck from our duty. Thank you, again, Freedom Sleepers!
Meanwhile... the homeless die off, slowly, day after day. These deaths happen while we blame "the homeless" for being without the housing and shelter that we refuse to provide, build and we ban people from sleeping anywhere except for in these unavailable homes and shelters. This situation of those who do not have homes not even having a park to sleep in legally, is the basis for a possible/probable lawsuit against the city of Santa Cruz, as some activists have suggested.
There are some initiatives in the works, I have heard, in this direction to sue the City of Santa Cruz. We are in the business for blaming people for existing without providing adequate places for these same people to actually exist, as existence requires sleep. So we are slowly killing people without housing off. This is generally called, generally-speaking, "a genocide". But because it is happening so slowly and so ubiquitously, right under our noses, it is not being recognized as "killing", as such.
We are in denial. We are in the killing business, kind of like Germany circa....1930's through the 1940's, and in so many other times in our history here in the United States. Though we say, "never again", we are actively doing it now. We are killing homeless people as a matter of policy here in Santa Cruz.
Freedom Sleepers is a movement of central importance to the entire issue of housing and shelter here in Santa Cruz, and no political discussion that is centered on affordable housing is really legitimate, or viable without also discussing emergency shelter beds, transitional shelters and subsidized housing here in this growing city. The current establishment in this city does not want, in general, to allow this discussion because it will interfere, so the people who comprise the elites and those of status here think, with their profitable interests. So these established people (many of whom are actually still thinking they are progressively minded individuals) stall and blame the homeless while they refuse to really address the problem in a way that addresses it with anything like a realistic, just and humane sensibility; they are in the killing business. Homeless people are dying, slowly, from a lack of housing, and services and shelter beds.
We so called, "responsible" people here in Santa Cruz, the City of Santa Cruz are slowly killing off people without homes or shelter whether we know it or not with our laws and policies, customs and obfuscations of the truth. With our ignorance of what Capitalism translates into on the ground floor of reality, in terms of housing stock and policies here in our city, county and country. Therefore, I believe that largely we are acting as if we are a very ignorant and prejudicial group of people here, in fact, in our so-called-liberal city by the sea.
The truth is we are veering toward a climate that is Nazi-like and fascistic. The people we are killing are a variety of individuals, many of whom are poor due primarily from mental illness and trauma, family indifference or frustration, hate and prejudice, and our own inability to deal more effectively with difference. However, many of "the homeless" would have been housed long ago if there was a stable stock of emergency shelter that was well supervised, along with seriously affordable and subsidized housing, ...oh, and more jobs that provided a fair living wage. Of course, other cities would need to do the same. Yet, because other cities do not do their duty, this is no reason for us, here in Santa Cruz to not do our duty.
Our policies and laws, prevailing customs, actions and speech toward the homeless, call it the "climate" of opinion toward "the homeless"- people here, is an invisible, and slow form of torture and genocide, of a certain kind, of those who are not housed, or sheltered. I firmly believe this after years of having deeply investigated the matter, profoundly and I think, without prejudice at and from the beginning of my exploration/witness. This is my conclusion after having witnessed the real situation for the homeless in Santa Cruz, and in Berkeley, and (to a lesser extent) other places in California.
We here in Santa Cruz are in violation of human rights as well as actual civil rights by not providing such poor people with options for legal sleeping, such as even a protected park where people could gather and sleep without getting ticketed, and having portable toilets available, or appropriate numbers of shelter beds for the indigent here. For example, the eighth amendment of the United States Constitution, that outlaws cruel and unusual punishment, provides us with the backing that we need to notice that our city is in rogue or illicit status, and actually illegal status, and we, that is our city government actually should be sued, in order to prevent the further killing off of the very poor, and people with other disabilities, such as the actuality of being without a proper home or shelter, or at least a park to be legal to sleep in.
What we actually have, in the way of emergency shelter beds in Santa Cruz, at the River Street Shelter and including the Paul E. Lee Loft, (and these are two different programs, by the way)- is plainly not enough shelter beds for single adults experiencing homelessness here in Santa Cruz, no matter how one evaluates the situation. I have counted, first hand at both places, and the number of beds is terribly paltry compared to the need. Let's ramp up the discussion and come together to face our challenges. Please help me, people of Santa Cruz.
Meet me at the next meeting of the Freedom Sleepers on Tuesday evening in front of Santa Cruz City Hall, across from the downtown library. Or, just stop by to thank Ms. Samuels and the other sleepers for doing our duty for us, sleeping out in protest and in civil disobedience against a terrible set of policies and bad laws. It is an old and venerable tradition in the United States, but then so is greed, classism, and indifference. Whose side our you on?
These comments have been written by "an awful activist", sometimes-know-it-all and coffee shop indolent, not to mention a seat-plopper who doesn't often enough ask politely enough if it is OK to talk about certain issues with people at the next table.
Needs work,
Elise Casby
While many unhoused people are shoved from one spot to another without regard to basic human rights. the Santa Cruz City Council and Staff funnels million of dollars of taxes revenues to favored big business like Seaside to build luxury hotels. Hotels rooms that sit empty for the majority of the year when tourist season is over. Contrast that with all of the longtime Santa Cruz unhoused citizens who are sleeping outdoors because of circumstances beyond their controls.
Santa Cruz residents need to wake up to the fact that the city cares more about tourists than the basic needs of all its citizens that contribute to tax revenue especially the poor and middle socioeconomic classes, elderly, disabled underemployment and young just starting out.
We need to utilize all empty motel and hotel rooms for students-elderly-disabled, especially those that received subsidies and tax exemptions from the city.
Santa Cruz residents need to wake up to the fact that the city cares more about tourists than the basic needs of all its citizens that contribute to tax revenue especially the poor and middle socioeconomic classes, elderly, disabled underemployment and young just starting out.
We need to utilize all empty motel and hotel rooms for students-elderly-disabled, especially those that received subsidies and tax exemptions from the city.
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