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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.
The origins of People's Park are a little more complicated than you imply. The area was originally obtained by the university by eminent domain, forcing homeowners to sell against their will after which the university bulldozed the houses and then left the site vacant for more than a year (see here). I think those original homeowners at least had a legitimate reason to be pissed off at the university.
That said, I find myself deeply irritated by the actions of local protestors in the decades since. I see no reason why the university has an obligation to maintain a homeless camp which was involuntarily forced on it in the first place, especially when there is an acute shortage of housing for students (the actual paying customers of the university). Some context is useful here: for many years the university has had a severe lack of housing for students. Most undergraduates live off-campus after their first year and even then, the university has trouble accommodating just the freshmen and transfer students who are guaranteed a spot in the dorms. A few years ago they were housing some students at Mills College about 10 miles away and at times have also housed students in the lounges of the dorms (which were not intended as bedrooms). By the way, the increase in enrollment that led the student housing situation to get this extreme was not unilateral action on the part of the university, but rather part of a University of California system-wide deal with the state to freeze tuition and enroll more in-state students in return for an increase in funding (see here for example).
I'm also annoyed by protestor complaints that the university should has plenty of alternative sites to People's Park and should use one of the those. Not only are some of those alternate sites much smaller than People's Park, most of them are already in use by the university (unlike People's Park) and developing them would likely face neighborhood anti-development activism of its own. Moreover, why can't the university develop multiple sites at once? The student housing shortage is so severe that even adding another 1000 beds (which the People's Park development is expected to do) would not come close to fixing it.
On another topic, I'm really skeptical about the university's plan to put a homeless shelter right next to a student dorm in the proposed People's Park development. I imagine most students would prefer not to live next to a homeless shelter, many parents would be freaked out by the idea and it would likely create a chronic source of problems for the university, especially if there are any altercations between homeless people living in the shelter and students in the dorm. Perhaps the university is simply planning to build the dorm first and then drop the homeless shelter idea once the dorm is already fait accompli.
Thank you for providing context; I really should have included the depth of housing problems at Berkeley (see page 10 and following). About a tenth of students were homeless at some point, though this mostly took the form of couchsurfing. (This matches up with how homelessness works; it's mostly temporary, and people only wind up on the street when they've exhausted their social networks.)
I'd also point out that the University predates the city; the city is there because of the University, which makes claims that the University is ruining the City, in a way, confused.
On the one hand, the homeless people are there in the area around the University already; they're just outdoors. On the other, I absolutely see what you mean. This is a hell of a compromise; more than half of the space will still be a park (an actual park, this time), and there will be more homeless/formerly-homeless people living on the site after the project is complete. It's a testament to just how ideologically committed the left-NIMBYs are that none of these concessions even registered. The maximalist position, I think, would have been an enormous mega-dorm covering the entire footprint of the site, and that's nowhere on the radar.
I don't think they're insincere, but ironically, the level of protesting has made this outcome considerably more likely. Supportive housing development, like any publicly-funded housing, involves a "layer cake" of various overlapping funding sources and deadlines, a byzantine array of mutually near-contradictory requirements, and so on. (Previously discussed here.) Any disruption or delay can trash the whole process.
Just wanted to mention that the stats on homelessness of Berkeley students and postdocs at the link you included seem somewhat misleading to me. The definition of "homeless" being used seems to include things like "living in an airbnb for a month while looking for long-term housing." They claim that around 20% off postdocs have experienced homelessness which seems crazy at first (postdocs aren't wealthy, but their salaries aren't that bad) until you notice that more than half the postdocs who say they've been homeless were living in an airbnb or motel during their period of homelessness. And 95% of them were homeless for under 2 months, which really seems to fit the pattern of living in a short term place while looking for a long term rental because you just arrived in town and didn't have a chance to visit and look for housing beforehand.
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Thanks for your original post and your reply to my comment. I think we agree on a lot and your take on the situation is perceptive.
Great point.
Yeah, but having homeless people in the area is a bit different from literally living next door to a homeless shelter. None of the existing dorms is as close to People's Park as the proposed dorm would be to the proposed shelter and that's bound to make some students and parents nervous. I did notice that the proposed development is apartment style housing for students so it probably wouldn't be freshmen living there, which might help.
To be fair to the activists, there are plenty of homeless people who for one reason or another prefer to live in an unregulated homeless camp than in a shelter. So if your position is "you should never say no to homeless people" then it makes sense to be upset about the development of People's Park and the concession offered by the university might not look very appealing. But I agree that from the perspective of the university, this is a massive concession.
I'm not sure. Carol Christ and the other high level administrators of Berkeley are not dummies and they must realize that (1) having a homeless shelter next to a dorm is bound to be a source of headaches and (2) there's a chance that the housing gets built but the shelter does not (maybe for the reasons you cite). Perhaps they are not explicitly planning on only building the housing but I suspect they wouldn't mind at all if that was the final outcome.
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