Who's the threat?

I was angered while reading your article about the videographer who was beaten and arrested by the San Francisco Police Department for filming the antiwar protests ["Arresting Journalists," 3/31/04]. I have been under the illusion that the police department was formed to protect the people from things and humans that could be harmful or dangerous. Now I must ask, how is a person filming a protest so the world can see what others are doing to get their voices heard a threat to society?

Lily Katz
Santa Cruz

Viva Las Vegas

While visiting from out of town I read with amusement your article about increasing property taxes on your businesses ["Assessed Out," 4/7/04]. All I can say is that we who live in Nevada will be rooting for Rob Reiner, et al. Let's pass that tax you guys and make our boom here even stronger ... Duh!

Robert Colby
Reno, Nev.

We need land reform

Three pages about property tax mis-assessment in last week's issue ["The Millionaire Beggars," 4/7/04] with only four paragraphs of plainspoken economic analysis leaves the reader thinking, "Hey, those fat-cat building owners downtown otta be nicer. And, say, yeah, tax their buildings more." Wrong. You (the reader) and I and the Bay Guardian too should demand that land rent be socialized via a major reform of Proposition 13. Justice couldn't be plainer: the value of land goes up with population and population's productivity, with no reference to who holds title to the land. No part of land values is earned by the land owner, therefore, but building values are earned because, unlike land, buildings are built, so don't tax them much, if at all.

David Giesen
San Francisco

Save 2211 Fifth St.

Some of Berkeley's roots are grand structures built by wealthy people, people with the leisure and capital to chart grand designs through their acreage and whose praises are sung by architects and historians alike.

Some of Berkeley's roots are buildings as plain-looking as the lives they sheltered. If you look too quickly, you may miss the few remaining details that document the history of more common lives, lives that best exemplify the majority of people in a historical period but, ironically, are often less respected for that commonality.

A small, unassuming, single-family house on Fifth Street headed for the seemingly inevitable multiunit, multistory replacement was discovered by an interested neighbor to have been built in 1878, making it one of Berkeley's oldest structures. The bare sketch left of the widowed woman who built the house and lived there with two daughters, described in one document as a "washerwoman," is an intriguing invitation to learn more about a time when both the area and the rights of women were quite different.

If you don't look quickly, it will be gone. The builder wants to get busy and demolish it while the weather is good.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission couldn't muster the votes to protect it, but neither could they vote down its potential as a landmark or place of interest. Constantly battered as obstructionists, they managed only to continue the matter.

West Berkeley, the town's working roots in 1878 and today, gets a combination of impatience and indifference unknown in wealthier neighborhoods.

The hearing on the proposed demolition of the small house, in a move some commissioners claim is out of order, was opened and closed the same night the documentation of its history was made available to those in attendance, not by the commission staff but by the same neighbor who managed to discern from the plain but unusual lines of the Italianate building that there might be something in the building, its setting, and its circumstance that Berkeley should stop to examine, and perhaps protect.

The woman who built the little house on Fifth Street near the factories and working opportunities of the time may never have thought of her house as worthy of notice. But Berkeley owes its working-class roots and its female pioneers simple respect more routinely accorded in other parts of town.