In late November and early December of 2015, homeless residents of Berkeley and supporters, organized by First They Came for the Homeless, created Liberty City, an occupation of Berkeley’s Old City Hall Grounds in protest of Berkeley’s soon-to-be enacted anti-homeless ordinances and in support of equal rights and homes for the homeless.
After eighteen days the City had had enough, the ordinances had passed, and they were evicted, homeless still.
Seven months came and went and the City, despite its declaration of an emergency shelter crisis in December 2015, has done exceptionally little to house the homeless. There is no Navigation Center open to bring people in off the street with their possessions, pets and partners, yet City buildings remain vacant. There are no Tiny Homes going up, nor any sites planned. In fact homeless services for youth, administered by YSA, were cut by $40,000. The only plan apparently for the coming winter is to arrest people for occupying sidewalk space once the fifty storage bins the City allocated money for are installed…
And so this Fourth of July weekend homeless people and friends again gathered at Old City Hall in protest, staging a 48-hour vigil demanding equal rights, justice not jail, and demanding that the City stop seizing and destroying their possessions. Some perched atop pillars (see at right), some occupied the steps and some organized feeds on the sidewalk. One person brought their kitten; another their child.
After a week in which the Bay Area’s press devoted article after article to the plight of the homeless, the City answered their demands by coming and stealing the protesters possessions, then ticketing them for sleeping (no one was sleeping, but everyone has to sleep sometime) and trespassing (no one was trespassing, but everyone has to occupy space – it’s the nature of physical law).
Nonetheless the protest remained. It remained all day Sunday and continued into Monday with much food and good cheer. (One thing that did not remain is the green mesh fence that you see in the picture below. It mysteriously vanished (probably folded itself up into some hidden dimension in accordance with string theory) sometime between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon.)
The protest may still be there. Or it may be back. One thing seems certain – the homeless are still around and about, whether or not they happen to make themselves plainly visible as they did at City Hall. And they still lack the one thing that would make them not homeless – a place to call their own.
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