2008 Woodie Awards
Sidewalk sweet sidewalk
Faith Stein--Daily Californian (U. California-Berkeley)
Issue date: 10/8/03 Section: Opinion
(U-WIRE) BERKELEY, Calif. - My friend Kimball was overjoyed in our Russian class when he finally learned how to write "dirty hippies" in Cyrillic. This phrase, according to my dear Comrade Kimballovich, applies to 60 percent of the Cal campus, 90 percent of Berkeley, and, above all, to the homeless. Frankly, this is old news.
Not a month goes by that I don't overhear someone around campus complaining about being asked for money by a street person. Considering that my friends and I have an informal economic exchange program up and running on the basis of constant debt and lending for coffee money, these complaints seem rather trivial. So you don't like being asked for loose change? I don't like being asked for a cigarette/a light/directions to "that one place, you know, the one with the party"/if I have a mirror in my pocket every four minutes at parties, but it's a part of the scene.
Berkeley's reputation for being rather crunchy is an aging joke, but it's place on the national circuit of pseudo-friendly cities to hit among the homeless and travelers is well-established. Between Telegraph Avenue and People's Park, the city sounds like a perfect haven for the rootless, a reputation that many in the city government and local activists have mixed feelings about: They want to be more humane and progressive than other cities in their treatment of the homeless, but don't want the negative impacts on tourism and business.
There seem to be two main categories of homeless in the areas around campus, if you'll excuse my eugenics-sounding diction (shudder). The first being the older generations that have been on the streets since then-Gov. Reagan closed down the state mental institutions -- these are the folks that you're told to be wary of if walking trough People's Park at night. This population is often the one that would benefit the most from a local, convenient drug-and-alcohol detox center. Alcohol is one of the main health problems among the homeless, mostly beginning after they have been on the streets for a while. Moreover, this is the population that, especially in South and West Berkeley often has a family out on the streets with them -- being a paycheck away from homelessness is a common, precarious existence.
Not a month goes by that I don't overhear someone around campus complaining about being asked for money by a street person. Considering that my friends and I have an informal economic exchange program up and running on the basis of constant debt and lending for coffee money, these complaints seem rather trivial. So you don't like being asked for loose change? I don't like being asked for a cigarette/a light/directions to "that one place, you know, the one with the party"/if I have a mirror in my pocket every four minutes at parties, but it's a part of the scene.
Berkeley's reputation for being rather crunchy is an aging joke, but it's place on the national circuit of pseudo-friendly cities to hit among the homeless and travelers is well-established. Between Telegraph Avenue and People's Park, the city sounds like a perfect haven for the rootless, a reputation that many in the city government and local activists have mixed feelings about: They want to be more humane and progressive than other cities in their treatment of the homeless, but don't want the negative impacts on tourism and business.
There seem to be two main categories of homeless in the areas around campus, if you'll excuse my eugenics-sounding diction (shudder). The first being the older generations that have been on the streets since then-Gov. Reagan closed down the state mental institutions -- these are the folks that you're told to be wary of if walking trough People's Park at night. This population is often the one that would benefit the most from a local, convenient drug-and-alcohol detox center. Alcohol is one of the main health problems among the homeless, mostly beginning after they have been on the streets for a while. Moreover, this is the population that, especially in South and West Berkeley often has a family out on the streets with them -- being a paycheck away from homelessness is a common, precarious existence.