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Notes -
NBC Bay Area, "Protests continue as large walls surround People's Park in Berkeley". (Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Also at theschism.)
(Notes on browsing: some of these links are soft-paywalled; prepend
archive.todayor12ft.ioto circumvent if you run into trouble. Nitter is dead and Twitter doesn't allow logged-out browsing; replacetwitter.comwithtwiiit.comand try repeatedly to see entire threads, but anonymous browsing of Twitter is gradually going away, alas.)I've covered historic laundromats and sacred parking lots, but what about a historic homeless encampment?
In 1969, some Berkeley locals attempted to make a vacant University-owned lot into a "power to the people" park. The University decided to make it into a soccer field and evicted them a month later. Later that day, at a rally on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Berkeley student President suggested that the thousands of people there either "take the park" or "go down to the park" (accounts differ), later saying that he'd never intended to precipitate a riot. The crowd grew to about six thousand people and fought police, who killed one student and blinded another.
The park has stayed as it was since then. UC Berkeley has attempted to develop it, first into a soccer field, then in the 1990s into a volleyball court (made unusable by protests), then in the 2010s in an unclear way which involved a protester falling out of a tree they were sleeping in, and most recently starting in 2018, into student housing with a historical monument and permanent supportive housing for currently homeless people.
The status quo involves police being called to the park roughly every six hours on average as of 2018, colorful incidents like a woman force-feeding meth to a two year old, and three people dying there within a six-month span. (There are forty to fifty residents at a given time.) The general vibe from students matches up.
The 2018 plan started having public meetings in 2020; when construction fencing was built in 2021, protesters tore it down; a group calling itself "Defend People's Park" occupied it and posted letters about how an attempt to develop the site is "gentrification", the university could develop "other existing properties", the proposed nonprofit developer for the supportive housing has donors which include "the Home Depot Foundation, a company that profits off construction", and so on.
Legal struggles are related to the 2022 lawsuit to use CEQA to cap enrollment at Berkeley and a lawsuit using CEQA to claim that student noise is an environmental impact. In the summer of 2022, SB 886 exempted student housing (with caveats and tradeoffs) from CEQA, and AB 1307 explicitly exempted unamplified voices from CEQA consideration. The site has been one of about 350 locally-designated "Berkeley Landmarks" (one for every three hundred and forty Berkeleyans) since 1984, but was added to the National Register of Historic Places that summer as well in an effort to dissuade development. (The National Trust sent a letter in support of that student-noise lawsuit.) Amid all this, RCD, the nonprofit developer attached for the supportive housing, left the project, citing delays and uncertainty. The State Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in the summer of 2023, but the case may be moot in light of AB 1307. The university says yes, and "Make UC a Good Neighbor" says no. Search here for S279242 for updates.
And that brings us to this January. On the night of the fourth, police cleared the park in preparation for construction, putting up a wall of shipping containers which they covered in barbed wire the next week to prevent people from climbing them.
Local opponents of the project take the position that "Building housing should not require a militarized police state", which seems to indicate support for a kind of heckler's veto. And, of course, it should be built "somewhere else". (This meme, basically.) Kian Goh, professor of urban planning at UCLA: "So, do places of historical and present political struggle not matter at all to yimbys? Or do they just not matter as much as new housing?".
Construction appears to be proceeding, after more than fifty years of stasis. Noah Smith attempts to steelman the NIMBYs, but I don't find it convincing. I'm sure the people who cheered burning down subsidized housing in Minneapolis saw themselves as heroes, but that doesn't make them any less wrong.
As a postscript, the City Council member representing the district of Berkeley including People's Park is Rigel Robinson, who entered office at 22 as the youngest ever councilmember, and was generally expected to be the next mayor. He abruptly resigned on the ninth, ending what had been a promising political career, likely due to death threats stuck to his front door. The Mayor of Berkeley wrote a supportive opinion piece; a fellow councilmember wrote a similar letter. On the other hand, a sitting councilmember in neighboring Emeryville retweeted "Sure sounds like going YIMBY ruined it for him. Here's to running more real estate vultures out in 2024 🥂". People are polarized about this. It's made the news.
I'm going to nutpick one of the comments from an article on his resignation, as a treat.
If only people could live inside a world-level political symbol. Current plans for construction at the site are here.
I'm nutpicking quotes, but I'm actually trying to make a substantive point. Well, more substantive than the obvious.
Is there something wrong with this? I mean I doubt the person who said it is some kind of doctrinaire Marxist criticizing profit(or at least, I doubt that they're criticizing Home Depot for profit), so they're criticizing construction as something inherently bad.
And I feel like zeroing in on this; "construction is inherently bad" is kind of nutsy. Not just "duh, where are people supposed to live"- it's an attitude of opposition to doing things, going out in the real world and making a change. I feel like this is my leviathan shaped hole-sized hock, but at the end of the day numbers, names, things on paper, vibes, these are just reflections of what's happening in the real world. You can fuck around with renaming things but it doesn't change what it is that you're renaming. Calling a luxury apartment building "affordable housing coop" with no other change does not actually stop the rent from being $3k/mo, you might as well call it kruphnewdala or something. At least it'd be less confusing- after all, you'd be inventing a new(very stupid) word instead of lying. "Point deer, make horse" only goes so far. You still can't ride a deer(most of the time; I'm sure you can find a youtube video of a crazy Russian guy riding a reindeer or a moose or something). It remains an eating animal, not a "but officer, the horse wasn't drunk" animal. In like manner, you can change zoning on a park(as it seems they did 50 years ago), but it has no actual effect until the bulldozers roll in. It's still a vacant lot full of drug addicts fighting. And I think this is behind a lot of weird far-left hobbyhorses; changing the real world instead of empathizing is morally wrong. It's wrong to send cops to intervene in a mental health crisis because they have an actual effect; it should be social workers who provide empathetic nonsense and don't change the situation. It's wrong to respond to a housing shortage by building housing; instead official figures should hand out money to the losers(which, following the laws of supply and demand, just raises the price of housing).
No, it shouldn't. Various weirdos should just get out of the way. The logical end point of that idea- that things requiring a militarized police state are verboten- is that nothing requiring coercive power should ever get done. That's obviously bad; you can't run a society without coercion of some kind. Like freedom is great, but not the freedom to shit in my neighbor's pool. Or the freedom to prevent him from building on property he owns. Etc, etc.
Why would you doubt a leftist activist in Berkley could be a doctrinaire Marxist? If they aren't explicitly Marxist they at least believe some adjacent far left ideology that borrows heavily from Marxist theory.
Basically what @netstack says below- it wouldn’t surprise me if this person has some ideas adjacent to Marx’s stance on profit. But it seems clear that they’re not arguing from that stance, they’re trying to paint the construction company as something inherently immoral because of what it does, not because of business practices. It’s similar to eg ‘profits from war’ ‘profits off fossil fuels’- even when Berkeley leftists who claim to be Marxists say it, they’re not criticizing Exxon for making money, they’re criticizing it for oil production.
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There’s a decent chance the speaker would, if pressed, endorse something like Marx’s stance on profit. I don’t think the statement given looks like an argument from that stance.
The statement has a clear meaning if interpreted through a Marxist lens. Home Depot and other capitalist organizations and individuals are pressuring directly and indirectly UC Berkley to engage in actions that promote capitalism and the interests of the capitalist class. That UC Berkley is really run by a bunch of communists is irrelevant in Marxist theory. I doubt they really believe Home Depot or other capitalists really did anything to pressure UC Berkeley on this issue. They don't care if they did. It's a part of their ideology that everything that exists is a superstructure built on a capitalist base. Everything bad must be linked to capitalism no matter how tenuous the claim.
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