364- He's Still Neutral

Episode Summary

Title: He's Still Neutral Summary: The episode tells the story of Dan Stevenson, who lives in Oakland, California. Dan was frustrated with the amount of illegal dumping that was occurring on a traffic diverter near his home. As a solution, Dan and his wife Lou installed a concrete Buddha statue on the traffic diverter, hoping it would deter dumping. At first, nothing happened. But then mysteriously, people started leaving small gifts for the Buddha - oranges, coins, etc. The Vietnamese community began coming to pray and hold feasts at the shrine. Over time, the shrine grew as people added more Buddhas, a goddess of mercy statue, a building to house the Buddha, and more. Dan never intended to create a sacred space. He just wanted to stop the dumping. But the shrine took on a life of its own. Local Vietnamese Buddhists come daily to pray and care for the space. Tourists even visit to see the shrines. Incredibly, installing the Buddha statue has dramatically reduced crime in the neighborhood - by 82% since 2012. The drug dealing and prostitution are gone. Dan's DIY solution worked in curbing dumping and reducing crime, albeit in an unexpected way. The Buddha shrine is now a beloved community fixture.

Episode Show Notes

The Buddha of Oakland

Episode Transcript

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Criminal is a member of radio-topia and probably my favorite podcast, depending on the moment you're asking me. And we're presenting a story from them today because it's one of their best and most popular episodes. And also in terms of subject, it's the best episode of 99% invisible that we never made. It takes place in Oakland. It's about the built world, liminal spaces, and a statue that fights crime. It was originally broadcast in 2015 but updated in 2019, including an interview with our own Kirk Colestead. It's just delightful. It's called He's Still Neutral. Here's Criminal. We've had muggings in this neighborhood. We've had muggings and aggressive behavior, aggravated assaults, and all kinds of things over the years here. SPEAKER_04: So it is an issue for lots of people. Maybe like five or six years ago, the community group gave everybody whistles in case somebody, especially women or something, were accosted or somebody was following them. They'd just have to blow their whistle and alert other people that something was up. This is Dan Stevenson. He and his wife, Lou, have lived in Oakland, California for 40 years. SPEAKER_05: They live in a two-story purple Victorian in a neighborhood called Eastlake. He says the crime's been an issue there for as long as he can remember. But when you live in a city long enough, you just learn to deal with it. You know, a couple of times some guys tried to get my wallet and just city stuff that, you know, once you live in a city long enough, you've got to at least be accosted a couple of times or you're not there. SPEAKER_04: Once you know everybody's position, you know, as you go outside, you know who they are and where they are and what they do. There was no hassle. So once you knew that the drug dealer was a drug dealer, you just went about your business and he did his business and you did yours. SPEAKER_05: That's correct. Yeah. And you just stayed out of each other's way. Right. I mean, I wouldn't call the police. SPEAKER_04: Why? Well, first of all, I don't trust the police. I probably trust a drug dealer more than I trust a cop. So that's part of it. Part of it has to do with the times I have called the police. They just don't seem to be able to come in and do it in a common sensical way. They have to come in like an army or something over somebody selling drugs or whatever. I don't really care about that. It's one thing not to call the cops and you suspect a guy down the block might be selling drugs. SPEAKER_05: But it's another thing when there's a man right outside your bedroom window at 3 a.m. This is what happened to Dan and Lou about five years ago. SPEAKER_04: My wife was here and we we went to bed about 3 a.m. She nudges me and says there's somebody on the deck. SPEAKER_05: Dan says he actually built a special deck to keep random people from wandering up there. There are no stairs. You have to climb partly up a tree and then lift yourself up over the railing. So I get up and I look out and sure enough there's a guy on the deck. SPEAKER_04: And so I yell through the door and tell him to get off the deck and he kind of is totally gone. I mean the exchange we had was like this guy was strung out on something big time and he was just out to lunch. So my wife wanted me to call the police but I thought if I call the police they're going to come. This guy's just you know screwed up. It's not a he's of no danger that I could see. He didn't have any weapons or anything. He's just out of it. So we started the talk. It took Dan 45 minutes but he talked the guy down. Nobody got hurt. SPEAKER_05: If he had gone the official route with the cops he says it would have been a real pain. And then I've been up for another two hours you know filling out reports with him. SPEAKER_04: Within 45 minutes I was back asleep and it was all good. But even this guy the most patient live and let live guy in the neighborhood eventually hit his limit. SPEAKER_05: And when he got fed up he did something desperate. Something that makes absolutely no sense to anyone. Maybe least of all to Dan himself. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. What wound up pushing Dan over the edge wasn't drug dealers or sex workers. It was garbage. A gigantic pile of garbage. The city put in a traffic diverter across the street from their house. It's about 500 feet from their front door. A concrete divide with space in the middle with trees and nobody took care of it. SPEAKER_04: Nobody took care of it and so it became a de facto garbage dump. SPEAKER_05: People that were moving decided that that would be a place to move everything they didn't want to take with them. SPEAKER_04: So the stack could be like six eight feet high sometimes with dressers and mattresses and garbage and bags of crap and clothing. I mean it's just intense. And it's been a big problem with Oakland for years all over the place. You know somebody will dump whatever they have in your front yard if you're not careful. Dan says he'd watch trucks pull up at night and unload mountains of furniture and garbage. SPEAKER_05: And he called the city and called and called and called. So you would wake up in the morning sometimes like eight feet to like an eight foot pile of crap. Yeah. And if if the city didn't come fast enough it could get higher because once you have it's like a magnet. SPEAKER_04: Once you've got a stack of stuff other people think oh there's an idea and they keep stacking it. So what did you decide to do about it? SPEAKER_05: Well that was that is a good question. SPEAKER_04: Lou and I discussed this for quite some time and we came up with the idea of a Buddha. To put a Buddha there. Are you Buddhist? No we have nothing to do with Buddhism at all. But you figured if there's one thing that might help here it's Buddha. SPEAKER_05: Well yeah because he's neutral. SPEAKER_04: I mean you know if we threw Christ up there he's controversial. Everybody's got a deal about him. But Buddha nobody seems to be that perturbed in general about a Buddha. SPEAKER_05: So Dan and Lou had made up their minds and it turns out they had a lot of options. You know we looked at the different ones and she picked out one that she liked the face because you know they come out of a concrete cast. SPEAKER_04: So some of them look more mellow than others. SPEAKER_05: Lou went off to Ace Hardware and picked one out. SPEAKER_04: Which you know she brought home and I liked him. You know he looked cool to me. And then he sat in the basement for about three or four months because I couldn't figure out a way to put him over there without having him stolen or ruined. And those things would have really pissed me off. So finally I came up with a plan and I drilled into him and put epoxy rebar into his body. And I fixed the Buddha so he'd be looking at our house. In fact looking through the window where I could look at him. So when I'd get up in the morning and have my coffee I could look over and see how he was doing. Wait are you allowed to do this? SPEAKER_05: It feels like this is breaking some sort of city code. Oh allowed. SPEAKER_04: That's another thing. It's best not to ask before you do things because it's always no. You kind of just do it and see what happens. SPEAKER_05: Dan didn't tell his neighbors about his plan. He dragged some extension cords from his house and used a drill to affix the Buddha to a slab of concrete. And that was it. SPEAKER_04: And there he was. It's like a surprise. And he just sat there. SPEAKER_05: How long before something happened? SPEAKER_04: It was probably about maybe four months or something of him just sitting there being concrete. But one morning I wake up and look over and the Buddha's white. Somebody's come and painted him a soft white. SPEAKER_05: This was someone had kind of carefully done this on purpose. Oh very carefully. SPEAKER_04: I mean there's no like paint around him or any. I mean strictly whoever did it took care in painting. And you know I thought that's interesting. And then after that you know he'd have an orange. And pretty soon two oranges and maybe a pear. SPEAKER_05: Just as mysteriously as Dan had installed the statue, people began leaving little gifts. Oranges or coins. One day he said he came home from work and there was a big stack of pears. And he had no idea where they were coming from or what they represented. SPEAKER_04: I assume now because of what has happened that the Vietnamese community decided that he needs to be cared for. And from there it just grew to where it is today which is a total shrine. SPEAKER_05: Yeah will you describe what the Buddha looks like right now? SPEAKER_04: Well the Buddha now is like upgraded considerably. I mean he's gold now. His eyes are painted in and he's just you know he's got a gold draped clothing and he's just really top drawer cool looking Buddha. I mean he's come a long ways in terms of his dress. Now he sits on the kind of a rock pedestal kind of thing that's not a granite or something. And then he has a house that you could probably live in if you were a single person and small. The house is now around Buddha? So Buddha's protected from the rain and such? SPEAKER_05: Oh yeah and so if you wanted to pray there, which they do constantly, you just slip inside the little building and you kneel down and Buddha's there. SPEAKER_04: And he's got other friends of Buddha's and there's a big kuan yin outside which is the goddess of mercy. But what do you mean when they come to pray? Who's coming there? Do people come there often? SPEAKER_05: Every morning at 7 a.m. they pray and they have this little clacker thing. SPEAKER_04: They have a little it's like a little drum. And sometimes they'll set up tables and have a feast. SPEAKER_04: And they put out food and all these people come and they pray and they go through that and they eat and they have a kind of a community. SPEAKER_05: Do you ever go to introduce yourself? SPEAKER_04: Oh they know who I am. So they know that you are the man who brought the Buddha from Ace Hardware in 2009. SPEAKER_05: And there lies the problem. Yes because at every feast day they bring over a stack of food and fruit and wine and a bottle of whiskey one time. SPEAKER_04: And just presents for... Yes. And I keep telling them thanks a lot but there's only like Lou and I and we can't eat all this stuff. But these aren't like your neighbors bringing over food. SPEAKER_05: These are people who are coming to visit Buddha from other neighborhoods and appreciating what you started. SPEAKER_04: Yes. And they all bow and none of them speak English so I bow and we all bow. It's embarrassing kind of for me because I don't even know what they're thinking. But I keep trying to tell them that it's their Buddha and good luck with them and adios. But they don't kind of go for that. SPEAKER_05: How many people are coming? How many people are coming on a daily basis would you say to see the Buddha? Oh at least 70. A day. A day, yeah. SPEAKER_04: And then there's also the tourist thing. They'll knock on my door. And they're from Minneapolis and somebody on Facebook posted something. So they want to take my picture with them in front of the Buddha. For me, as cynical as I am, this is like what is happening? SPEAKER_05: Remember, Dan and Lou put the Buddha up as a sort of desperate shot in the dark. A truly random attempt to curtail dumping in crime. And he accidentally created a sacred place for members of Oakland's Vietnamese Buddhist community. But that's not the end of the story. Oh the crime has pretty much disappeared in a sense. SPEAKER_04: The drug dealing definitely is gone and so is the prostitution. I mean there's none. Zero. Within quite a distance from our area now. But it's a slow process that I didn't really notice it happening. And didn't even think of it in those terms until I read it in the paper. SPEAKER_05: In September, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle did a story on Dan and the Buddha and asked the Oakland Police Department for the updated crime statistics for the neighborhood. Here's what he wrote. Since 2012, when worshippers began showing up for daily prayers, overall year-to-date crime has dropped by 82%. I mean I think we all have some respect for religious symbols. Whether it's the religion that we ascribe to, whether we ascribe to a religion at all. I mean there's something rather sacred about things like this. Well I agree. And I don't know if it's superstition or whether Buddha says don't f*** with this or what. SPEAKER_04: I have no idea. But it works. So you're right. I think people do have a feeling of either respect or fear. I don't know. I guess it doesn't matter. Crime is death 82%. SPEAKER_05: I guess it doesn't. SPEAKER_05: I spoke with Dan Stevenson in 2015. In the past four years, things have only gotten bigger at the Buddha. It's all thanks to one Vietnamese family. Here's Veena Vo and her husband with some translation help from their son, Kuk Vo. Every day, morning, 7 o'clock. Every day, one day, two times. SPEAKER_01: 7 o'clock and 4 o'clock. 6 o'clock I go home. Every day. I make over here. And my husband make over here. How do you feel about that now? You put Buddha in the rock? SPEAKER_00: My dad says all day to Dan here, we can have a peaceful shrine here and make the neighbors calm down a little bit. So we can have a peaceful mindness and tranquility. SPEAKER_05: Veena says some mornings she arrives to find that other people have brought new incense and fresh flowers. She says it's a peaceful place. If you'd like to visit yourself, it's easy to find these days. The Buddha is on Google Maps. Just search for the Buddha of Oakland. It even has reviews. One says, best Buddha. SPEAKER_04: This is beyond my wildest thought pattern. I just couldn't, I wouldn't even fathom it at that time. We called Dan last week to see what was new. SPEAKER_04: It's insane in terms of what has happened to a concrete garden Buddha, which was just on the shelf with a whole bunch of other Buddhas all just sitting there in the nursery. And different things have happened along the way, you know, like cars will miss the corner or something and hit something or, you know, there's been some vandalism over the years. Every time anything happens, the response is they make it bigger. It's just, you know, so it's used to be just a small one little building and then it's two. And then somebody tried to they broke a statue or something. So then it's three and then four. And then there's a little shed, I guess you'd call it the shed, but a little side building where I understand that the the guy in that building is the god of war, god of protection or god of somebody that has done pretty good job since they put them in to keep things calm. Do you ever sit back and think to yourself, well, that was really something that was quite an idea I had? SPEAKER_04: Well, Lou and I had the idea. Neither one of us expected much of anything except maybe it would shift the garbage and it did that. But then this has been outrageous. SPEAKER_05: Do you still have anybody knocking on your door, coming and saying hi? Or are you the guy? Are you the famous Dan of the Buddha? SPEAKER_04: I pretty much get that. Not a whole lot, but more than I would expect at this point in time. And also people stopping me on the streets somehow. They're not even close to my house and they have a reference point or somebody in some business someplace will recognize me. I don't even know where they find the information out, tell you the truth, or how they figured it's me. But they do. And it's I guess it's nice. It's to me, I've you know, I put the Buddha in and I'm done. The rest of this is somebody else's work. So I helped start it. And Lou and I had lots of discussions before we did it because she's much more positive than I am. So I always look at how they're going to wreck it as opposed to the possibilities. And she's much more of a possibility person. SPEAKER_05: She was right. She's right on a lot of things. SPEAKER_04: Not just the Buddha. We spend a lot of time talking spirituality and the greater things. And she's pretty much on the mark on most of it. Way ahead of me. You know, just way ahead of me. She's much more positive. SPEAKER_05: We have 119 episodes, and this is one of our most popular episodes ever. Wow. Why do you think this story gets to people? SPEAKER_04: Well, I would say that it's positive. It's a positive story of actually hope. I mean, it truly blows my mind that it exists in the world that we live in. It's just like it's almost counter to everything that I hear constantly. But it's not really because it's happening everywhere. It's just that we only hear the bad parts most of the time. So it's just kind of a giving thing. The people that are involved with it are, I mean, they give. It's a giving of their beliefs and their stuff. And people that come just respect that. I mean, we now have certain. I haven't kept track of it, but there's tour buses now that come to visit. And here's this huge bus coming, trying to get through the streets. They're rather smallish in terms of buses to drop people off to take photos and stuff. It's impressive. I never realized how something like this could be this. I mean, it certainly inspires people to better things, I think. SPEAKER_05: Anything else going on in your life? SPEAKER_04: Too much to mention. I keep busy all the time. SPEAKER_02: We'll be in talks with our own Kurt Kohlstedt after this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. SPEAKER_05: Can be viewed through the lens of a design concept known as hostile architecture. Hostile architecture is one facet of efforts to, quote, design out crime. Change something about public space in order to deter unwanted behavior. A few years ago, a community group in Hamburg, Germany, got fed up with the constant smell of urine in their neighborhood, a neighborhood packed with nightclubs. And they decided to fight back with a special kind of paint. This paint is designed to be used on boats and will not absorb liquid. If it won't absorb liquid, they thought, maybe it will repel urine. They were right. When someone walked out of a nightclub and attempted to relieve themselves on a wall, their urine, quote, bounced back onto them. Other cities have followed suit. Cities implement design changes like spikes on window sills to prevent people from sitting down. Arm rests on benches aren't just to give us a place to rest our elbows. They also prevent people from lying down. Hostile architecture is often criticized for being less than subtle in its attempt to drive away a city's homeless population. While cities come in and try to alter the public's behavior from the top down, often in aggressive ways, there are also plenty of examples of citizens stepping in, like Dan Stevenson with his Buddha implementing changes from the bottom up, changes that may or may not be legal. Kurt says there are a lot of playful examples of this. So parklets are essentially public parking spaces converted into little parks. SPEAKER_03: The idea got really big after this group called Rebar in San Francisco made a parklet and it went really viral online. And essentially all they did was they rolled out some sod and they put some furniture out on the grass and they fed the meter and then they just waited to see what would happen. And some people stopped by and actually used the parklet. And as they tell the story, a traffic cop came by too and was saying, hey, you know, I'm going to have to write you a ticket. And they said, no, we've legally rented this spot and they kind of got him to go away. So through this kind of loophole, they legally occupy this space by paying the rent, paying the meter, which is just a different way to think about this kind of public space, right? We think about it as a space for cars. They thought about it as a space for a park. It's not really what the law was designed to accommodate. And yet they're making the law work for them and work for the public. SPEAKER_05: But there are a lot of things out there that kind of skirt this line of legal or illegal. And I was thinking about fire hydrants. Right, yeah. I mean, fire hydrants are kind of this classic thing where you've seen, everybody's seen scenes of movies where SPEAKER_03: kids are playing in the street and the fire hydrant's pouring water and everybody's having fun. And it's one of those things we all know if we think about it, that's probably technically illegal. And in fact, it usually is. You can get fines for doing that. But there are also cases where the firefighters will actually come along and help people open up the hydrants. So it kind of goes back and forth. And it goes way back, too. So there was this heat wave in the late 1800s in New York City where the city just said, you know what, we're going to open up the hydrants, we're going to distribute ice, we're going to basically help cool down the city and keep people safe and happy. And all this back and forth, is it legal, is it illegal? Eventually, New York came up with this kind of novel compromise where they created these caps that control the flow of water. It makes it so it's safer to use, it wastes less water, but it still lets people crack open these hydrants. So it's this kind of acceptance by the city that people are going to do this. Let's maybe try to find a way that they can do it more safely and not just kind of recklessly like it's been done in the past. In Chicago, when I grew up, it would get really hot in the summers and there would be fire hydrants that would be opened. SPEAKER_05: And I remember very clearly being a really little girl. And it's really powerful, the water. I mean, this is, it's too much. It's almost too powerful, the force of the water coming out of this thing for like a seven-year-old girl to be playing in. But there was something about it that the city, that the firefighters, that the police were acknowledging, hey, we just got to get through today because it's 115. So let's bend these rules. Let's all just come together. And it felt really nice. Yeah. And I think that is part of the appeal. It's like it breaks down these barriers. SPEAKER_03: Like we think, you know, oh, city infrastructure is for city stuff and we're not allowed to touch that. And these people are here to enforce laws and put out fires. But yeah, that's kind of beautiful. You know, when those barriers break down and we realize now the city is all of ours and like here's a novel way or a different way to put its infrastructure to use. SPEAKER_05: What are other examples of people playing with their environment? One of the types that I'm particularly fascinated by is sort of it's generally known as guerrilla gardening. And this idea, it goes back to the 70s and it sort of started with people taking over abandoned lots in New York and turning them into community gardens. SPEAKER_03: And it started out illegal and some of those gardens have since become legal. So there's this group in San Francisco that call themselves the guerrilla grafters and their approach to guerrilla gardening is sort of different from most. Instead of, you know, trying to plant new things or take over abandoned spaces, they're actively grafting fruit-bearing branches onto non-fruit-bearing trees. So essentially they're turning these ornamental trees into fruit-bearing trees in the city. And you know, at first you'd think, hey, who would have a problem with that, right? I mean, they're creating food where there was no food before and that's kind of their take on it. But it turns out that those trees are ornamental for a reason. The city doesn't want them attracting animals. They don't want to like have these fruits falling and making messes that the city then has to clean up. And so these grafters end up having to work kind of under the radar. So just tell me exactly what they're doing, this guerrilla gardening. They're putting like an apple branch on like a maple tree? SPEAKER_05: I did not really understand that you could do this, but essentially you can make a little cut into an existing tree and attach a little scion, a living branch, and then it heals in place and becomes part of that existing tree. SPEAKER_03: So you don't convert the entire tree into a fruit-bearing tree, but you add a fruit-bearing branch to that tree. And then over time, you know, these start producing fruit. And the idea is that, you know, anybody can walk up and just kind of say, oh, there's an apple on this tree. I could eat that. And it's subtle. It's a subtle intervention and probably nobody would be the wiser until suddenly there was fruit all along the block. SPEAKER_05: These are all examples, Dan and his Buddha included, of people kind of thinking outside the box. SPEAKER_03: Yes. And I think that's the most interesting thing about all of this, right? Like we have a way that we think of cities. We think of cities as being planned things where if you want to get something to change, maybe you talk to a city council. But what these kinds of projects show is that there are a lot of opportunities to try, you know, what Dan Stevenson did. You could say, I'm just going to go get this Buddha and stick it to the ground and see what happens, you know, ask for forgiveness, not permission. And what I find really fascinating about the Dan Stevenson example is that people love it too, right? People come and care for it and love it and it's become part of the community that, you know, Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike seem to really appreciate. SPEAKER_05: You just went back there. You just saw it. You were just there last night. SPEAKER_03: I was. And it's amazing. I mean, at night you can see it from blocks away. I mean, there are these blinking lights, these sort of spiraling blinking lights. When you get close, you can really smell the incense. And there are all these different Buddhas. Some are white and some are painted and they're different sizes, different materials. And the original Buddha isn't actually the central Buddha. He's sort of sitting off to one side in this smaller hut. So he kind of sparked this thing, but he's not at the heart of it anymore. It's just been taken over and grown. And, you know, behind the main building there are a couple of brooms, which I assume, you know, is part of the keeping the area clean effort. So it is doing what Dan Stevenson wanted it to. It's getting people invested and keeping the area clean. But it's also taken out a life of its own. And what's really crazy, I just found this last night. If you turn the corner, just another block and a half away from this shrine is another one. And it's like a smaller version of the same thing, but it's growing. And I can just imagine in like five or ten years, these could just be all over the neighborhood, right? So I don't know. I think it's, you know, what started with this one Buddha has become something much, much bigger. Music SPEAKER_02: Criminal is created by Lawrence Fohrer and Phoebe Judge. Their senior producer is Nadia Wilson. Audio mix by Rob Byers and Michael Raphael. Special thanks to Eric Menel, Alex Blair and Coby McDonald. If this is the first time you've heard a story from Criminal, I actually kind of envy you because you now have one hundred and nineteen episodes to go dive in and enjoy. Find them at ThisIsCriminal.com 99% Invisible is a project of KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at RadioTopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit, too. But I welcome you to dive in and try a story you haven't heard at 99PI.org. Radio Topia from PRX. SPEAKER_02: Great sleep can be hard to come by these days, and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. Serta's new and improved Perfect Sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions. With zoned comfort, memory foam and a cool-to-the-touch cover, the Serta Perfect Sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at Serta.com. SPEAKER_07: If you went on a road trip and you didn't stop for a Big Mac or drop a crispy fry between the car seats or use your McDonald's bag as a placemat, then that wasn't a road trip. It was just a really long drive. SPEAKER_06: And participating McDonald's. Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruuuuut Loops, just so you know. Uh, fruit. Fruit. Yeah, fruit. 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