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Monthly Archives: 11/2018

Neutralizing Poverty: Governing Homelessness in San Francisco (Edmundo Fitzgerald)

Posted on by sarahhwang@berkeley.edu

Neutralizing Poverty: Governing Homelessness in San Francisco

Lecture by Chris Herring for Fall 2018 Colloquium The City and its People.

Fall 2018 GUH Colloquium student Edmundo Fitzgerald wrote the following reflection on the November 13th lecture given by Chris Herring, PhD Candidate in Sociology.

Chris Herring’s work looks at how cities attempt to mitigate homelessness. His presentation shared the results of his research as a PHD Candidate at UC Berkeley. He first showed us a brief history of cities incorporating anti-homeless legislation, the legacy of which being that 50% of all cities have at least one anti-homeless ordinance while some have as many as nine. It has been speculated that this is a type of class warfare but Mr. Herring postulates that the inhumane treatment of homeless people reflects the decline of a social democratic welfare state and the rise of the use of a penal state to try to mitigate the problem. Mr. Herring’s presentation is a reflection on his substantial field work, which includes twenty-three ride-alongs with SFPD, eleven community police meetings, eight city hall hearings, more than one hundred police on homeless person observations, and more than one hundred coalition outreaches with homeless people.

I asked Mr. Herring if he felt that there was a mutually beneficial relationship between homeless people and the city institutions that mitigate it-to which he immediately said no. But he mentioned that some literature was published on the “Homeless industrial complex”. When I researched that the first result was a Huffington Post article published in 2016 by Carey Fuller a former homeless advocate in Seattle. In it, she chastised the then mayor for not having adequate services to accommodate homeless people. Another article in the Washington Post by Daniel Stid in 2012 provides a compelling argument toward the existence of the “social services industrial complex”. In it he states, “the dirty little secret of the social sector is that once government money starts flowing, the nonprofits that have advocated for it and/or who are benefitting from it have a vested interest in keeping it going, even as evidence shows weak or no positive effects.”

Seattle is like San Francisco in some demographics. It too has had a tech boom, which means a steady crop of salaried, college educated millennials will continue to arrive to compete for a finite amount of housing. Young, smiling faces with satchels full of cash and career mobility have brought out the worst in San Franciscan landlords, using legal apparatuses such as the Ellis Act to evict tenants and develop their property. The most important difference between San Francisco and Seattle is the climate. While ending up homeless in San Francisco can be uncomfortable, being homeless in Seattle can be deadly. It would be interesting to see if homelessness is regarded more seriously in colder climates, using Mr. Herring’smmings scale of welfare state against therapeutic penal populism. Are cities addressing the homeless problem with outreach, substance abuse treatment, and mental health services? Or are they kicking the can down the block by having law enforcement and public works employees criminalize the homeless by writing citations that they can’t pay or forcefully throwing away their few worldly possessions?

The passing of Proposition C in San Francisco might represent a concept of the Homeless Industrial complex. While San Francisco has been lax in combating Ellis Act evictions, ravenous property developers have flooded the market with luxury lofts; many of which stay vacant. The tech sector cannot be blamed for homelessness, nor should we blame the hordes of educated young people flocking to the Bay Area. The generators of so much revenue are themselves creating a new bureaucracy with the extra 1% tax levied upon them as written in Prop C—all of which to combat a problem that was exacerbated by San Francisco property owners. This large sum of money has to go somewhere, and will most likely be a boon to many city contractors as they build navigation centers, clinics, and public bathrooms. Proposition C is a neoliberal solution to a neoliberal problem.

Of the great amount of revenue for city contractors that San Francisco’s homeless population are about to generate, how much of it will actually benefit them? This will be the important metric moving forward with regards to San Francisco, Seattle, or any city in the world. If two years down road, the homeless population of San Francisco significantly drops, I too could declare that homelessness and the state are not entwined.


Neutralizing Poverty: Governing Homelessness in San Francisco (WeiJie Zhu)

Posted on by sarahhwang@berkeley.edu

Neutralizing Poverty: Governing Homelessness in San Francisco Lecture by Chris Herring for Fall 2018 Colloquium The City and its People. Fall 2018 GUH Colloquium student WeiJie Zhu wrote the following reflection on the November 13th lecture given by Chris Herring, PhD Candidate in Sociology. Chris Herring’s lecture focused on discussing the relationship between the police and the homeless community in San Francisco. He began by explaining that there has been a history of discriminatory laws and ordinances that have negatively affected homeless people. An example is the Ugly Law (revised in 1970s), which makes it illegal for “unsightly or disgusting” people to appear…


Impossible Exiles: Palestinians in Arab Cities

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Impossible Exiles: Palestinians in Arab Cities Lecture by Ahmad Diab for Fall 2018 Colloquium The City and its People. Fall 2018 GUH Colloquium student Saeed Nassef wrote the following reflection on the October 16th lecture given by Ahmad Diab, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies. Ahmad Diab posed the idea of an impossible exile by investigating the works and lives of two of the most famous Palestinian artists and poets: Mahmoud Darwish and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. Both of these authors were born in Palestine at the time of the British mandate. Darwish stayed in Palestine during the Israeli occupation and left in…


‘My Bad Attitude Toward the Pastoral’: The Country and the City in the Poetry of C.S. Giscombe

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'My Bad Attitude Toward the Pastoral': The Country and the City in the Poetry of C.S. Giscombe Lecture by Chiyuma Elliott for Fall 2018 Colloquium The City and its People. Fall 2018 GUH Colloquium student Sunya Berkelman-Rosado wrote the following reflection on the October 23rd lecture given by Chiyuma Elliott, Assistant Professor of African American Studies. Chiyuma Elliott, Assistant Professor of African American Studies tells us that great pieces of art teach us how to analyze them. The analysis of such art, in turn, is an important tool for social analysis. In her lecture, ‘My Bad Attitude Toward the Pastoral': The Country and…


Recent publications by GUH Faculty Andrew Shanken

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Professor of Architecture Andrew Shanken has published two new articles this year. He wrote “Unit: A Semantic and architectural History” in the summer issue of Representations and “The Visual Culture of Planning” in the Journal of Planning History. Shanken co-taught the GUH course City of Memory with Prof. Lauren Kroiz, and will be co-teaching with her the Spring 2020 Graduate Interdisciplinary Studio on Berlin. Shanken, Andrew. “Unit: A Semantic and Architectural History.” Representations 143, (Summer 2018): 91-117. Find the article here.  This essay peers through the peephole of the word unit to reveal the word's journey across multiple fields from the mid-nineteenth…


Metropolis in Ruins. Berlin’s Interval of Time, 1943-1947 (Vincent Buckwitz)

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Metropolis in Ruins. Berlin's Interval of Time, 1943-1947. Lecture by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann for Fall 2018 Colloquium The City and its People. Fall 2018 GUH Colloquium student Vincent Buckwitz wrote the following reflection on the October 30th lecture given by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Associate Professor of History. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Associate Professor of History) was from 2017-2018 Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg/Institute for Advanced Studies Berlin and Guggenheim Fellow. He shared his research about the history of Berlin from 1943 to 1947 as it was transformed from the capital of Nazi Germany to a divided metropolis of the Cold War. In the beginning of the presentation, Prof.…


What does Infrastructure do? Water in Mexico City

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What does Infrastructure do? Water in Mexico City Lecture by Ivonne del Valle for Fall 2018 Colloquium The City and its People. Fall 2018 GUH Colloquium student Vivian Tran wrote the following reflection on the November 6th lecture given by Ivonne del Valle, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese. In the early 16th century, the conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan by the Spanish Empire brought about changes that radically altered the city's semi-aquatic environment. While the indigenous populations strived for a system of water management (using lakes and rivers surrounding the area), Spaniards from very early on had done the opposite by exposing a model…


Neutralizing Poverty: Governing Homelessness in San Francisco

Posted on by sarahhwang@berkeley.edu

Neutralizing Poverty: Governing Homelessness in San Francisco Lecture by Chris Herring for Fall 2018 Colloquium The City and its People. Fall 2018 GUH Colloquium student Tom Lindman wrote the following reflection on the November 13th lecture given by Chris Herring, PhD Candidate in Sociology. Chris Herring—a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley—studies anti-homelessness laws in the United States. His presentation for the City and its People provided a history of anti-homelessness laws and their impact in San Francisco. His work sheds light on how these laws are currently enforced and their effect on the unhoused. The talk began by situating current responses…


Metropolis in Ruins. Berlin’s Interval of Time, 1943-1947

Posted on by sarahhwang@berkeley.edu

Metropolis in Ruins. Berlin's Interval of Time, 1943-1947 Lecture by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann for Fall 2018 Colloquium The City and its People. Fall 2018 GUH Colloquium student Lily Leveque Eichhorn wrote the following reflection on the October 30th lecture given by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Assistant Professor of History. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann’s work focuses on uncovering a new perspective on people’s experiences in Berlin before, during, and after World War II. In introducing his work, he comments on the enormous amount of attention the World War II period has received from historians and scholars. He explains that despite people’s fascination with this point in history, little is known…


Recent publications by GUH Faculty Lauren Kroiz

Posted on by sarahhwang@berkeley.edu

Associate Professor of Art History Lauren Kroiz published a new book on the American Regionalists titled Cultivating Citizens: The Regional Work of Art in the New Deal Era. She also has an essay in the Ashmolean catalogue America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keefe to Hopper that was informed by her work with the Global Urban Humanities Initiative. Read the abstracts and find the books below. Kroiz, Lauren. Cultivating Citizens: The Regional Work of Art in the New Deal Era. UC Press. March 2018. Find the book here. During the 1930s and 1940s, painters Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry formed a…