Tag: Sit Lie

As a shockwave of disclosures expands the Hunters Point scandal, more startling historical and scientific facts were revealed by Daniel Hirsch, former University of California Santa Cruz Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy director on Thursday, Oct. 18, 2018. A clutch of powerful federal, state and local politicians has been involved for decades in the remediation and redevelopment of Superfund sites Hunters Point and Treasure Island. 

There are so many untold stories of how and why people become un-housed. Loss of a job, a partner, the onset of an illness or a crisis, but most of the time, in the Bay Area, it’s because of a greed-inspired landlord raising rent, evicting for profit so he or she can house the droves of 20-30-something wealthy, mostly white people streaming into town for the tech industry.

The broken windows model of policing uses code words like “disorder” and the metaphor of “broken windows,” focusing on the importance of “fixing,” aka policing, getting rid of, cleaning out broken windows as a way of “preventing” more “serious crime.” The poor, disabled and houseless scholars from POOR Magazine who have experienced the violence of this private policing launched the WeSearch Policy Group in 2013.

On Wednesday, Feb. 5, citing California Penal Code Section 368, we, the evicted, gentrified, policed, elderly and disabled, walked into the Hall of Justice in San Francisco to bring criminal charges of elder abuse against landlords for the perpetration of the crime of Ellis Act evictions against frail, elder, disabled and traumatized residents of San Francisco.

Reporting and supporting as a revolutionary poverty journalist, I have done multiple stories on the increasing criminalization suffered by houseless peoples in the U.S. As a daughter raised in a houseless family, I was personally cited, arrested and eventually incarcerated for the act of being houseless and living in the car with my mama.

From the Mission District in San Francisco, to West, North and now East Oakland, several neighborhoods in LA, young Black and Brown men, convening, talking, laughing, being young, are viewed as “dangerous,” “suspect” or criminal. Laws like the gang injunction are instituted and applied, and eventually we are completely wiped away like we were never there.

Residents of the Sunset district of San Francisco voiced support for a racist, classist, anti-poor people measure which would make it doubly illegal to park RVs and campers where houseless people sleep on the streets in the Sunset. To speak back to this legislation, call the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to oppose ‘Large Vehicle Parking Restrictions,’ Item 120142 on their agenda for Tuesday, Sept. 25.

At a meeting with the Coalition on Homelessness, Police Chief George Gascon confided he knew a sit/lie law was unnecessary “scapegoating” (Gascon’s word), but he was under tremendous pressure from Haight Street businesses to promote it. Many Haight merchants, however, oppose sit/lie, Prop L.

The end game for the ballot proposition known as “sit/lie” is to not just rid the city of homeless people but, more importantly, to shift the power balance in San Francisco to the right. The biggest funder of Prop L, millionaire Ron Conway, says: “We must take our city back … This is about survival.” Pushing Prop L with a passion is one-time Republican political action committee fundraiser C.W. Nevius, now a Chronicle columnist, who parrots arguments proposed by an ultra-right-wing think tank, the Manhattan Institute.

On Sunday, Oct. 10, from 4 to 7 p.m., in coordination with World Homeless Day, a spontaneously organized group, Creative Housing Liberation, came together to help kick off a rally with speakers and music at San Francisco’s Civic Center in the shadow of City Hall, the Mayor’s Office and the Board of Supervisors’ chambers.