The City of Berkeley has blown off decades of opportunities to listen to its citizens and has opted for big developer, corporate, and university perspectives every time. Berkeley citizens have no reason to trust city planning processes that are designed to grease the path for their own exploitation.

Berkeley needs truly affordable housing, City Councilmember Kriss Worthington said. It is a strong indictment by Worthington directed at members of the Berkeley City Council who act in the interests of developers and wealthy landlords against the needs of people with low or modest incomes.

HUD just added a high cost to the growing federal pressures against cities that criminalize homelessness. Cities that enforce anti-homeless laws risk losing $1.9 billion nationwide from federal homelessness funding. For the first time HUD is asking applicants to “describe how they are reducing criminalization of homelessness.”

At Urban Shield’s vendor expo, a hundred companies sell military grade weapons and surveillance equipment to local police departments. As much as organizers claim Urban Shield is about saving lives, the focus on guns and death is overwhelming. City agencies should not participate in an exercise that militarizes the police.

Nobody buys the hype about insanely tall buildings somehow saving the whales or solving the housing crisis. Insanely tall buildings full of luxury housing fill up with insanely wealthy people who rarely wonder why a town which once had a thriving black community now looks like a white country club.

Nine homeless individuals just whipped the City of Los Angeles in court. It’s a narrow ruling, and it was not unanimous, but it helps protect homeless and poor people’s property, including “medications, legal documents, family photographs, and bicycles that are left momentarily unattended in violation of a municipal ordinance.”

Anti-homeless ordinances in Boise, Idaho, are being challenged by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. The Department of Justice states that laws which criminalize involuntary behavior or conditions are in violation of the Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment, making them unconstitutional.

“The killing of civilian noncombatants for political purposes is terrorism and mass murder — nothing else. It should not have happened. It did not need to happen. It should never happen again.” -- Daniel Ellsberg, speaking at Livermore Laboratory on the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing