Column by Cheri Rae
A couple months ago, one of the City’s lead planners on Plan Santa Barbara, referred to the need to create housing for the “worker bees” in our community, specifically nurses and teachers.
That stung.
As a little basic apiary research proves, all worker bees are female and incapable of reproducing. While they live very busy lives, they—like their male counterparts called drones—are devoted only to serving the hive and the needs of the Queen Bee.
No one I know would ever refer to themselves as a flying insect dedicated to serving a Queen Bee, needing only a tiny cell in which to light when not engaged in endless activity devoted solely to the success of the hive.
I checked in with my sister, a dedicated nurse, and my neighbor, a terrific English teacher at a local high school—both well-educated, highly professional individuals with lots of interests, dreams and roles that go far beyond their work lives. And neither one of them was too happy about hearing about such terminology from a public official.
The teacher called it “incredibly insensitive and insulting” to be described as a worker bee. She explained, “There is a very negative connotation of pursing mindless tasks at the lowest level of existence, and no acknowledgment of how we put our personal lives into this community.”
And the nurse noted, “Housing just for nurses and teachers? It sounds rather like herding a specific group of employees into a common living space. Weird.”
For years the keepers of Plan Santa Barbara, have swarmed all over this document that turns Santa Barbara into something very different than the city we know now. The newest buzz is all about creating teeny, tiny little dwellings for our worker bees. Confined to 600 square feet, they won’t be raising families in them.
Which is fine for flying insects, not so much for feeling, thinking, human beings who typically aspire to leading personal lives beyond the work shift.
Thoughtful citizens have been swatted away throughout the long Plan Santa Barbara process whenever they have objected to densifying this place. If the beekeeper’s vision comes to pass, Santa Barbara may just resemble a bee hive with all those small units they have in mind.
Contrast the worker bee description with the wording in the introduction to the1964 General Plan, “…Every possible effort has been made to maintain an intimate contact with the people of Santa Barbara, for they are the ones ultimately to feel the full impact of changes in their environment. In fact, without this contact and a consequent mutual understanding, no effective planning is possible.”
It concludes, “It [the Plan] will therefore speak of the meaning of Santa Barbara held in the minds and hearts of its citizens. The degree of truth with which it does this will be the measure of its value and the strength of its influence in the years to come.”
When the City Council takes up the density discussion of the General Plan in the next couple of weeks, let’s hope they remember they’re debating the future of human beings—not a pesky bunch of drones or indistinguishable workers who just ended up here to serve the hive—and plan accordingly.
At least they didn’t call them serfs, which is how they act towards the “little people”
LOL, a great column with a sting. (Who’s the queen and who’s the beekeeper, I wonder?)
But, as for 600 square feet, there are quite a few of that size dwellings around town already and people do raise families in them, small families, hopefully – it’s painful to think of more than three in such a space. However, it’s a reasonable size for one (young, non-thing-cluttered) person, a starter cell, perhaps, using the hive terminology, toiling in downtown Santa Barbara.
Such accumulation of cells do make up a hive, as a glimpse of any modern city will reveal and, like it or not, Santa Barbara is a city, with its own developing hive mind. That said, I prefer the character of Santa Barbara to remain as it has been, as it has been specified in prior general plans, something quite a little different from the rest of our growing smart, Californicated world.
WOrker bees can fit much easier in mixed used buidlings, but they can’t afford them.
I heard the “worker bee” quip and it obviously was said too casually in spoken remarks.
The bigger offense is how some professions –the proverbial and politically untouchable firefighters, nurses, and teachers– keep getting mentioned in rhetoric intended to make the other side of the argument simply shut up. This is like the Bushians saying if you do not support war on Iraq then you are against Our Troops. Or Obama is a Socialist or whatever.
WE ALL KNOW that no housing project can limit its occupants according to the profession of the occupants. Do people in other professions not work as well?
Priced out of their own hives…how sad.
Great read Chei- as usual
..what a wonderful sound a nail makes when it is struck squarely in the center…..your reference to the 1964 grneral plan was the final stroke.
otheos
“Worker bee” is just part of the vocabulary that an oligarchy uses. Excuse them; they can’t help it.