City Council, November 25th - Camping, Vagrancy, and their Emblems

Council meets on Monday and they'll be considering a modern Vagrancy Law.

CANDO has the best notes and critical analysis, so be sure to read what they have to say, most recently a close reading of the Council Work Session last week, and a new piece on disability and the proposed law.

Saturday's front page

A bike at a camp - and the rhetoric of trash
January 2019, Marion St Bridge

I have nothing to add the debate, but I want to talk about optics and visual rhetoric. Bikes are neutral transportation technology. Rich people and poor people both use them. But they have advantages: They are cheaper than a car, portable, and easily obtained and repaired. They travel on roads, sidewalks, and paths. They can also stolen, chopped, and sold or bartered. They can be put to good ends and bad ends.

It is a little concerning that in the imagery around people who lack housing, we code bicycles as inherently juvenile, inherently sketchy, only something poor people or bad people use.

In today's paper, a story about students who lack housing,
and another bike

In the piece for today's story about students who lack housing, there's a random bike, not anything that corresponds to any detail or person in the story, but a more general "illustration" of homelessness. Its narrative function is only to code bikes as something associated with homelessness.

This serves autoist interests by aligning bike use with misfortune, and paints bikes as an emblem of misfortune or poor judgment that people not only can read, but should read. It stigmatizes bike use. It also reinforces the signalling function of cars and car use: Cars signify a certain class, respectability, and wealth.

Cars are way more harmful than bikes
Final pie chart from Our Salem

But we should remember that if there is a transportation technology that deserves stigma, it is our autoism, our overuse of cars.  

Cars actually kill people, and cars actually pollute and harm our world.

From Tuesday: Used a car, not a bike

About the other things there is not much to say, so bullets:

Some interesting land use matters:

• Council will affirm the Riverbend concept after it was appealed. (Maybe we'll come back to this later. See previous notes here.)
• An information report on the approval for the 990 Broadway mixed-use project. (Previous notes here.)
• A weird affirmation of a decision out on Battlecreek. It was a Council call-up for review, but no public comment was offered. So why was it called up? What was contested about it? Rather odd.
• Ratifying the reduction in the the boundaries of the State Hospital Historic District. Basically carving out the "park" and land cleared by the demolition, north of Center Street. (The Dome Building and Yaquina Hall would remain inside the District.)

There are a couple of acquisitions for future road work:

• One parcel for a future Marine Drive
• A bunch of small bits for the 22nd Avenue connection to Madrona.

And other items:

• The quarterly business development report. The number of permits is down from last year, so that's evidence that things are slowing. But as usual they never offer any assessment about effectiveness: Was this incentive actually necessary, and did it accomplish the goal? The reports always frame things up as self-evidently effective.
• A memo on the under-attended DAB Open House in September. There was support for paid parking, it should be noted. Grocery store and housing were leading interests.
• People with an interest in tourism will want to look at the expansion of a tourism tax and programming it looks to fund.
• A list of new property tax abatements for low-income housing.

Update, Monday

The Safe Routes to School Partnership yesterday announced they'd joined a coalition against the Vagrancy Law and submitted formal comment. I think this is the first time they've commented in Salem in the context of a broader conception of public space and travel, not just the narrower question of better sidewalks and crosswalks for kids. Something to watch.