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Nothing Works Quite As Well As Housing

Opinion
Our lack of affordable housing is a real public health crisis — the result of 30 years of complete neglect of homeless people by Mayor Tom Bates and, before that, his wife, former Mayor Loni Hancock. Their housing policy has been to ignore the people sleeping in parks, under overpasses and in alleys.

As Rents Skyrocket, Berkeley Attacks A Familiar Scapegoat

Opinion
The second vote on the anti-homeless laws came on December 1, 2015, exactly 60 years to the day that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that Montgomery Bus. On the 60th anniversary of Rosa Park’s historic action, the City Council is rolling back those civil rights in Berkeley.

On Homelessness and Human Rights in Santa Cruz

Opinion
Santa Cruz has enacted bans on sleeping in parks and in vehicles, bans on blankets, and bans on sitting, camping, sleeping, breathing, resting, dreaming and existing. Have the activists been noisy and “boisterous” in protesting the cruel attacks on poor people in their community? Thank God they have.

Cities that Criminalize the Poor Risk Losing HUD Funding

Opinion
It’s one thing to show the fallacy of giving tickets to people with no money, and wasting police resources on issues which would disappear if everybody had somewhere to live. But HUD is offering to share two billion dollars in federal funding with cities —if they stop criminalizing the poor.

Broken Windows Transcript

Opinion
Join Ibrahim Mubarak, Right 2 Survive; Benjamin Donlon, Denver Homeless Out Loud; JoJo Smith, Los Angeles Community Action Network, Shayla Myers, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles; Liz Brown, San Francisco State University; and Sulaiman Hyatt, BlackLivesMatter Bay Area chapter at a panel discussion organized by the Western Regional Advocacy Project. Speakers address the links business improvements districts increasing power in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver and other cities to how policing is connected to racial and economic segregation, gentrification and mass incarceration.

Broken Windows Policing Breaks Lives Apart

Opinion
We will continue our organizing efforts against the Business Improvement Districts and anyone who encourages police harassment and incarceration of poor and homeless people. We are not broken windows and we will continue to fight this violent system trying to break us until we are all free.

How Homelessness Is Distorted in the Media

Opinion
Many viewers of the morning news don’t think twice when they hear about the thousands without homes because these individuals are no longer portrayed as people with feelings and ideas. Instead, they are numbers. We see people turned into statistics because they are easier to compute that way.

Los Angeles and Portland Declare Housing Emergencies

Opinion
When countless people are living on the street, when there’s no state in the union where workers making minimum wage can afford market-rate housing, and when hundreds of thousands of school children are living in cars and trying to do homework in the dark, we have an emergency.

Humanize Not Militarize: Resistance to Militarism

Opinion
FROM FERGUSON TO GAZA, militarism directly impacts all of our lives. The American Friends Service Committee’s new poster art exhibit examines the effects of militarism in both foreign and domestic policy, and highlights alternatives and positive nonviolent solutions.

Unethical Medical Experiments on U.S. Citizens

Commentary   Features
The United States has an epidemic of ill health due to excessive drugging. The American people are considered a giant pool of experimental subjects for massively wealthy drug companies. Many persons diagnosed with mental illness are experimented upon, often without their consent and against their own best interests.

DBA Ambassadors Sweep People Away ‘Like Trash’

Opinion
Block by Block "ambassadors" utilize a strange sweeping technique to harass people on the streets. I hope the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission will request that Block by Block employees refrain from this kind of "beautification" activity. It demeans us as a community to have people treated like trash.