No Place at the Table: Feeding the Hungry in San Diego is a Crime!

By Rocky Neptune

“Mommie, I’m hungry,” the little girl cried as she stood shivering in the cold wind, waiting for food. The image has never left me…and now that I am semi-retired I want to be part of an effort making sure no more children starve on San Diego city streets.

I want to help buy a catering truck. A fellow member of the San Diego Renters Union, who was once homeless, has gotten a modest settlement and has agreed to match whatever the Renters Union can raise toward buying a food truck to feed the homeless. As someone who spent their teen years on the streets of New York City, I learned very early, as I camped under a hedge at New York University, that whatever didn’t fit in a back-pack was useless. I had no possessions, so possessions did not possess me. But I did know hunger and, often, what crimes against society – and oneself – it took to obtain money for food.

In 2004 I defied San Diego police to feed hungry children. Together with Norma Rossi, the 70-year-old firebrand who ran the San Diego Inter-Faith Coalition for the Homeless, several Nazarene ministers, two fundamentalist preachers and about a dozen students; we cut the lock on the gate at 14th and Broadway and allowed volunteers onto the empty lot which was owned by the city to begin setting up tables to distribute warm food and clothes.

For almost 10 years, the lot had been a regular nightly venue for homeless persons, seniors, the disabled and others who had no money to buy food. No means test, no guilt trip, no judgments, and no question of worthiness; just people of faith, after 2000 years, still doing what the original Christian did – feeding the hungry.

But a wealthy condo developer, a member of the oligarchy who controls city government, bought the property opposite the feeding area and didn’t want his prospective $450,000 condo buyers to see the poor on the opposite corner. In cahoots with the very corruptible downtown Councilman, Byron Wear, and others bought off in the City Manager’s office and General Services of the Planning Department, a charade was created where the developer threatened to sue the city because the lot was not zoned for outdoor meals. The city quickly buckled and ordered the church groups to quit their nightly feedings. It was done so quickly that homeless activists didn’t even have an opportunity to point out that no such zoning restriction existed, that the feeding program could have been “grandfathered” and that all the city had to do was declare a homeless emergency and they would have needed no justification or legal defense for the continuation of the feeding program.

The next day, after our defiance, city officials quickly signed a lease with the developer and when we arrived the next night, the entire area was filled with construction trucks while squad cars blocked the entrance and they threatened to arrest anyone who entered with trespassing. For several nights, those people of highly seasoned faith, including Mid-City Nazarene Church members and a few Quakers, continued to feed the poor on 14th Street adjacent to the lot in spite of increasingly belligerent police officers who made threats of arrest – the fundamentalist people quickly buckled and ran.

Alas, imprisonment for justice is for saints and those with independent incomes, most of us working stiffs, students and retirees couldn’t handle the fines, so we stopped our defiance of greed and inhumanity, just as the wonderful people at the Salvation Army just up the street on Broadway began a nightly feeding schedule.

It was then that I discovered that the whole incident at 14th and Broadway was not just about one man’s greed or one corporation’s political prowess, but was the “shot heard ‘round the city” which began San Diego’s War on the Homeless. Powerful developers, hotel moguls, corporate CEO’s and others who hold the leash on city officials, fed by the salivating crook John Moores and his new tax-payer financed ballpark, wanted the homeless gone. Father Joe and others wasn’t doing enough to warehouse them and the fight over opening the only 24-hour public restroom downtown, led by a charismatic homeless man, Larry Milligan, terrified the city’s oligarchy. An organized, militant homeless population demanding basic human rights would conflict with their inflated profit projections, anticipated property values and the artificial ambiance in America’s Phoniest City.

San Diego’s class cleansing of the last few years has used hunger as its main weapon. Daily hassles, sleep deprivation, arrests, beatings and even a few high profile police assassinations are also weapons of choice in San Diego’ economic combat against a people who have nothing. Incredibly, Police Chief William Landsdowne has given his officers free reign to not only attack the homeless but their benefactors. 74-year-old John Ross in May of last year was grabbed by the head, his arm twisted and thrown to the ground for giving bottles of water to the homeless at the corner of K and 15th Street. Ross, who has filed a lawsuit against the city, along with two homeless men, Marvin Brittan and Myron Hill, who were also injured when the officer became violent over the water giving gathering.

After closing the public feeding facility, the city quickly moved against the Salvation Army and got their meal program closed. Then, one by one, they began picking off the smaller homeless providers who offered food and day shelter. Some churches have resisted. In Pacific Beach, the United Methodist Church, sued the city after a code enforcement officer cited the church for its meager once-a-week homeless feeding program on church grounds. In 2008, with the first honest, humane City Attorney, Michael Aguirre, just elected; San Diego’s economic jihad faltered. He settled with the church, recognizing its 1st Amendment Right of freely practicing religion

He also settled a class-action lawsuit which was filed after city workers escorted by police seized and destroyed the possessions, including medicines, priceless photos, even toothbrushes, of homeless men and women. The San Diego ACLU and the Dreher Law Firm had asked the court for a permanent injunction stopping the city from massive sweeps and the wholesale destruction of people’s personal possessions.

Of course, like an honest sheriff in the old west, no one who opposes the city’s bad guys lasts for long in San Diego. His re-election was doomed as the oligarchy settled on a former right-wing state legislator, Jan Goldsmith, and funneled millions of dollars and “volunteers” into defeating Aguirre.

The local Food Not Bombs group feeds the poor in North Park each Sunday afternoon but it is small scale, almost like a family picnic, and in the last few years the police have left it alone.

“No Place at the Table,” is a report issued last month which looks at the efforts of cities across the nation to not only criminalize the homeless, but make it a crime for those humanitarians and people of faith who are called to share food with those who have none. San Diego was among the 23 communities which were blasted in the study as developing types of laws and tactics which restricted or outlawed feeding the poor.

The July, 2010, report, issued by the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, stressed that access to food is both a human need and right. “As the recession and foreclosure crisis drive dramatic increases in poverty and homelessness, communities should be embracing solutions to homelessness, rather than punishing people for feeding those in need,” Maria Foscarinis, Executive Director of the Law Center said in releasing the study.

The report shows that in 2009 there was a 26% increase in demand for food assistance in all the cities surveyed and 25% of those demands went unmet. To starve people down on their luck or too fragile to compete in our dog-eat-dog world in the hopes that they will move on, somewhere else, shows the depths of depravity we have sunk as a society.

We must set aside worthiness; determining who has earned a place at the table. Those shadows passing us on the streets, lugging all they own in the world, many struggling for a moment of life in decency and relevance, clinging to their personhood in the face of hate and disgust, should not be further victimized by starvation. Even Charles Manson and Bernie Madoff get three meals a day.

Help us buy a food truck for the homeless. If the city refuses to give us a health permit because we are giving the food away; we will sell it at 1 cent each. There are no price controls in modern corporate owned capitalism. Send your checks made out to Lyle Neptun Co. 2260 El Cajon Blvd. #907, San Diego, Ca. 92104 with donation-food truck in the memo section. The Lyle Neptun Co. will be apply for the permit to operate the feeding van as a profit appearing enterprise to get around the city’s war on the homeless. Oh, yea, you can volunteer to person the truck as many hours as possible. Or you can join the Feed the Homeless Bandwagon Board of Directors, which will eventually incorporate and run the project.

Rocky Neptun is director of the San Diego Renters Union and is acting manager of the Casa de los Olvidados, a refuge for street kids with HIV-Aids in Tijuana, Mexico. He is a former elected member of the San Diego Mid-City Planning Board and is a member of the San Diego Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). His book, San Diego:1st City of Empire will be published early next year. He can be reached at (619) 450-9804 or rockyneptun@gmail.com