Albany CA has arrested the last residents of a longstanding East Bay homeless community on public property known as the Bulb. The Bulb also featured public art such as the figure above. (Photo: David Soto-Karlin)
The East Bay city of Albany, California, a relatively small town (approximately 19,000 residents) – just north of the former bastion of leftist politics and culture, Berkeley – this past Thursday cleared the last homeless residents from public land by charging them with “suspicion of illegal lodging.”
According to the Monday June 2 The Daily Californian:
Police arrested Bulb [the name of the publicly owned landfill in the bay] residents Amber Whitson and Philip Lewis, along with their friend Erik Eisenberg, on suspicion of illegal lodging. The city began enforcing a no-camping ordinance in October in an effort to relocate the homeless population so that the Bulb can be turned into a state park. Local law firms then filed a lawsuit against the city on behalf of the residents, which ended in an April settlement that gave residents $3,000 each as long as they agreed to leave the Bulb by April 25 and stay away from the area for one year.
Twenty-eight residents accepted the money, but Whitson and Lewis refused it, making them the last to leave the Bulb. The two have lived in the Bulb for seven years.
“We didn’t take the money because you can’t buy someone’s home,” Whitson said.
Although Albany is not as economically prosperous as the now upper-end Silicon Valley housing values of the increasingly wealth-dominated Berkeley, it is following a trend in the Bay Area that includes a war on the homeless. A 2010 citywide vote San in Francisco, the poster board symbol of alleged “degenerate” liberal values for the right wing, made sitting or lying on public sidewalks illegal from 7 AM to to 11 PM. This, even though, the San Francisco Police Department found the law utterly ineffective and a waste of law enforcement time.
Only because of student votes, according to The Daily Californian, in 2012 Berekely narrowly defeated an ordinance similar to San Francisco’s. However, a disturbing trend in many perceived progressive northern California and Northwest state [Oregon and Washington] cities is toward increased efforts to remove the homeless from the increasingly hi-tech cities that are seeing property values soar.
Bay Area attorney Osha Neumann, a longtime and passionate pro bone legal defense counselor for the homeless was infuriated by the uprooting of the homeless community on the Bulb swath of land in Albany:
Albany city officials have said the city has been working hard to provide for the homeless, but Osha Neumann, one of the lawyers who represented the residents, described the settlement as unsuccessful.
“What Albany has done is outrageous, by expelling (Bulb residents) from the city,” Neumann said. “They’re doing very poorly with or without the money. They’re finding themselves back on the streets.”
According to Neumann, many of the former Bulb residents are now living under a highway overpass.
In an earlier article about the Berkeley effort to ban the homeless from marring the shopping experiences of the residents of the city that was once known as a radical enclave — but no more; it is an increasingly a Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) community with some political activity at the University of California at Berkeley and activists who own homes or condos from before the skyrocketing prices for property became the norm — Osha Neumann indignantly stated: “Homeless people do not disappear from the streets, and they certainly don’t get moved from the street into housing or any place where their condition is bettered.”
BuzzFlash noted in an April 20 commentary that:
The war on the homeless – in which some cities have passed laws outlawing giving food to the homeless, not to mention longstanding laws against “vagrancy” – has taken a cruel turn. Now, some municipalities are outlawing living in cars and other vehicles.
People who live in cars are one step above the penury of complete homelessness. Denying them the shelter that an automobile provides is another cruel step in the war against people without economic means. Such actions give the term “the war on poverty” a whole new perspective: punishment for not having enough money to afford increasing rents.
Nearly 70 municipalities have passed or are considering such ordinances prohibiting living in cars, including Palo Alto – the home of Stanford University and the symbolic intellectual capital of Silicon Valley.
Like the fine art that we presume hangs in the expensive homes of hi-tech moguls and senior staff alike, wealth buys visual images that delight the eye. Consistent with that, when leaving one’s costly abode, the homeless are a visual blight to those who believe that money should not burden them with confronting economic and social disparities daily.
The Bulb in Albany, which for years was a community of mutually supportive homeless persons, will now likely be turned into a jogging path and bayside public park. This “battle of the Bulb” has been raging for years.
The end, however, appears near. The contradictory mission of the new hi-tech enriched wealth of the Bay Area is gathering steam: liberal on social issues, but keep the homeless and the poor out of sight. It makes for such an unpleasant day, doesn’t it?
In the showdown between the homeless and the heartless, the heartless apparently won in Albany – just a stone’s throw from Berkeley, fast becoming a redoubt of the economically supercharged who believe in liberal values as long as they don’t have to see the reality of homelessness on their way to Whole Foods.