Tents dot the Benchlands in San Lorenzo Park Thursday evening.
Photo by TARMO HANNULA
The Unhoused of Santa Cruz City Win Another Round
By KEITH MCHENRY
March 30, in another win for the unhoused of Santa Cruz city in their legal struggle to protect their rights and safety, Federal Magistrate Susan van Keulen ruled against the City of Santa Cruz's motion to vacate the injunction and ordered city officials to meet with the unhoused, the Santa Cruz Homeless Union and Food Not Bombs about the details of a new managed camp on the Benchlands.
City Planning Director Lee Butler had announced a sweep of those living in San Lorenzo Park in December 2020, but the community joined with those living at the park in physically blocking the Holiday Evictions.
The Santa Cruz Homeless Union, Food Not Bombs and the people sheltering
in place at the park filed a restraining order that week halting the sweep because it was contrary to the Center of Disease Control's Covid-19 guidelines. Judge Van Keulen issued her first temporary restraining order stopping the planed eviction.
During the first phase of the eviction, Santa Cruz Police Chief Andy Mills said he didn’t care where people went as long as they stayed twelve feet apart. The fact that the eviction was stopped and the city was forced to provide a camp for 122 people is a huge victory against a government that has a decades' long history of disregarding the rights of those who are forced to live outside.
Santa Cruz is likely to experience a dramatic increase in the number of
people becoming unhoused. The Santa Cruz Homeless Union and Food Not Bombs will continue to defend the rights of those living outside including
those who agree to move to the managed camp on the Benchlands.
This victory shows that when the unhoused get organized they are able to
defend themselves. This is a crucial step in the struggle towards the goal of everyone in Santa Cruz securing housing.
Editor's note: An audio of the Court hearing was made available to Robert Norse and can be heard on his Homeless United for Friendship and Freedom, HUFF website. Also, on Apr. 27 at 9:30am, Judge Van Keulen will issue a formal amendment to the preliminary injunction. She particularly will be looking for updates on vaccination availability for the local houseless population.
|
|
20th Year of the Reel Work May Day Labor Film Festival Begins Now
By SARAH RINGLER
Twenty years ago, Jeffrey Smedberg, Santa Cruz unionist and activist, and a few others in Santa Cruz County’s State Employees International Union, SEIU, decided to launch a film festival. They felt that people needed to be informed and reminded what unions do, had done and stood for. The festival is kept going by a group of dedicated volunteers.
Last year, under the restraints of Covid-19, the festival made some tenuous changes. Surprisingly, the changes created a model for this year and resulted in altering the festival from being a local Central California Coast event to going international. In 2020, filmmaker Cosima Dannoritzer of "Time Thieves," appeared on Zoom from Barcelona, Spain. This year, even more international filmmakers will appear on the festival's Zoom events.
The festival, from Apr. 1 to June 1, will be featured in two forms, 2021 Festival Selections and Classic Labor Films.
2021 Festival Selections will be shown for a week, from Thursday to Tuesday, and culminate with a Tuesday night online discussion with filmmakers and others at 7pm. See this week's films below.
2021 Opening Festival Selections:
Women Can Do Anything! Watch films from April 1—6
WOMEN OF STEEL
(Robynne Murphy, 2020, 56 min, Australia)
Wollongong, New South Wales, 1980: Denied jobs at the steelworks, the city's main employer, working class immigrant women refused discrimination. Their 14-year campaign for the right to work pitted them against the most powerful company in Australia. This group of seemingly ordinary women were determined to overcome a giant.
ANCHOR POINT
(Holly Tuckett, 2020, 91 min, USA)
A Documentary about Badass Women. Smart. Strong. Committed. Fearless. They are wildland firefighters battling more than raging, dangerous fires. They're also fighting a culture that has marginalized their voices, excused gender-based discrimination and left them vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault.
The panel will discuss women in traditionally male-only jobs, their love of the physical work, and the unrelenting discrimination they face. Panelists include: Robynne Murphy, filmmaker, New South Wales, Australia; Holly Tuckett, filmmaker, Salt Lake City; Sadie Runge, US Forest Service Regional Fuels Specialist; Lacey England, former US Forest Service Wildland Firefighter; Lenya Quinn-Davidson, Area Fire Advisor, University of CA Cooperative Extension.
Classic Labor Films on Fridays from Community TV:
Friday, April 2, 6-8 pm
Mother Jones
(Laura Vazquez & Rosemary Feurer, 2007, 24 min)
The life and times of labor activist and heroine Mary Harris Jones.
What The Hell Is A Labor Union?
(Paul Russell Laverack, 2014, 57 min, USA)
Mark of a Free Society
(Robert Grieves, 2018, 3 min, UK)
A Living Wage
(Dan Albright & Andy Keyes, 2016, 21 min, USA)
Learning to Bend Steel
(Alex Johnston, 2009, 9 min, USA)
|
|
The First Day Without a Home
By KEITH MCHENRY
Editor's note: The following was written on Dec. 19, 2018 and titled, "America's Economic Crisis is Just Beginning."
In the 38 years that I have been sharing meals with the hungry, I have never met so many people who reported becoming homeless for the first time during a single month.
I was walking pass Pacific Cookie Company on May 31st and noticed a woman sitting on the sidewalk with a number of signs. I took a closer look when I saw “VIRGIN” on one of the poster boards.
“VIRGIN panhandler, this is my first day,” secured to the sidewalk with blue tape and a small frying pan.
That is really clever I said, I see you have a pan with a handle. She smiled and started to talk. She lost her apartment the day before. This would be her first night sleeping on the streets of Santa Cruz.
She suffered from injuries she sustained in a car accident and could only work in spurts.
When our neighbor came to our apartment in a panic in late April, I had no idea this would be the first of many accounts of people experiencing homelessness for the first time.
“I work at Jewels On Pacific and my boss’s friend just became homeless. She can’t afford to help her friend pay for another night at the motel. Is there a shelter for her to stay at?”
Our neighbor said her boss’s friend had spent last night sleeping outside Verve Coffee on Pacific Avenue. It was her first night on the streets. I told her about the shelter. Sadly it is full and she would be lucky to get in.
A couple of weeks later I was speaking with a man who had come to eat at Food Not Bombs. I asked him about his little white dog, Buddy Boy. He told me he slept outside for the first time that evening. He had been a mechanic maintaining the AT&T fleet but became disabled outside work.
A week later another person eating with Food Not Bombs outside the downtown post office shared that he had just become homeless. He had been an engineer at a company producing LED lights. They had to lay off half their engineers when they ran into financial difficulty. His unemployment ran out and he could no longer afford his rent. He talked optimistically about how his first Social Security check would be coming in a few weeks.
The post office erected a chain linked fence around it’s exterior this March to keep out the homeless who were seeking shelter from the rain and wind. Another sign that homelessness is increasing.
I met another engineer that day. It was also his first week living outside.
“Where is the safest place to sleep? I slept under a stairway by the parking garage last night but it didn’t seem safe.”
His company also ran into hard times and he lost his job. At 60 he didn’t think he would get another job in his field soon.
The five newly homeless people lived in Santa Cruz before losing their homes.
They aren’t “transient,” coming to Santa Cruz because they heard the city offered great services. No, like the eighty-four percent of homeless surveyed in a 2015 Applied Survey Research study, they were living in Santa Cruz County at the time they had to sleep outside.
Santa Cruz is not the only American City experiencing a surge in people becoming homeless. Los Angeles homeless numbers jump 23% in a year according to the 2017 annual survey conducted by The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told reporters “It’s impossible to wrap your head around the numbers…”
Trump’s 2018 budget proposes a $6.2 billion cut to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development impacting rental assistance and other programs that help keep people from becoming homeless. Trump is also calling for $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid, the health program for the poor. His budget also asks for $192 billion in cuts to food stamps over the next decade. With a Republican majority and a Democratic party that dances to Wall Street we can expect much of Trump’s budget to become reality.
Republicans are also seeking to end the Dodd-Frank Banking Regulations put into law in 2010 in response to the housing foreclosure crisis.
“It’s an invitation for another Great Recession or worse,” Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the panel, said during the House Financial Services Committee’s markup of the “Financial Choice Act”.
People are already finding themselves homeless before the 2018 budget takes effect. Add to that, the deregulation of the banks and we can expect many more millions of Americans to be forced out onto our streets to face the cruelty of local anti-homeless laws and the promise of nonexistent shelter space.
Millions of people are already facing hunger and live in extreme poverty. Conditions look more and more like those of Great Depression. The National Center for Family Homelessness reports that there are 2.5 million homeless children on the streets of America. Who really knows how many millions of adults live without housing?
The National Hunger March in 1931 and 1932 helped build a movement to that brought America’s poor the New Deal. Support is building around the country for another National Hunger March proposed for October 2019.
America’s economic crisis is just beginning. City officials think they have a “homeless problem” now. They haven’t seen anything yet.
|
|
“When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.”
Shirley Chisholm
|
|
Photo by TARMO HANNULA
This Anna’s hummingbird collects nectar from the bounty of flowering plants at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum.
|
|
Santa Cruz County Covid-19 Report
By SARAH RINGLER
The Santa Cruz County Health Department regularly releases data on the current status of Covid-19 in the county. As of March 25, there have been 15,258 cases that tested positive. That is an increase of .7% from last Thursday. There were no additional deaths this week. There were few changes in all of the categories.
Santa Cruz County moved into the Orange Tier on March 30. For information, go here.
The county's Effective Reproductive Number is continuing to fall below one. See chart below. Numbers above one show the spread of the virus is increasing. Below one means the spread is decreasing.
To get tested without a doctor’s request, call 1-888-634-1123 or go online at https://lhi.care/covidtesting. Other testing sites that may have restricted access can be found here.
For vaccine information in Santa Cruz County, click here.
|
|
 |
% deaths by ethnicity/% of population:
White - 56%/58%
Latinx - 36%/34%
Black - 1%/1%
Asian - 8%/4%
American Native - 1%/not available
% deaths by gender/% of population:
Female - 52%/50%
Male - 49%/50%
Other - 0
Under Investigation - 0
Deaths by age/200:
30-39 - 2%
40-49 - 3%
50-59 - 3%
60-69 - 14%
70-79 - 21%
80-89 - 31%
90+ - 28%
Tested positive by region/% of population:
Mid-county - 21%/12%
North county - 19%/60%
South county - 59%/29%
Under investigation - 0%
Weekly increases in positive tests:
June 12-19 - 7%
June 19-26 - 23%
June 26 to July 3 - 22%
July 3-9 - 23%
July 9-16 - 40%
|
|
|
|
July 16-23 - 20%
July 23-30 - 27%
July 30-Aug. 6 - 13%
Aug. 6-13- 12%
Aug.14-20 - 16%
Aug.20-28 - 10%
Aug. 28-Sept. 3 - 10%
Sept. 3-10 - 6%
Sept. 10-17- 8%
Sept. 17-24 - 7%
Sept. 25- Oct.1 - 5%
Oct. 1 - 9 - 4%
Oct. 9-15 - 4%
Oct. 15-22 - 5%
Oct. 23-29 - 4%
Oct. 30-Nov. 5 - 6%
Nov. 5-12 - 10%
Nov. 12-19 - 11%
Nov. 19-26 - holiday
Nov. 19-Dec. 3 - 29% 2 weeks of data for this week only
Dec. 3-10 - 16%
Dec. 10-17 - 17%
Dec. 17-24 - 14%
Dec. 24-31 - 19%
Jan. 1-7 - 13%
Jan. 7-14 - 14%
Jan. 15-21 - 11%
Jan. 21-28 - 5%
Jan. 28-Feb. 4 - 5%
Feb. 5-11 - 2%
Feb. 11-18 - 2%
Feb. 18-25 - 1%
Feb. 25-March 5 - 1%
March 5-11 - 1%
March 11-18 - 2%
March 18-25 - .5%
March 25- Apr. 1 - .7%
|
|
|
|
Labor History Calendar for March 27 to April 2:
March 27, 1885: Army fires on general strikers in Charleroi, Belgium killing many.
March 28, 1983: 96% of Argentine workers strike, the junta totters.
March 29, 1948: Police charge strikers blockading the NY Stock Exchange, 43 arrests.
March 30, 1918: Chicago stockyard workers win the 8-hour day.
March 30, 2020: GE workers demand Lynn factory to convert to making ventilators.
March 31, 1994: French students celebrate defeat of a plan for sub-minimum wages for young workers.
March 31, 2020: Whole Food workers strike for hazardous pay.
April 1, 1946: 400,000 miners strike
April 1, 2016: Chicago teachers' strike demands adequate funding.
April 2, 2015: Students and teachers strike against austerity in Quebec.
April 2, 2018: Oklahoma teachers strike for school funding
|
|
Photo by TARMO HANNULA
Lavender Lovely in a Pound Cake
By SARAH RINGLER
Lovely lavender is blooming all around us right now. As a member of the mint family, it grows worldwide although it is thought to originate in Asia. Its name comes from the Latin word lavare which means “to wash” and happens to be a common scent in soaps of all varieties.
This cake is classified as a quick bread because it is made from a mixture dry and wet ingredients that are combined quickly at the last minute and baked. The chemical reaction that causes the bread to rise only happens when the mixture is quickly combined, not over-mixed, and done just before baking. Everything should be prepared in advance.
This is a delicate cake with just a hint of lavender. For one cake, cut the recipe in half.
4 eggs
1 cup unsalted butter
¾ cup sour cream
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 recipe lavender sugar
Lavender Sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
1-2 tablespoons dried lavender flowers
Frosting:
1 cup powdered sugar
1 tablespoon melted butter
3-4 teaspoons lemon juice
Let the eggs, butter and sour cream stand at room temperature for 30 minutes. In the meantime, make the lavender sugar. To make the lavender sugar, grind the sugar and the lavender flowers in a spice grinder, mortar and pestle or food processor until well mixed and grainy.
Butter two, 8-inch by 4-inch loaf pans. Scoop about ¼ cup of flour into the loaf pans and shake around to coat pans. Shake out the flour that doesn’t stick.
In a medium bowl sift, or whisk together the flour, baking soda and baking powder and salt. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
In a large bowl, beat the lavender sugar, granulated sugar, 1 cup of softened unsalted butter and vanilla until light and fluffy. Scrape down the sides. Add eggs one at a time and beat for about 30 seconds before adding the next egg.
When the egg mixture is smooth, stir in one third of the flour mixture and mix just until combined. Do not overmix. Stir in one half of the sour cream just until combined. Add the second third of the flour mixture and the rest of the sour cream. Stir just until mixed. Stir in the rest of the flour mixture. Finally stir in the lemon zest.
Spread the mixture into each of the prepared loaf pans and immediately put in the oven. Bake 45 minutes or until a wooden tooth pick or bamboo skewer come out clean when inserted in the middle of the cake. Leave in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn onto a wire rack to cook completely.
In a small bowl, mix melted butter and powdered sugar. Add lemon juice a little at a time until it is thick enough to drip over the cakes. Serve
|
|
YOUR STORY OR ART HERE: Please submit a story that you think would be of interest to the people of Santa Cruz County. Try and keep the word count to around 400. Also, there should be suggested actions if possible. Submit to coluyaki@gmail.com
If you are enjoying the Serf City Times, forward it on to others. We need readers, artists, photographers and writers.
|
|
Welcome to Serf City Times. Over time, our county has grown more stratified and divided with many people feeling left out. Housing affordability, racism and low wages are the most obvious factors. However, many groups and individuals in Santa Cruz County work tirelessly to make our county a better place for everyone. These people work on the environment, housing, economic justice, health, criminal justice, disability rights, immigrant rights, racial justice, transportation, workers’ rights, education reform, gender issues, equity issues, electoral politics and more. Often, one group doesn’t know what another is doing. The Serf City Times is dedicated to serving as a clearinghouse for those issues by letting you know what is going on, what actions you can take and how you can support these groups.This is a self-funded enterprise and all work is volunteer.
Copyright © 2021 Sarah Ringler - All rights reserved
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
