Er, It's Called a Public Parking Lot for a Reason

Update:
Chalk one up for the dirty hippies.

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Imagine for a moment that you're building a city from scratch. You're given 12.5 sq. mi. of land in which to comfortably fit about 55,000 people. In the US, a large chunk of that space will inevitably be sold off to build private housing and commercial space, but if you want your city to be a place where people actually want to live, you'll have to retain a sizable portion of that land for parks, roads, schools, municipal buildings, hospitals, fire houses, transit infrastructure, and other shared items that benefit everyone. The people who live in your city will pay you taxes so that you can pay other people to maintain these public spaces and services, and that's pretty much just the way things go. Of course, the people who pay these taxes will probably want to use the space you've retained as "public" on the assumption that it is actually accessible to them and will be used for the common good, and when they do, you will probably arrest them and issue them summonses.

Uh-huh.

The Santa Cruz Trash Orchestra and their community have been dealing with this on an escalating basis for at least a few months now. It seems that a weekly drum circle in a public parking lot is, let's say, underappreciated by the city administration. In fact, this drum circle is actually illegal, according to this entry on the Trash Orchestra blog. Quoth Valerijan Ercegovic,

The City of Santa Cruz's parking lot panic law is in effect and being enforced. For those unfamiliar the law restricts the use of downtown parking lots and garages to parking and retrieving of vehicles (the person must be in and out in 15 minutes), and for pedestrians passing directly through from one sidewalk to another or a bordering store. Anything else (waiting in your car for a friend, eating lunch, talking to friends, playing music...) is trespassing, illegal, will get you hassled by Santa Cruz's finest, and, ultimately, fined

It has gotten to the point where drummers are being hauled off to the pokey for it. So let's call this law what it is: a hot, steaming pile of horseshit.

This is not dissimilar to the crackdowns on Critical Mass that are happening or have happened in Atlanta, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and New York; not unlike the restrictions on street musicians in Northampton, MA that Michele previously wrote about; and it's not a far cry from any effort to systematically harass or arrest homeless people for being, uh, homeless. So why is it that urban administrators seem to almost universally hate the use of public space for just about anything other than driving? A couple of good reasons might be:

• some people who saw Footloose understood the John Lithgow character to be a tragic martyr
  


• the police union demands overtime


• homeless people just don't have much money or political clout
  


• if you are not making or spending money, you are giving aid and comfort to the terrorists
  


• people who ride bicycles are effete and probably even know what "effete" means because they are so into being all Franch and everything
  

Well, regardless of the whys and the wherefores, I cast my lot in this case with the dirty hippies because, as a wise prophet once said, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.