They REFUSE to put together an organized referral agency/list for affordable housing. UC Berkeley does a better job just posting lists fot students! But agencies that help the disabled and elderly in Berkeley (i.e. people on fixed incomes) have NO PLACE TO REFER PEOPLE when they are displaced by the scads of small landlords flipping their properties in the "hot" real estate market.

I think this has been DELIBERATE POLICY of the political establishment to remove the low tax-paying poor. And the result has been to delete 2/3 of the black population so only 9% of Berkeley's population is black now. Is that number still falling? That ugly revelation of economic racism in Berkeley should be immortalized in a statue and remembered forever as a brand of shame. The crony-regulated free market and big development is a transfer of wealth to white people. They think their ideology gives them a right to any "desirable" property they can take.

When I recently attempted to bring up the fixed incomes of the elderly and the disabled with one of the development astroturfers, he insisted that anyone too poor to buy should be prepared to move someplace less desirable "like Detroit." He concluded his analysis of the situation with: "Thanks for playing! Buh bye!"

This is how the people taking the property regard the poor in Richmond and Berkeley. We need to elevate and highlight that remark and make people see the gaming of the system and blatant theft involved here.