San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
THE PEOPLE’S LAWYER
Osha Neumann is in for the fight of his life as a defender of the Bay Area’s homeless.
Osha Neumann steps out of his beater Toyota Corolla wagon and walks into Berkeley’s People’s Park. A blind man stands on the sidewalk, and Neumann calls him by name.
“Mr. Neumann!” the man says. “How’s the foot?” Neumann asks. The man’s foot recently had been run over by a car. OK for now, the man says. Neumann moves on. He’s not at People’s Park just to see him — he’s there to see everyone.
Another man beckons him from a parked car to whisper about a legal problem. Neumann stops at a picnic table with four old-timers to get the lowdown. As one of the few legal advisers to the East Bay’s homeless population, he regularly drops by for updates on how cities are responding to those living on the streets and to find out who needs his help.
In 2017, Neumann helped represent First They Came for the Homeless, an organized encampment, against an eviction by BART. In 2018, he represented the RV-based Berkeley Friends on Wheels, and assisted in representing Oakland’s Housing and Dignity Village camp. He’s now working on a lawsuit against Caltrans, which, according to Neumann, has been “taking property and destroying it,” a violation, he argues, of the Fourth Amendment. “People have lost incredible things. Not just tents, but old photographs, contact information for their family,” he says. “They may look like they’re living in squalor, but sometimes they have very valuable things.”
Legal victories are rare, maybe an extra few days for folks to stay put, but to Neumann, these fights are vital as long as housing is a commodity and not a right. “Ultimately, my goal is utopithe an,” he says. “Penultimately, my goal is to be part of the greatest possible resistance to the forces that make that goal utopian.”
And now, to Neumann, 80, there’s no Bay Area municipality in the way of that goal as much as the city he first moved to in the 1970s for its promise of a new, progressive way of life.
“Berkeley is living off the fumes of this reputation,” he says. “I’m angry and outraged and pissed off in my quiet way.”
Neumann was born in 1939 to German Jewish parents who fled to New York to escape Nazism. His father, Franz Neumann, was a prominent member of the Frankfurt School, which examined global discord through Marxist and Freudian analysis. He lived with his parents and their close friend Herbert Marcuse, another giant of the Frankfurt movement.
When Neumann was 14, his father died in a car accident, and his mother, Inge, and Marcuse married, validating an affair they’d long been having. In fact, Neumann’s long-held belief that Marcuse was his biological father was recently confirmed in a DNA match. He now tells people about his mother and fathers — plural.
Growing up in that academic atmosphere meant a prescribed life path: doctorate, write, teach, die. But when he went to Swarthmore College, he was miserable, and when he went to Yale, even more so. He dropped out, moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and began painting. He enjoyed the action of the anti-Vietnam War street protests, and helped found the activist group Up Against the Wall, Mother—. Whenever police cracked down on an action, the UAW/MF made sure to be most militant group fighting back. (Neumann says the current generation of those using the black bloc tactic look to the UAW/MF for inspiration.)
As the ’60s became the ’70s, the scene changed. “It was becoming a bit of a death trap,” Neumann says. Some UAW/MF members moved to New Mexico to support an armed Chicano movement that was fighting the U.S. government for land rights. But the desert isolation pinched their pressure points. “We got crazier, and it wasn’t a great place for women,” he says. He conceived a child and the mother gave Neumann an ultimatum: her or the gang.
They moved to Berkeley, where their daughter was born, then moved north to the Black Bear Ranch commune in Siskiyou County. They grew their own food and lived in nonmonogamous relationships where everyone helped raise kids and traded chores. “We were snowed in in the winter,” he recalls with a smile. But it, too, was isolating, so they came back to Berkeley.
He was introduced to the San Francisco Mission street art scene. “I lived off unemployment and put cans for donations out on the sidewalk next to my paints and brushes,” Neumann recalls in his book, “Doodling on the Titanic.” One project became a mural on Berkeley’s Haste Street titled “The People’s History of Telegraph Avenue.” It’s still there, highlighting the area’s political history: the fight for People’s Park, Mario Savio’s speech, James Rector’s killing, the Black Panthers, the tendrils of the system they attempted to overthrow.
The revolution, however, never happened.
“If I fault my politics, it’s that it wasn’t enough involved with electoral politics,” he says, without regret as
much as certainty. “I still don’t know if we believe we have the power to create the real shift we need to.”
Looking for another attack angle, he finished law school in the mid ’80s, and helped open a stall at the Berkeley flea market to help those who couldn’t afford lawyers. They called it Fleagal Aid. In 1990, he brought his first major case on behalf of homeless people who had their belongings snatched and crushed in UC maintenance-crew garbage trucks. Some of those he represented, tired of harassment, moved to the Albany landfill known as the Bulb.
“I loved the wildness of it,” he says, excitedly. “Anything goes. And it worked!” He helped create enormous sculptures out of driftwood and construction debris, one an iconic piece of a woman with her arms outstretched, known unofficially as the Beseeching Woman or Woman by the Lake.
But in the late ’90s, when the McLaughlin Eastshore State Park took control of the Bulb, the City of Albany moved to evict the community. It was a legal struggle that spanned more than a decade. Eventually, Neumann helped win a few concessions from the city — including a $3,000 payout to many evictees — but it was cold comfort. “They were kicked out, and Albany doesn’t have shelter for them,” he says. “I was just so mad about that.”
He’d found his next calling.
Neumann sees a cityscape differently than most.
The recent remodel of downtown Berkeley’s BART plaza isn’t some sleek update but is designed to shoo away the homeless. The public chairs are designed with intentional ambiguity so they look like they belong to businesses. The bar running down the middle of a bench is there to prevent lying down. An old sign that dubbed the area Constitutional Plaza was removed. “That symbolized to me what’s going on — you’re supposed to keep walking, unless you’re eating or buying stuff,” he says.
Berkeley’s slow creep away from the ideals that originally brought him there clearly disturbs him. Had he ever thought about leaving? “I’m rooted here,” he says, with two daughters and four granddaughters living nearby. He adds: “The struggle is the same everywhere. Every city is dealing with gentrification.”
The homeless crisis in the Bay Area is reaching a breaking point. According to the annual count by EveryOne Home, Alameda County’s homeless population has increased by 43 percent since 2017, from 5,629 to 8,022 people. Meanwhile, the 2018 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco in Martin vs. Boise concluded that cities can’t punish homeless people sleeping on public property unless they also provide indoor accommodations, notably scant in the Bay Area. It’s a landmark ruling that has given the homeless more ammunition in legal battles. “Whether that small spate (of local lawsuits) becomes a flood, and whether they ultimately succeed, remains to be seen,” Neumann says.
To prepare for these fights, Neumann hands out pocket-size cards with phone numbers for legal advice and information about rights. “It’s not a crime to sleep,” reads one. “You’re not trespassing if you’re on a public sidewalk, even if you’re leaning against a building with a no trespassing sign on it,” reads another.
“He’s a radical lawyer, the one guy with his finger holding together the dam,” says Needa Bee, a founder of the Village, an organized encampment in East Oakland. “When I was filling out paperwork for lawsuits, I didn’t know what I was doing, but he’d always walk me through the process.”
“He has a huge heart and is very passionate about the community he’s representing,” says Joe DeVries, assistant to Oakland’s city administrator, who often speaks for the entity — that is, the City of Oakland — that Neumann is haranguing.
Candice Elder, founder of the community-organizing East Oakland Collective, met Neumann last year when he was representing an encampment facing eviction. “He was there day in and day out, and being on the ground teaches us,” Elder says. “A lot of our unhoused neighbors don’t know their rights, and that’s how they’re further victimized.”
At the end of Neumann’s 1976 “Telegraph Avenue” mural is a scene set in the future. In the foreground is a stark depiction of beggars; in the background is an image of people dancing and singing, glowing in a glorious haze and carrying trophies of the system they’ve overthrown. Through the lens of contemporary irony it looks like a veiled criticism of past mistakes, like the hippies blew it, that their dreams were too separated from reality.
“No, no, no! It can become rainbows and dancing naked if we want,” Neumann joyfully exclaims, inching back to his beater Corolla. “This crusty present could be broken.”