[Dryerase] The Alarm--Pacific Agoraphobia

[Alarm!Wires]

This piece is from one of our loyal contributors.  A fabulous fellow 
with a tendency toward high-falutin language.  We've forced him to tone 
it down for us, with mixed success.  Manuel is a very smart writer and 
rhetoritician.  He generally approaches problems of international 
significance.  This is one exception where his commentary is based on 
local events.  You may still find it interesting

Pacific Agoraphobia
By Manuel Schwab
The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor
5-12-02
Agoraphobia, which is the clinical term for the fear of open spaces, is 
derived from the Greek words “agora” and “phobia.” The Agora was a large 
public square at the center of Athens. It was open to the Athenian 
citizen class, although only about 5 to 10 percent of the population of 
Athens could afford to live a leisurely life that included hours spent 
debating and talking in the Agora. As opposed to the theater—in which 
the distinction between spectators and orators was clearly marked—the 
Agora was the center of participatory political discussion in Athens, a 
place in which discourse was fragmentary rather than dominated by a 
single citizen.
In modern Greek, the meaning of “agora” has been altered. “Agora” now 
refers not to a public forum but to a marketplace. Nevertheless, 
“agoraphobia” still carries the connotation of a fear of public 
engagement: a phobia of putting oneself at stake in front of one’s 
fellow citizens.
If the public documents about the current debate on the use of downtown 
space are any indication, it would serve us at this time to reflect on 
the shifting definition of “agora.” In response to a series of 
“incidents” that are perceived as threats to the placid face of our 
beloved Pacific Avenue—a shooting, a stabbing and agressive panhandling—
the Santa Cruz City Council has held public forums and formed a special 
committee on downtown issues. Close on the heels of this chorus of 
concern, the July 3–10 edition of Metro Santa Cruz treated Santa 
Cruzians to “The Reality Check Issue,” in which it attempted to “put 
some overdue perspective on the controversy over safety in downtown 
Santa Cruz.”
The institutional and media responses from the community demonstrated 
the heartening fact that Santa Cruz is actually concerned about its 
public space. But the terms of the debate led to the unavoidable 
observation that we cannot, at least as far as the dominant perspectives 
of our community are concerned, imagine the difference between civic 
spaces and commercial districts. What becomes clear in both the framing 
of the Council Committee’s recommendations, and the response of the 
Metro article—which relies heavily on community testimony—is that the 
Santa Cruz community works from extremely narrow assumptions about what 
a downtown should be, about whom it serves, and what constitutes the 
good health of a public space. What was once the politically heated 
public space, perfectly suited for the exchange of debate, has become 
marketplace, suited only for the exchange of goods and services. Yet 
even with this devolution of public space into the relative safety of 
rule—bound economics, we in Santa Cruz still retreat from any trace of 
the old political friction once associated with the Agora.
The Downtown Issues Committee, for its part, is so split in its 
recommendations that it is difficult to understand where they would have 
us go with downtown. One minute they want the City Council to take a 
clear position regarding “anti-social behavior.” But in the same 
statement they re-affirm their commitment to “protecting public space.” 
These commitments may not at first seem at odds, until we realize that 
“anti-social behavior” has come to include any form of friction, 
encompassing many activities that were once an integral part of “public 
space.” “Public space,” in turn, has become emaciated, left with nothing 
to flourish around but money transactions, so that merchant interests 
are the only ones that count. Not recognizing that these developments 
have transformed the defense of the space now considered public into an 
attack on the social sphere in all of its fertile messiness, the council 
is proposing to take measures that work in the exact opposite direction 
they intend
Sarah Phelan’s article in the Metro illustrates the tension between the 
desire to regulate downtown and to still allow the space to be genuinely 
public. In the article we find the County Supervisor telling us in no 
uncertain terms that fears about downtown safety are generated and 
defined by the commercial interests in downtown. “Usually the merchants 
plan a campaign [to crack down on downtown problems] just before 
Thanksgiving,” Mardi Wormhoudt tells Phelan, “but this year it’s 
earlier, maybe because of the economic downturn…”
Perhaps, but if so the economic downturn clearly has the business sector 
peculiarly worried. Phelan claims she sees “no signs of Armageddon,” and 
while I agree, it seems clear that signs of a new brink in the battle 
between private and public space is at hand. On the one side, we have 
the usual fare of self-indulgent overstatements by those who frequent 
downtown and clearly have a lot to gain by painting themselves as the 
targets of excessive oppression. Most glaring among these is Estéban 
Fox, who seems to think that getting a ticket for sitting on a planter 
(yeah, we all know how ridiculous that is) puts us one step closer to 
building a “20-foot-high wall around downtown…and a military takeover of 
downtown.”  This claim seems excessive, especially in light of 
developments in Palestine and Israel, where citizens have every tangible 
reason to fear draconian governments.
On the other hand, there are legitimate reasons to suspect the 
merchants’ new campaign.  New-Corp-on-the-block Borders has the audacity 
to publicly admit “we’re considering installing an ATM that would limit 
loitering [around the Borders store] to 50 feet.” Reality check: with 
laws on the books like the one that would provide Borders with a 50 foot 
buffer for its ATM, town ordinances already fall clearly on the side of 
the merchants. No matter how self indulgent the “gypsy kids” on the 
streets may get, there is a higher power indulging the commercial 
interests.
This indulgence becomes even more clear when we look at the remaining 
recommendations of the Downtown Issues Committee. While they include a 
few more gestures like the promise to protect public space (the hiring 
of a Downtown Social Worker, for instance), the committee’s 
recommendations, aimed ostensibly at restoring a downtown “out of 
balance,” bend over backwards to accommodate the merchants who feel so 
deeply threatened.
Take a close look and you will recognize that the committee’s 
recommendations for Ordinance Modifications—made under the guise of 
simplifying the understanding and enforcement of the present ordinances 
on soliciting and sitting down on sidewalks—and you see that they are 
actually engineered to clear the mall of any such activity by 
“undesirables.” “The proposed adjustment is to make the distance for all 
of the above situations 14 feet.” Apparently, Borders will not have to 
bother with the 50 foot buffer around their store—by my estimation, a 14 
foot distance from storefronts puts panhandling “gypsy kids” in the 
street for almost the entire length of the Mall.
The threat that these “gypsy kids” pose, as Glenn Rogers informs us in 
Phelan’s collection of interviews, is not that they are dangerous. 
Rather, Rogers informs us that he tends to avoid “walking along Pacific 
Avenue because I don’t want to get hit up for money all the time.” The 
irony, of course, is that extracting money from customers is precisely 
what every mall is engineered to do. The entire shopping district is a 
place where people go to be solicited for their money in exchange for 
one commodity or another.
The fact that this economic exchange is an acceptable replacement for 
the democratic confrontations of the past is symptomatic of the time in 
which we seem no longer to have a social sphere, but an economy instead. 
In fact, as Greg Kindig rightly points out later on in the “Nuz” section 
of the Metro the entire list of downtown issues “reads like a list of 
symptoms.” But nobody seems to be understanding the disease. Focusing 
only on symptoms—from the disruptive presence of panhandlers to 
hacky-sack projectiles—amounts to establishing scapegoat issues to avoid 
the fact that our public engagement is bankrupt. Downtown’s status as a 
shopping/public district in which it seems that the stores themselves 
are the only citizens who ultimately have a right to occupy downtown—
with prospective consumers as their temporary guests—is testimony to 
this.
As is the repeated reference to the Beach Flats as the source of the 
dangerous elements in downtown—references that seem acceptable across 
the board, as they are made by residents, merchants, and homeless 
citizens alike. We are afraid of confrontations with difference, of 
heterogeneity, of any form of friction—we are agoraphobic, scared of 
others, afraid of precisely that which we need to make us strong. Of 
course this superstitious disposition is neither the fault of Sarah 
Phelan, nor of the Metro Editorial Staff, nor for that matter of the 
City Council. What all three entities should be taken to task for, 
however, is that they present this superstition without challenging it 
systematically.
After glossing over the myth of the “dangerous” Beach Flats and the 
victimized chain store—or rather allowing these myths to speak for 
themselves—it is downright aggravating to see Phelan take on the quite 
evident process of gentrification and dismiss it as mythical. One almost 
gets the impression that Phelan is bent on ignoring the facts. Has she 
forgotten that the fear that the Cinema 9 would drive out the Del Mar 
cannot be so quickly dismissed, as the theater actually did go under, 
and the “beautiful renovation” touted by one of her interviewees was 
made possible only by a city government bailout. And while the Dotcom 
bomb may have made a serious dent in the office rentals downtown, it has 
not made a dent in the rent prices that the previous Dotcom boom helped 
drive skyward.
Luckily, it seems that there are still plenty of us left who realize 
that the replacement of the social considerations with economic 
transactions is an unacceptable compromise. For now, even the Committee 
Forums and Reality checks that offered such a startling illustration of 
the problem also offered us a good picture of those people left in 
resistance. The biggest danger, then, is that we will slowly be taught 
to underestimate the import of this struggle to maintain our spaces for 
civic confrontation. When that happens, we will have lost a monumental 
battle in the fight for self determination. In the final analysis, what 
must become more and more clear to all of us is that ironically, the 
capacity for self determination depends on our willingness to be 
confronted, often uncomfortably, by others.
 
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