After years of hands-off policy, UC plans to build housing on People’s Park
A year shy of its 50th anniversary, People’s Park in Berkeley may be about to get a radical makeover.
Sources say UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ will soon announce the university plans to build housing for up to 700 students on the long-disputed site of Vietnam War-era protests, which in recent years has become a haven for the homeless.
A portion of the land would also be used to build up to 100 apartments for homeless people or others needing supportive housing.
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In a sign of the changing politics surrounding the once-untouchable park, Berkeley’s progressive Mayor Jesse Arreguin is backing the effort enthusiastically.
“For many decades this was the third rail of politics in Berkeley, but today I think there is a desire to look at something different,” Arreguin said.
The park has become known as a trouble spot. In June, a woman was arrested for feeding methamphetamine to a 2-year-old boy there. And last month, a UC Berkeley employee working at People’s Park was robbed, kicked and punched.
“The current condition isn’t acceptable,” Arreguin said.
The mayor said under the plan the university is contemplating, a private builder would construct the student housing and a yet-to-be-picked nonprofit would build the supportive housing. Some open space will be retained, he said.
“The details will be developed through a community process,” Arreguin said.
A draft report by a UC Berkeley student housing task force last year said the campus was 6,900 beds short of the 15,600 it needed to meet goals to house half of its undergraduates and a quarter of its graduate students.
The report identified nine sites on or near the campus that could be used for student housing — including a possible residence hall at People’s Park.
Initially, university officials soft-pedaled plans for housing at the 2.8-acre park just off Telegraph Avenue, describing it as low on its list of priorities.
Now, however, “given the safety challenges at the park, there is some urgency to do something sooner,” Arreguin said.
Berkeley Councilman Kriss Worthington, whose district encompasses People’s Park, says the proposal for homeless housing has helped smooth the way for broader acceptance of building on the site.
“That’s the new twist, ” he said.
Worthington said while he is focused on larger sites that “will get a lot of (student) housing more quickly” — such as at Edwards Stadium or at University Avenue and Oxford Street — he isn’t opposing the People’s Park plan.
In any case, Worthington notes that the city doesn’t actually have legal jurisdiction over how the university develops its property, despite UC’s pledge to abide by city rules.
The plan to include housing at the park for either the homeless, developmentally disabled or others is intended to address a key issue of concern for some community activists.
UC spokesman Dan Mogulof said Tuesday that none of the plans for the parkhave been finalized, but once they are “we will provide the public with ample information.”
In any case, according to one university source, while UC may provide land for supportive housing, “it will not fund, operate or manage that facility.”
People’s Park was born out of the radical politics of the late 1960s antiwar movement. The university acquired it by eminent domain in 1967 and cleared it for future development, but after the upheavals of those times, it became untouchable sacred ground. In 1969, activists declared it a park and it has been one ever since.
Even as the park became increasingly plagued by vagrants and violence, former Mayor Tom Bates consistently argued it was a waste of time for the university to think about building there.
But within weeks of her appointment last summer, Christ hired a $92,000-a-year social worker to work exclusively with the park’s intractable homeless population, signaling she was ready to take the first step toward developing the site.
Not that some aren’t still holding on to its counterculture past.
Lefty lawyer Osha Neumann, who has fought efforts to transform People’s Park in the past, said there are plenty of other sites where housing can be built and that he would oppose any effort to do away with one of the last pieces of open space in the city where “the homeless have been allowed to be.”
“It’s a part of Berkeley that is fast disappearing” given the city’s rapid gentrification, he said.
Plus Neumann said it has symbolic importance.
“You don’t build on battlefields that are significant to the community, and that’s one of those battlefields,” he said.
Just this past weekend, a motley crowd of park protectors gathered there to mark its 49th anniversary with music, speakers, dancing and drumming.
Candidate sweep: San Francisco Mayor Mark Farrell’s renewed crackdown on tent camps is getting a mixed reaction from the four leading candidates for mayor in the June election, with most opting to dance around the question of whether they agree or disagree with the mayor’s moves.
Board of Supervisors President London Breed said that while she supported “a tough-love approach,” the “tough doesn’t work without the ‘love.’ We must have alternatives in place before we force someone off the street or we will just be moving people from one corner to another.”
Former state Sen. Mark Leno — who has vowed to “shake up” the city’s homeless programs — said that while tent camps are unacceptable for both the homeless and those who live around them, the “sweeps alone are not the answer.” Leno then repeated his campaign promise to find more housing.
Supervisor Jane Kim, who has made cleaning the city’s streets a top issue, said she “understands the urgency of this issue,” but declined to comment specifically on the mayor’s actions.
Instead, in a statement to us, Kim’s campaign said she would work to expand mental health and substance abuse programs and hire the homeless to clean the streets.
“Finally, she will call on the state to declare a state of emergency,” the statement said.
Former Supervisor Angela Alioto, on the other hand, came out swinging, denouncing the tent takedowns as little more than a photo opportunity for an ambitious politician.
“He doesn’t have a place to send them — it’s just literally sweeping people around.” Alioto said.
“All of this is merely a show for what I believe will be Mark Farrell’s future run for mayor.”
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