100% Affordable Housing at Ashby BART — An open letter to South Berkeley Now from Friends of Adeline
Dear South Berkeley Now,
Over the weekend, a steering committee member of your organization made the below statement on Twitter. This person later deleted the tweet and wrote an apology on Twitter.
This tweet feeds a false and dangerous narrative that poor people “cause” multi-generational poverty, an idea that has been used to assert biological and cultural superiority of some groups over others and is rooted in white supremacy. This narrative has been weaponized to defund services that support low-income people and people of color.
The problem with concentrated poverty is NOT the concentration of poor people, but how people in power use segregation to deny resources to, and exploit, low-income people and people of color. The way to solve this problem is not by fighting against 100% affordable housing, but by fighting for 1) more power and voice for low-income communities and communities of color to get 2) resources that meet their needs, including 3) new, low-income housing, especially incommunities such as Berkeley.
Though the person apologized for this tweet, South Berkeley Now continues to invoke this same dangerous narrative. On Sunday night, your organization sent a new mass email warning that “100% low income subsidized housing at Ashby BART would mean… Concentration of low income residents in one location.”
To be clear:
- There’s nothing wrong with low-income people living together.
- “Affordable housing” in our city covers a wide range of incomes, up to $98,550 for a family of four.
- In our neighborhood, the median income is $46,500. There is active displacement, especially of the Black community. 100% affordable housing is an essential neighborhood stabilization strategy, and this is what we should be using our public lands for.
Warning against the “concentration of low-income residents” is a dog whistle. In a historically Black neighborhood undergoing extreme gentrification, many people will read “low income” as code for Black.
We want to believe that this is not who you want to be. We call on you to publicly apologize and join our demands for 100% affordable housing and a guaranteed future for the flea market and its vendors at the Ashby BART site.
Read our full vision here: https://www.friendsofadeline.org/south-berkeley-needs-a-peoples-plan-for-adeline-street/
It matters who new housing is for. We live in one of the richest places that have ever existed in the history of the world. Committing resources to stabilize our neighborhood, strengthen our Black community, and invest in the housing that our community needs is worth fighting for.
-Friends of Adeline