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Indybay Feature

Preliminary Survey Results on Backpack Bigotry & One Man's Experience at Peets Coffee

by Robert Norse, Sean Deluge, & Linda Lemaster
Coffee Roasting Company, Peet's, and Starbucks--of 8 coffee shops surveyed downtown explicitly ban backpacks--even if non-obstructive. It's also not clear whether there's discriminatory treatment for "student" backpacks, versus survival or "Homeless" backpacks. None of the cafes approached (which included Verve, Lulu Carpenters, Cafe Pergolesi, & Cafe Gratitude) agreed initially to post the Non-Descrimination Pledge we gave them, but did say they'd pass it on to their managers or owners. We have yet to hear from any of them. The day before ten of us in a group visited each cafe on Saturday night Sean Deluge posted his dark experience at Peet's Coffee.
SEAN'S "PITCHFORK THE POOR" PEET'S EXPERIENCE
Sean Deluge posted the following comment on Steve Pleich's Citizens for a Better Santa Cruz Site [https://www.facebook.com/groups/463105420413280/permalink/643897609000726/]:

"As of this morning [Friday January 24, 2014] the coffee shop I've been going to for the last 5 months has changed it's policy of allowing people with backpacks to place them outside the door or even bring them in. Peet's Coffee on Pacific has always treated everyone the same--homeless or not.

I placed my guitar on the cart I have just outside the door and I know other who are artists not homeless that bring in bags of their art supplies without a problem. Today that all changed with this new policy. Today Peet's no longer allows any bags, backpacks or items to be placed outside the door or be brought inside. I was told I could lock my guitar to a bike rack or leave it at home if I don't want it stolen or wrecked.

I will no longer support Peet's. I personally feel if a business anywhere that finds reasons to exclude a group of people because the business was pressured to do so by a group who's purpose is to drive them away will not get my business. One of the shift managers told me in so many words when I asked why this change and if it's from pressure by a certain local group (not mentioning the name) and was told, "They made a good point, and they aren't anti-homeless and are anti-violence I don't think you're giving Take Back Santa Cruz [TBSC] a fair break."


LIGHTHOUSE LINDA LEMASTER LAYS DOWN THE (HIGHER) LAW
There was a long thread of commentary, but I found the comments by Linda Lemaster most instructive. She's the former chair of the Homeless Issues Task Force, a formerly homeless single mom, and co-founder of Housing Now! in Santa Cruz (as well as a dynamite writer) among other things. She wrote:

"I know the downtown Peet's discriminates against "homeless" looking people first-hand, have seen it, called them on it (wrote of it somewhere...), so for me, WHY staff there "blames" TBSC for their policy change is a whole other conversation. My encounter happened between 2 n 3 years back, tho. Sean, I wish I knew how to be supportive so you can enjoy and participate with others more freely? But clearly it isn't just Peet's. That's like blaming Wells Fargo for the foreclosure piracy and not mentioning BofA or Morgan Stanley Chase just because Wells Fargo is blatant and gets noticed first. Whatever else we must create and manage for a non-discriminating future public life,
I believe we need "safe spaces" for STUFF, since parks and other public spaces have been intentionally shrunk around here in direct response to MORE people who happen to be homeless.

You'll see: the need will grow here for people, as $1,000 for a studio or bedroom to rent becomes $1,200 for half a bedroom in a few years -- our children's lives will be different if extreme inflation continues to be treated as the status quo. Unless we get to work now. One could even say living rooms and sit-down private kitchens are a thing of the past, except for the wealthy and the inheriting lucky.
Peets downtown is way more crowded (table spacing) there than in others I've seen...not expecting cornered managers to soften up especially if confronted effectively....

I am not sure the general public yet understands that keeping one's "stuff" is absolutely necessary for many folks who are homeless. (To overgeneralize anyhow, the LONGER outside, the more essential...) But the courts are fulla cases wherein police arresting or disrupting homeless people, then taking or disposing of their belongings are consistently found wrong. Turns out it is unconstitutional to take away a person's needed personal effects without their consent.

Ours is not the only City with little or no institutional memory,so this gets adjudicated over n over, it seems. So the problem with a private business like Peet's is, it seems to me, asking customers (in this case, Sean) to burden the Public Property with his guitar or whatever else in order to partake of their coffee n service, without either considering the risk he'd be taking, nor offering compensation to City personnel pressed into service for Peets's profits. I cannot understand how that isn't clearly discrimination?

I have been treated MORE like a Bag Lady since housed, than I ever was on the streets homeless?!?! (And I don't appreciate peoples' looks and comments of judgement, not a bit.) The difference: Now I have no car, so have to carry anything I will be needing, sometimes for the whole day. Also I wear my hat way more -- predicting hat comeback as folks get fed up with their cars and gas-hostage pricing. Because I'm disabled it means more stuff than I would have formerly needed to get thru the day... Just reminding: you can't really tell by looking who is homeless. Evaluate what you really know before foot goes in mouth..."


HUFF RESPONSE COMING UP ON WEDNESDAY
HUFF (Homeless United for Friendship & Freedom) will be meeting on Wednesday (11 AM, Sub Rosa) to discuss what further steps to take to encourage non-discrimination downtown. Please post any experiences you've had around this issue. The creeping criminalization and exclusion of homeless people is no joke.
Add Your Comments

Comments (Hide Comments)
by Razer Ray
...and they can keep the inside of the store clear of packs/etc, their window free of impediments to passers-by, ie. potential customers view of their shop, if they want to.

Personally I don't go to Peets anymore b/c of their policy regarding unattended Items at tables, like my computer, when I take the long walk to Cedar to smoke, but I DO NOT WHINE ABOUT IT.

I simply take my business elsewhere. There are LOTS of coffeeshops in Santa Cruz.

It's really that simple. It's THEIR store and easement in front of it and they can do what they want as long as it isn't selective (and even that would be subject to 'right to refuse anyone'), and it isn't. I've watched them do the same thing to cubie-dwellers.

The onus of not allowing people's property all over a store's property is more rightly attributed to the high cost of per-foot lease rates Downtown meaning the stores are so small they can barely squeeze enough customers inside to make their 'nut', no less someone's shopping cart or Expedition pack.

Buy a lock and chain and put your stuff at a bike rack like the rest of us.

Ps. Does Linda LeMaster KNOW RN is using her words right now? RN says: "She wrote" without providing a link to her writings. I'd advise he do that. I think context is needed because one thing RN is NOTED FOR is his inability to provide context for his out-of-context quoting

Because Robert is a disinformation artist
by Robert Norse
Linda's comments were solicited and authorized. Not taken out of context. She however was not part of the 10-person surveying group on Saturday. Nor was Sean-whose comments were the subject of a long stream on Steve Pleich's Citizens for a Better Santa Cruz.

I encourage folks to report their experiences when they are hassled or excluded.

I fear if there is not general resistance to this crap, it will become general practice.
by other than your back
snoring dan told me your stuff needs to be on a bike or it's panier to legally use the bike lockers downtown.
during pc2010, ed frey's truck became a de facto homeless storage unit, in addition to the porta potty it sported.

fuck the capitalist coffee shops. HUFF Cafe can provide free coffee. Sub Rosa is also a better choice.

we now have a 24 hour porta potty downtown. the next step in the struggle is a safe place for homeless stuff downtown, and ed showed how easily that can be done.
by Razer Ray
t_m.jpg
Image info pertinent to the following comment → Left:Tony, Right: Max, taking a well-deserved beer break @ city hall. Later, Tony was barred from city hall property for verbally threatening a groundskeeper b/c like RN, he PERSONALIZED and thought the groundskeeper made his OWN decision about when to turn on the lawn sprinklers. Details of the threat on request. I witnessed the incident. Albeit so much bluster on Tony's part YOU would not have wanted to be threatened that way either.
---------------------

Nice exhortation but personally I drink coffee earlier in the day than 2pm or whenever SubR's staff gets around to opening.

I think the difference between discrimination and not tolerating individual's "behavior" is being conflated here. I see that conflation a LOT in certain social circles a lot because the people in those circles DON'T KNOW the people under discussion... They only kmow what the person tells them, often, like MOST OF US, excluding indications of their culpability from the narratives told. I PERSONALLY KNOW most of the people under discussion here, and in other posts about Santa Cruz Street People ("Homeless" is dehumanizing and demeaning... We ALL live here) on IndyBay.

For instance... Portugee Tony... Interviewed by RN at last Saturday's FNB feed by the Post office. You know... The guy with the flamboyantly 'dressed out' bikes and who speed raps at anyone passing by 90% of the time?

He understands perfectly well why he can't go into BookShop Santa Cruz, and honestly... IF he maintains as he has for the last month or so, someday in the not-too-distant future (years) he may actually find himself sitting and reading a book at the BSSC with no problem... Or not, but either way, the legitimate reason he's been 86'd is understood by him, if not by the people who conflate the issue of discrimination against individual "bad behavior" with civil rights issues involving groups for their own opportunistic advantage
While instances of individuals being banned for "bad behavior" certainly need to be examined on their individual circumstances, it seems clear to me that a broad ban on survival backpacks is a pretty clear anti-homeless move.

Those interested in further steps to expose and combat this kind of corporate nastiness might be interested in the HUFF meeting later today (11 AM at Sub Rosa CAfe).

More research is clearly needed to explore the reasons for these bans in the Coffee Roasting Company, Starbucks, and Peet's, and how selectively it is enforced.

Please pass on info about other cafes and businesses and what their practice is.

DAMN! You give TBSC a LOT of credit for being able to pressure businesses.

I can almost sense Robert's admiration of their organizing power! (snigger)

When you say TBSC or "Downtown Businesses" Robert, you REALLY need to start separating the overarching agenda of property development from the businesses AND good-hearted (if misguided) residents or else all you end up doing IS giving TBSC's scumbucket 'leadership' more traction for their propaganda.

Besides, you're wrong. The DTA does the pressuring, as I illustrate below.

A scant few business employees, such as the recently departed manager of Peets, LUV TBSC, and I CAN imagine her going into the store to badger-from-a-distance as she visits her old haunts, but to say she and her few true-believing friends like the harried and overworked 'day manager' of Starbucks can "pressure" anyone is nonsense.

I was told years ago by a store employee at Peets that the DISTRICT MANAGER made the policy of not giving out the day-olds anymore. ONLY the District Manager would be involved in making ANY policy affecting all customers. NOT a 'store manager", and ESPECIALLY NOT AN OUTSIDE PARTY LIKE TBSC. This is also true at Starbucks.

But to really understand what's happening we need to identify ALL of the vicitims.

The DTA's victim businesses who have postage stamp size floor spaces and HUGE expenses not the least of which are their (property interests benefitting) over-priced lease payments.

TBSC's citizen victims who were just looking for a day out with neighbors doing something civic-minded like cleaning riverbanks and end up being displaced by (property interest benefitting) hotels and such.

Displaced people, victims of the city's economic collusion with property interests... again "often not-even-in-the-same-state" interests.

Can anyone spot the common denominator?

I'm about to flesh that out a little in a rambling screed.

------------------

Lets do some analysis vamping on that Lord Buckley tinged Jim Morrison line in the title

When I was back there in Santa Cruz There was a person there who put forth a proposition...

...that you can blame an organization (TBSC) which represents a portion of the citizens looking for something community-minded to do, yet the powerful economic interest in Santa Cruz... Commercial property interests, who have the ultimate control of that organization go un-noted by the accuser, with the onus falling on the name of a shell organization and the 'civic minded citizens' that relate to that name with some adoration because they're simply interested in cleaning up beaches or somesuch and never note, because it's never clearly stated BY ANYONE, there's a subrosa (sic) agenda at work.

I think a LOT of TBSC following Lower Ocean residents are STUNNED by the appearance of a hotel project in their hood... And they are STILL unaware TBSC's leadership, by pursuing the "cleaning up', the gentrification of Lower Ocean, intend to apply that broom to THEIR presence eventually. Give it a few years after hotel project completion folks..

Note: The commercial property interests have no love lost for renters or homeowners.


Second verse: "When I was back there in coffee shop janitorial work", there was a DTA coffee klatch there where a person put forth a response, as a representative of commercial property interests, as the economic crunch was hitting home in first decade of the new millennium, to a panicked statement by one of the business owners attending the klatch that a friend's business was down by 50% and was worrying for that friend's ability to 'make it'.

The response? "We can just put another business in that hole."

Note: The commercial property interests have no love lost for the business owners they lease to.


A year or somewhat later, my boss returned from a DTA meeting wherein he was told, and communicated to me, a new policy of not taking the day-old pastries out to "Feed the pigeons". This occured at the same time Peet's District Manager informed that staff of policy change.

DTA encompasses both business AND property interests in Santa Cruz, and TBSC REPRESENTS PROPERTY INTERESTS TOO, with the businesses under the gun of often not-even-in-the-same-state PROPERTY OWNERS, even if only by force of lease non-renewal or tripling of $/FT ease rates to drive a business out.

Meanwhile Robert's tone-deaf simple-minded vilifying of the name TBSC, an organization that MOST Santa Cruz citizen understand as "Mostly Harmless", alienates 'ordinary citizens' who would come into contact with the city's 'alternative citizens' at coffee shops and on the street, and is counterproductive. Most people involved in TBSC just want to be community-involved. They don't have the vaguest idea why the organization is singled out.

None of them has ever made a bogus video showing them poking one of their friends covered in a blanket with a stick or called the cops on a panhandler, or found alleged human feces 'in their driveway' (that came from a homeless person, not the bar-intoxicated drunk on their way home to the wife of course)


Regarding stores 86'ing people in general. Most of the people I hang out with NEVER get 86'd from anywhere in Santa Cruz. They keep their in-store 'footprint' to a minimum and show respect for some SERIOUSLY UNDERPAID PEOPLE called "Employees". Because MOST of us have been one of those (unlike you Robert) and we empathize.

OTOH we really have no empathy whatsoever for people who think the world has to bend to their whim. It doesn't. NOT Sorry.

THOSE PEOPLE have problems EVERYWHERE, and honestly, there's a fuckload of pseudo-affluents here like that too, and I'VE SEEN THEM get bounced for the same reason the 'grown children' Robert promotes as 'cause celebres' might.

I witnessed a Starbucks worker tell a guy who rolled in with a $5.000 dollar bike one morning and OFC, no lock, that HE COULD NOT bring it in the store.

He made a bigger fuss that Portugee Tony's ever created there and left in a (sic) HUFF

(btw, tony's allowed to go into starbucks at the moment after being 86'd a while back)

As long as whatever rule a store creates is applied to everyone equally, I see no problem.

I also see no problem ejecting anyone whose behavior is bizarre enough to disturb, threatening to me OR THE EMPLOYEES of the store, or smells badly by estimation of the manager on shift, or honestly just about any reason the store personnel may like because I rarely find myself not understanding why someone is 86'd if I observe the whole incident.

Typically only the person so encumbered doesn't understand.

Also typically, they're in denial.
by Bruce Holloway
Linda's comments are well-taken except there ain't no Morgan Stanley Chase. It's J. P. Morgan Chase Bank. Morgan Stanley is guilty of its own sins. Chase Bank was David Rockefeller's for many years until it had to merge. J. P. Morgan's bank was cleaved into two entities in 1933 due to the Glass-Steagall Act, which legislated the separation of commercial and investment banking and was subsequently eviscerated during the Clinton Administration.
by Robert Norse
I'm not sure how public the whole discussion on the Citizens for Positive Change facebook page is, but Mark Weller gave me permission to pass on his recent report at the Pergolesi yesterday:


"This morning I was standing on the sidewalk in front of caffe Pergolisi's talking with a friend who was there having coffee. The heavy set young woman that works the mornings there came out to the top of the steps and told us we could not stand on the sidewalk in front talking. She stated that the were "Cracking Down" on people hanging out.

Now, the issue is....I have been an occasional customer there for months (homeless) but was always able to arrive in a car. My sleeping bag and luggage cart were in the car not visible. Today without a car, I had my cart with me and it was set on the sidewalk out of the way while I was talking. My clothing is exactly the same as always, clean and not appearing "homeless." So the only difference was the sleeping bag and luggage cart.

Please post your recent experiences around the issue of exclusion (i.e. is it happening unjustifiably or not?).

This is the typical asinine attitude displayed here in Santa Cruz toward the homeless. I can guarantee I will not be a customer there from this point on and I will spread the word that this establishment is no longer worthy of being in business.

When a business tries to control a city sidewalk, there is a problem... The sidewalk is not their property and no one involved was using the facilities or even on their property. Actually, the person I was talking to was there as a customer and had a coffee paid for. He was on the sidewalk though as was I during out brief talk."


I understand others may have different and more positive experiences at the Pergolesi. I've generally been treated well, for instance.

However, my concern is with both the ir policy towards homeless people generally (especially those with backpacks), and with how widespread this shadow of growing bigotry (as it feels to me to be) is.
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