Being neighborly
Homeless are swept out of the civic concourse
By Kelly Davis
A lawsuit settled last year by the city of San Diego and two attorneys working pro bono for eight homeless men and women gives anyone without a place to sleep permission to bed down on public property between 9 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. It’s a rule that’s made some downtown developers and business owners unhappy, as CityBeat has reported. Sidewalks, even if they line private property, are open to public access.
Also open to public access, it would seem, is the Civic Center concourse, the large plaza adjacent to City Hall. In fact, if anything fits the definition of public property, that’s it—“Dedicated to the present and future citizens of San Diego,” reads a plaque hung at the entrance to the concourse in 1965.
Several weeks ago, signs (see Page 10) went up around Golden Hall, the 20,000-square-foot building that sits at the west side of the concourse. Golden Hall is rented out for, among other things, church services and music performances. It’s where people gather to watch the vote counts come in on election nights and where the city holds large employee meetings.
The signs cite a portion of the municipal code that pertains to private businesses that are open to the public and makes it illegal to loiter if the business owner doesn’t want you there. It also cites the state’s illegal-lodging law, the one that the lawsuit settlement overrides between the designated hours.
It’s pretty obvious to whom the signs pertain. So, since when did the concourse become private property? And what about the illegal-lodging ticket settlement?
Gary Jones, asset manager with the city’s Real Estate Assets Department, which oversees all city-owned land, explained that his department was looking for advice from the police and the City Attorney’s office on how to deal with complaints they’d received from organizations renting out Golden Hall. A spokesperson for the mayor, who directed us to Jones, said complaints included cheerleaders being harassed during a competition at Golden Hall and people smoking pot in the concourse.
“Though it’s a city-owned building, we book that facility for private users, so for certain periods of time, the use of the building is under contract with a particular user,” Jones said. He said Real Estate Assets consulted with a city attorney on the sign’s wording.
Apparently, no one consulted Chris Morris, head of the City Attorney’s Criminal Division—which would prosecute any violations of the sign’s terms, or the city attorney, Mike Aguirre. Morris wasn’t aware of the signs until CityBeat pointed them out; after checking with his deputies, he said no one had been cited for illegal lodging in the concourse since the signs went in. That conversation was followed by a call from Aguirre, who said simply, “The concourse isn’t private property.”
Sometime between Wednesday afternoon, when we last took a look at the signs, and Monday evening, someone covered over the word “private” in neatly cut rectangles of tape.
Jones said it was his understanding that people could still sleep in the concourse between 9 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. if they didn’t cause problems—the guards who patrol the area under city contract with Wackenhut, a private security firm, were briefed on that, he said.
At 8 p.m. this past Monday night, the concourse was empty. But just outside that area, along Third Avenue and down B Street, it was a different story. One hour before the start of the settlement timeframe, more than a dozen folks were rolling out their sleeping bags. It’s an ideal spot because Third Avenue and C Street is where the only public restrooms in all of downtown are located.
Bea (she declined to give her last name) and an elderly man who declined to give his name altogether—we’ll call him “Max”—sat waiting on a bench just outside the concourse. Max said he doesn’t bed down until 9 p.m. “I’m a law-abiding citizen,” he said. When asked whether anyone sleeps in the concourse, Bea said she used to, but starting in December or January—she can’t remember exactly when—anyone sleeping there was asked to leave.
“It used to be a safe place to sleep,” she said, but now you don’t see no one in there because they know they’ll get thrown out.”
Both said the ouster was explained to them to be complaint driven.
“You’ve got 2 percent of the people who don’t follow the rules,” Max said.
Contacted the next morning, Aguirre said he didn’t know who’d taped over the word
“private.”
“But we have determined that the concourse is not private property,” he reiterated. He was about to draft a brochure, he said, a “good neighbor” pamphlet that, he felt, would be more effective than the signs and would be distributed to San Diego’s homeless population—guidelines to follow so as not to incur “the wrath” of people who might complain.
Write to kellyd@sdcitybeat.com and editor@sdcitybeat.com.
Published: 03/25/2008
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Comments
All men are created legal, but some are legaller than others.
The City Attorney has actually been rather scattered on this issue over the past two years. On the one hand, of all the questions over which to scratch one's head about Mike's eccentricities, whether or not he cares about vulnerable citizens certainly is not one of them. He's a good guy. He really is.
But on the other hand, as to whether or not he fully understands what's wrong with the practice of disrupting private behavior conducted on public property out of sheer necessity - a practice methodically and routinely employed by the police department - well that's a head-scratcher.
Mike it's simple - the Court determined and the City's settlement echoed that a municipality cannot, in effect, criminalize the very existence of certain members of its society based upon those members' class. San Diego cannot enact, codify or enforce its laws differently for poor people than for non-poor people. Sleeping is a basic human function. Many San Diegans resort to sleeping outside because they have to. What proximate cause might underly their circumstance is immaterial. If the City can offer them no alternative, it cannot lawfully brutalize those citizens because of their poverty,and that's what constant harassment, blaring PA systems, drive-bys, pat-downs and 5:00 a.m. wake-ups are, brutality.
There's a simple answer - create a shelter. It's cheaper than doing nothing at all. San Diego is the seventh largest city in America and it has not one, not ONE public shelter bed. It's got a buttload of homeless people in jail at an untold expense. It's got cops on the payroll out chasing old, infirmed, broken and sometimes gravely ill people around all hours of the night at an even greater cost. But it has nowhere for people to perform one of life's basic functions - sleeping.
Mike, you're a good guy. You're crazy as all get-out but you're not wrong, not usually. On this issue you've just not seen it for exactly what it is. Your city is engaged in the lowest form of thuggery and at its own expense. And please, don't think your mayor or police chief give good g*d d*mn - they're thugs themselves.
I know you haven't any connection to the budget, Mike. You can't decide to build a shelter. I get that. But you can do something - I hope desperately - to at least stop the city's goon squads from afflicting the defenseless just out of some petty, ugly, base, small-minded, ill-conceived idea that "those" people aren't people at all.
All you have to do is work in the area of the Civic plaza to see the problems caused by the sleeping people. The daily piles of garbage, planters full of junk, endless harrasment, etc. The biggest joke is the reasoning that it is close to the public bathrooms. The majority of the people sleeping in the plaza can't be bothered to walk the 1/2 block to the bathroom. Every planter has piles of human feces, and every doorway is a public urinal. Let the people who don't come to the area say how wrong it is to move these people out, but anyone who works in the area knows the truth of the situation.
I'd like to know who is responsible for simple cleaning of the concourse paved areas outside of City Hall. There is a large assessment on downtown property owners, purportedly for maintenance and cleaning beyond what the City General Fund provides. Yet the paved area is filthy and garbage cans are cracked, dirty, and overflowing at all hours of the day. If the special PBID district downtown is supposed to clean and beautify, why is our City Hall plaza such an embarrassment?