In response to local opposition, University planners placed themselves within the rhetoric of good and bad citizens --no doubt taking strength from Bush's well-intentioned yet racist, sexist, ageist war on drugs--announcing intentions to reappropriate the park for the middle-class, from the homeless and other undesirables (Lynch in Mitchell, 1995: 110). For a week, police battled the homeless and other protesters in an effort to gain military control of the park (Mitchell, 1995: 114). The police won, and a few days later, university officials offered to let student employees leave work early if those students would play volleyball on the new courts (114).
Homeless people are being evicted from one public space after another in an effort to make America seem like a nice, safe, upscale place to live (see: The Burnside Cadillac)**LINK TO THE BURNSIDE CADILLAC**, but it is not just the homeless who are losing ground in the war over public space. For their own safety, many women will not go alone to public parks or streets during certain hours of the day. Groups of minorities and young people are excluded from the same spaces, ostensibly for the safety of everyone else. Even rich white men (the only people who are not officially advised against entering the public domain) are making an exodus from many public spaces, preferring to remain within the tranquillity of their own private fortresses.