Have-Nots Are Losing Ground in Turf War

This story begins in Santa Barbara, although you could pick any city in California and produce more or less the same results.

Sometime last summer I was walking through Santa Barbara’s downtown, looking for city hall. Actually, I was lost. It’s not easy to get lost in Santa Barbara, but I had managed. I kept turning one corner after another until, finally, there it was.

Only it was different from what I remembered. The last time I had seen the city hall, maybe a decade ago, it conveyed all the small-town coziness you might expect from a place where half the population doesn’t have to work. This scene was not cozy at all. Santa Barbara’s city hall was under siege.

All around the entrance, a throng of the homeless was thoroughly encamped. Not in protest, not with any particular political agenda--they were just there. Tarpaulins were strung between trees and the grass had been worn to bare earth. The ground itself smelled of urine and rot.

Their position seemed to have been chosen for strategic reasons: Anyone entering city hall was forced to run a gantlet of panhandling and insults. Anyone leaving got the same treatment.

All this produced a high level of donations and amounted to a statement of sorts. The squatters were announcing that they could seize and control a prime piece of Santa Barbara turf. Before you dealt with City Hall, you had to deal with them.

One young man, maybe in his 20s, sat beneath a tree near the entrance. Beside him was a wooden coffin. I remember wondering where the coffin came from and whether it was the place where he spent the night.

“Hey, chief,” he said as I passed.

I stopped. The coffin had hooked me.

“What’s the coffin for?” I asked.

He shrugged and ignored the question. “There’s a toll,” he said. “All politicians got to pay a toll.”

I wasn’t a politician, I said, and gave him some change anyway. “Now what’s the coffin for?” I asked.

But he never answered. His attention had turned up the walk to the next visitor. As I went inside I heard it begin all over again.

“Hey, chief,” he said.

That happened, as I say, last summer. It was remarkable only for this quality: The scene outside the city hall represented a turf war of sorts. The homeless had come to realize they could force the burghers of Santa Barbara to deal with them and acknowledge their existence by taking control of an essential piece of real estate.

Over the last decade, you could see similar scenes emerge in virtually every California city. In Santa Monica, it was the promenade overlooking the Pacific. In San Francisco, the Civic Center Plaza. In the cities of the San Joaquin, the downtown shopping malls.

These were the places where the middle class was forced to rub up against the have-nots. And the middle class never liked it. In some cases, like the Santa Monica promenade, the struggle involved some of the very best turf the city had to offer.

But no more, in most cases. You will not find the young man and his coffin in front of the Santa Barbara city hall today. In fact, the whole scene in front of city hall is gone. In October the city of Santa Barbara passed a new ordinance making it illegal to spend the night on any public property in the city except for one derelict spot near the beach.

And so it goes all across California. Over the last few months, a remarkable campaign against the homeless has taken place. San Francisco has routed them from Civic Center Plaza. Santa Cruz has done the same at its mall, as has Berkeley at People’s Park and San Jose along the Guadalupe River.

The middle class has taken back its own. Only in Santa Monica, along the promenade, does the struggle over prime real estate continue.

Just why the campaign took place in the waning days of 1990 is not clear. Perhaps, after 10 years, we abandoned the notion that this problem could be solved. Or, more truthfully, that we were willing to pay the price to solve it. And so we chose to eliminate its most irritating symptoms.

And, after all, they were a nuisance. And still are, in Santa Monica. In our hearts, I suspect many of us are more cheered by this news than we would like to admit.

Still, it leaves some imponderables. For example, I keep wondering where the young man and his coffin went after Santa Barbara. The promenade at Santa Monica? Or some invisible place?

We will never know, of course, and I can’t say I will miss him. But I wonder, all the same.